The Ultimate Secret to Making Money in Affiliate Marketing

I sorta kinda ripped this title off of a post by Bill Rini:

The Ultimate Secret to Winning Poker

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this post here on my blog, but I am going to suggest that you run over to Bill's blog and read it. Bill tells a story about how when he was a stockbroker, he spent a lot of time perfecting his pitch and researching stock recommendations.

And some of the brain-dead monkeys he worked with made 200 calls a day while he perfected these things. In a few years, his monkey colleagues were making 5 or 6 times as much as he was, because they focused on the fundamentals and took action.

Think about how this applies to your affiliate marketing. Chances are that while you're surfing forums reading about how to make money, and surfing blogs and reading about how to make money, and reading ebooks about how to make money, other webmasters are building pages and getting links. Guess who's going to be making more money.

I posted a few days ago about needing to get refocused on the fundamentals. And Bill's blog post, even though it's about how to be a winning poker player, has a lot of insight into how to win at anything.

It's all about the fundamentals.

Back to Basics

I'm reading a John T. Reed book right now called Succeeding, and in it he mentions that one of the simpler and more important things that he learned about goal setting was that he should set a specific and measurable goal every single week and work toward achieving that goal. And I've been working a bit aimlessly lately, to be honest, and I need to provide some structure to what I do for a living. (Because frankly, what I do lately is work on whatever seems interesting to me at the time. Which is also a structure, of sorts, but I don't think that it's the structure I need right now.)

I've also been doing a lot of thinking about what the basics are. What are the fundamentals of being a successful affiliate marketer? Tony Robbins is always pointing out that if you master the fundamentals, you've got it made., and that getting a black belt in karate means mastering only 7 fundamental moves. I need to focus on some fundamentals.

The fundamentals boil down to two things, IMO: content and links. So my goal for this week is to get the content for my online bingo portal up to 100 pages. And my other goal for the week is to get 100 new backlinks built for the bingo site. And just for fun, I'm going to re-read what I think is the greatest thing ever written about SEO: 26 Steps to 15k.