I've become too attached my to my first website...

Soo I bought a website page from here, it provided me with:installed theme,aged domain and 1 keyword they said was going to rank super easily.. I'm the type to dive in head first and learn to swim later, I bought a manual car from another state and forced myself to learn to drive on my way back.

That being said I invested in a few blackhat packages and articles both the articles and packages are highly rated with thousands purchased. 9 months into running this website and seeing my efforts pay off the idea evolved into something far greater, something that brings value to the world rather than another authoritative website rewriting topics to try to rank on google. I want this website to last and build a youtube channel and make it a brand.

I have a full time job that allows me to brows BHW and a boss that encourages me to learn about SEO in the off time. So i have been purchasing these packages and doing stupid amounts of reading on here and have gained tremendous insight and clarity on link building and ssm.

Here are my current links, looking at the quality of the backlinks they are bellow average. Say if I turn a new leaf and build the rest of the links by hand, do I have to worry about getting swept away in 1 of the google updates? Should I jump ship and start a clean slate using site as teacher, whatever I invested as a lesson or continue with my new found knowledge and claim my chunk of the internet?

Backlinks:523 Live 352
Referring Domains:151 live113

You said your efforts paid off, so I assume your site did end up ranking for your desired KW. I'd stick with it and grow it out, as long as it's actually brandable. Your info on backlinks and referring domains isn't really enough for me to assess their quality, so I'm operating on the basis of things having worked up to this point.

Keep going. Add quality links and overtime the spam links will be such a low percentage. You can always disavow some of them as well

if you can make money from it make money, if not do something else