On our last radio show, we discussed 10 actions steps that poker affiliates can take to go from a part time poker affiliate to a full time affiliate. Some of these actions steps I pulled off of the entrepreneur website. The interesting find is that regardless if you are looking to go full time as a poker affiliate, or grow your offline business, the same action steps are required.

As a full time poker affiliate myself, and as someone who started out as a part timer, I will summarize some of the most important action steps with my suggesstions specific to poker affiliates.

1. Open up another location or website - Actually I think you should open up a few. Websites are just like real estate in the real world. The more you have, the more you can leverage off eachother. If you look at some of the super poker affiliates, many gain a huge advantage by simply having the linking power on so many sites to feed juice to the new pages they want to rank well. Furthermore, having several sites in your portfolio can never hurt.

2. License your product or resell it - Although this may sound difficult in the online world, it isn’t. I started PAP by reselling a simple ebook. I sold the ebook through clickbank and eventually had many affiliates selling books for me, and in turn, giving exposure to my brand absolutely free.

3. Create an army of resellers - Certainly you can create an army of resellers by incorporating some sort of affiliate scheme into your business (such as a clickbank product). However, let’s say you don’t have a tangible product to sell. That’s fine, you can still do some sort of referral contest that will get players sending you more player for some sort of incentive to them. I have had a great deal of success with referral contests in the past, they work.

4. Form an alliance or partnership with another medium sized website - One way to achieve rapid growth is to partner with another medium sized site and become one big giant. These type of partnerships happen all the time in corporate America. If you can find another site that has some synergy with yours, together you can do big things. A more recent example of this was when Parttimepoker.com bought Neverbeg.com. After the acquisition, they rolled the existing Neverbeg into a ParTimeStaking site…..This seemed to work very well for them.

5. Diversify - I know everyone has a passion for poker and loves writing and promoting poker all day long. However at some point if you want to be a full time affiliate, you will have to start exploring other verticals. An easy transition would be to go into casino, bingo, rummy, forex, or sportsbetting. Either way, just remember, there is more out there than just poker affiliate programs.

6. Target other markets - Although it is easy to get stuck promoting in one country or your native language, there are loads of opportunity if you think on an international level. If you want to go full time, you should consider things such as geo-targeting and having your high ranking or converting pages translated into a few different languages.

7. Acquisition Strategy - Whether it be at PAP, sitepoint, or one of the other webmaster hangouts on the internet, you can always find some decent poker sites for sale. If you are confident in your abilities, you can acquire a non revenue producing site with good content and turn it into a money maker. As much as I like starting new projects from scratch, nothing is funner than buying an existing product and building it out.

8. Create a public written commitment on how you are going to achieve your goal - I have always been a firm believer in writing down goals. Likewise if you don’t tell anyone what your goal is, trust me, it will make it 100 times harder to accomplish. Tell the world about your big goal of going full time and how you’re going to do it. Then work your plan for making it happen. Worse case scenario is that you might fail, who cares!

9. Embrace technology (web 2.0) and be progressive - As the poker affiliate industry continues to mature, so will the technology in our industry. Always be on the forefront of this. Even better, be an innovator and create something 2.0 for the industry. If you can do this successfully and make it popular amongst players, you will be leaving the realms of a part time affiliate very quickly.

10. Think like a full time poker affiliate - Change your mindset from thinking about making small money. Think about the big money and start running your affiliate business like a real business. If you are using your affiliate income to simply supplement your bankroll right now, you are on the wrong path. The poker affiliate business is a legitimate business where there are millions to be made. Act accordingly and have the right mindset when running your business in this great industry.

And even more important than #10, if you want to be a millionaire, you have to start thinking like a millionaire. Here are 5 lessons I have learned from millionaires.

So yesterday while I was enjoying a wonderful Father’s Day with my wife and daughters, I had a chance to catch the some of the back 9 of the U.S. Open Golf Championship on T.V.

If you didn’t get a chance to see it, you can surely read about it on any sports website. I won’t tell the whole story here as this is not ESPN.com! However, Tiger Woods who is arguably the best golfer ever to play the game proved why he is over the last 72 holes.

Even though being an internet marketer and a professional golfer are completely different careers, there is a great deal we can learn from and be motivated by in Tiger Woods. As affiliates, it is easy to listen to the negative people in your life or even your friends who tell you that something you’re trying to achieve is impossible. Look how many times Tiger has been completely out of a tournament going into the final round, and somehow defied the odds to come back for the win.

Here’s an example more pertinent to the real world though. Let’s say you only have $750 in your checking account today, no real assets, and a shitty rent payment every month. Is it truly impossible that you couldn’t be a millionaire in 3 years? No it isn’t! Do you think that the kids who started Youtube in their garage were balling out with Bentley’s and Rolex’s while they were developing the idea?

Here is a quote Tiger made several years ago:

“One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people’s expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it.”
– Tiger Woods

Tiger was also once asked what his biggest challenge was, and this was his reply,

“That’s simple, to become a better person tomorrow.”

Tiger shows the same type of success traits on the golf course that many successful entrepreneurs have. He believes in his skills, and he puts 110% into everything he does in his trade. Tiger Woods who is a bazillionaire and could sleep in every day, retire, never practice again, and still continue winning majors, still wakes up every day at 5:00 AM to get on the putting green.

Tiger Woods is where he is at in the golf world today because of his relentless strive for excellence and passion for being the best in the world at what he does. There are very few people on this earth with the mental toughness and focus of Tiger Woods. Likewise there are not as many people as humble as Woods once they achieve success.

Everybody, even the PGA Pro’s want to golf as good as Tiger, but how many people actually work as hard as he does every day of every month throughout their life? The same goes in affiliate marketing. Everybody wants millions of dollars and to have 5 and 6 figure checks showing up each month, but how many of us are actually doing what it takes to EARN this type of affiliate income?

If you’re not quite where you want to be in your professional or even personal life right now, take a look at Tiger Woods approach to life and his career. None of us our going to be the Tiger Woods of our selected niche’s or markets over the next week, but you have to start somewhere.

Commit to make one change or do one thing different in your business this week. And lastly, if YOU don’t believe in your heart that you can be the best in the world at something, unfortunately you never will be.

Make it a great week!

First, apologies for not making that many blog posts this week. Our consulting company has really taken off and we have been swamped with a new exciting project we are working on. Don’t worry you’ll all hear about it soon.

Anyhow, since 2003 I have had the pleasure of running several forums. Some, such as my stock market forum have come and gone, while others such as PAP have continued to flourish and grow. Not as if anyone didn’t know this, but the PAP forums are truly an authority forum that receive thousands of visits and several new signups each day. Being fortunate enough to be the founder, I figured I would share some tips about etiquette from my last few years there.

I could write here about how to build and grow a forum, but that is actually such a complex discussion with many variables and I’ll leave that for another discussion. So if that’s what your looking for, here is a pretty good article with 10 tips for growing a forum.

In this post however I want to discuss some simple forum posting etiquette and advice. All too often you see new posters, or sadly enough even some older members in forums doing stupid shit ,sorry, not following policy and guidelines.

Instead of making a list of 25-30 tips, here are the top 7 tips I can offer. If you’re going to be an active member in any forum, make like Nike and “Just Do It”

1. Search Function – If you’re a new member in a big forum and you have signed up to ask a question or get information, there is this neat feature called the Search Function. Usually the topic you are seeking information on has been discussed several times.

1. Self Promotion & Spam – In a community like PAP, or any forum that discusses industry issues, you simply make yourself look like an idiot and lose credibility if you are shamelessly trying to self promote. Nobody comes to a forum to be “sold” something, they come for information.

1. Keep Personal Differences Off the Forum – It’s ok to be opinionated and disagree on various topics, this is what a forum is all about. But keep your dislikes for other members out of the public eye. If a major dispute breaks out, take it to private messaging. Nobody wants to waste time reading that stuff, and makes for a negative environment.

1. Signatures – Signatures are a great way to make a statement, or get some traffic and SEO benefits with a link. They also let the other members know what sites you represent and give you some personality. They are not billboards though. Big annoying bolded and multi-colored signatures make you look like an idiot. Avoid them at all cost.

1. Concise Posting – I realize that sometimes it may take a few paragraphs to make a point. But nothing is worse than seeing a 6000 word dissertation in a post where the main point could have been made in a 4 paragraphs. People cringe when they see threads this long.

1. Thread Hijacking – Don’t hijack someone else’s thread with either meaningless bullshit, new topics, old topics, private conversation, or of course useless responses. In most forums you can start brand new threads for new topics and ideas, take advantage.

1. Newbies – You too were a newbie too at one point. Don’t chastise these guys just for being new in an industry. If anything, give something back, and help them like people helped you on your way up the ladder.

Make it a great weekend everyone!

For the longest time while I was learning the ropes and getting started in affiliate marketing, I always wanted a Black American Express card. I used to want the card for different reasons though, more so just to be able to say I had one. If you know anything about black American Express cards, then you know that they don’t just hand them out to everyone.

Now days however, the reason I wanted a black card is for the kick ass benefits involved with being a card holder. These are just a few:

• Dedicated 24 hour concierge service & travel agent.
• Free flight upgrades.
• Access to a whole list exclusive airline clubs throughout airports all over the world.
• Complimentary companion airline tickets 4 times a year.
• Hotel and car rental complimentary upgrades.

They’re are some other nice perks made available to members, but the ones above are the ones that entice me the most. Never in my life have I received a credit card that was packaged like the black card is. I will give American Express credit (no pun intended). They want the black cards to be percieved as the most elite card in the world, and the way they package them and treat you on the phone does just that.

Right on the box the card came in it says “With a level of service and degree of personal attention few people ever experience.”

The only downside to getting a centurion card is the up front fees as well as the annual fee. Not to mention that you have to spend $250K a year on the card to stay in the program. As a business getting to this level is not hard. For us it’s actually pretty easy with all the trade shows and international travel. To spend that kind of money personally though……..well, that could be fun.

Anyhow this is supposed to be the Monday Motivational post, so keep this in mind. Less than 10 years ago I was driving an ambulance making less than $30K a year. As far as website building skills or technical knowledge, I am still not very smart at it! The one thing I do have however is a positive attitude, a strong work ethic, and a tremendous drive to be successful in everything I do.

So to all the haters who thought I was chasing a pipe dream trying to “make money online” back in the day, this post’s for you………bitches!