Let me use a completely random analogy to get this point across for you.

Let’s say you are a window cleaner, and you are paid for every window that you clean. However, you have a very acute attention to detail, which leads you to spend a lot of time going over the same windows to get them as clean as they can be. So whilst it may take 5 minutes to clean a window well, you end up spending an extra 5 minutes on each window to get them “super clean”.

Now this sounds like a great work ethic, and it is. However, the problem with this approach is that you are using up time that could be spent cleaning another window and making money, just to make an almost unnoticeable difference to a window that has already been cleaned.

The fundamental problem with this strategy is that whilst you might get the odd recommendation here and there, you are essentially throwing your energy down an empty well, without expecting an equal return on your efforts. However, if you work smarter and move on to the next window without fine tuning an already cleaned window, your efforts are going to be rewarded like they should, and the amount of money you are earning will dramatically increase.

After using that (exceptionally random) analogy, I would like to highlight one extra point. This is that I am not suggesting that putting 100% effort into a project is incorrect, nor is it wrong to work to the best of your ability in everything that you do. The key however is to only do this when the work warrants it, as a lot of the time your hours of effort may well be only making a minimal difference to your bottom line at the end of the day, and you efforts could well be best utilised elsewhere.

The perfect cliché phrase that I am going to use here is: “If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it”. If you want to make money in this industry, you have to put your effort into doing the work that makes you money. The kind of work that will make you money will vary from niche to niche, but the key idea here is that if you’re spending time touching up the smallest things that make no difference, then you are wasting you time.

I will openly admit that I am terrible for putting effort into the smallest things that make little or no difference to my earnings, but make minute things a little prettier. Whilst many will say that this is great as I want to provide the perfect experience for the user, I am not getting a great return on my efforts. However, I have come to realise over time that there is a fine line between wanting to create a great site, and wasting time being anal about the smallest things.

A great way to sort out what makes you money and what doesn’t is to create a list of things to do for the next day. After doing this, consider which tasks are the ‘money-makers’ and which are the ‘time-wasters’. From here you can contemplate whether those ‘time-wasters’ are really essential to the development of your site, and think about if it is worth doing them in favour of the ‘money-making’ tasks.

If a task is not directly or indirectly making you money, then just strike it off the list and forget about it. Whilst it might be a nice thing to do for your site, if you can’t see it making you money in some way shape or form then it is not worth doing.

If you can focus on only doing the things that make you money for a month, you should certainly see a return on your work. You may well be surprised at how much time you spend nit-picking at things that nobody cares about, yet you are unaware that what you are doing is useless in the long run. So write down your task list at the end of each day, strike off the useless projects, and start focusing on the things that are going to bring in the money.

Don’t let useless tasks get in the way of the work that brings in the money.

As a new poker affiliate, there will often be times where you consider whether or not the whole idea of promoting online poker rooms is really worth while. When you’re at your computer facing a serious bout of writer’s block, or having a shitty time trying to modify a section of your site, it may seem as though poker affiliating is way more hassle than it’s worth. You will think it much easier to knock it all on the head and try something else instead.

But seriously, don’t give up.

There are very few online industries that will allow you to make as much money online as poker affiliating will. By giving up you are missing out on a prime opportunity to make a very nice amount of money from month to month, and possible live a far more comfortable life than you are now. Whilst making 6 figures a year seems pretty distant to most new poker affiliates, it is by no means an unattainable target.

Waking up in the morning to see that you’ve made a few hundred dollars whilst you were sleeping is a pretty enjoyable experience… I will tell you that for free.

After you get past the breaking point, you will have a completely different approach to your affiliate business. Whilst at the start you were always wondering if you would ever see any return on your efforts, you will now be wondering how far you can push yourself, and how many figures you could be bringing in each and every month. When things start to fall into place and you start making money, making even more money on top of that gets a lot easier.

Nobody likes to work for nothing, especially if things don’t appear to be going your way. There will be set backs, and there will be disappointments. There will be missed opportunities, and there will be failures. But hey, who’s counting? It doesn’t make a difference how many times you fail; all that matter is that you have that one break through project.

All the greatest Internet entrepreneurs have had their failures; some have even had some pretty monumental ones. But at the end of the day, nobody cares. Nothing is stopping you from trying again, and from every failure you set yourself up to do even better with your next project. Even if things do not work out as you have planned, you will still have learnt a few tricks and picked up some valuable experience. As hard to believe as it is, the experience you gain will often make up for the fact that your project was a failure.

Sometimes as a poker affiliate, things will go seriously wrong. You may lose a week’s or a month’s worth of work, but on the grand scale of things this isn’t too much of a big deal. Don’t get me wrong, you will be uber-pissed off if something like that happens, but it’s how you deal with it that counts. You can really let it get to you, and just forget about trying again. However, if you’re the sort of person to just let it go and start again, you are the sort of person that is hella likely to be making a boat load of money online at some point in the future.

As the old saying goes… its not the falling down that matters, it’s the way you pick yourself back up that counts. It may well be a little cliché, but it couldn’t be more accurate as far as poker affiliating is concerned. If you can bounce back from all of your set-backs, eventually you are going to hit on something that will be a great success. It’s just the way things work.

You have to realise that not everything you touch is going to turn to gold as you’re learning the business, but the one thing that does work out for you is more than going to make up for all the other projects that didn’t work out how you planned.

So as I was saying… don’t give up. Giving up is by far the easiest option; but it’s not going to make you any money at the end of the day. If can continue to work through the worst of it, your success is going to be just around the corner.

Keep plugging away.

One of the worst mindsets you can be in as a webmaster is where you do little work, yet still expect things to ‘just happen’. You can check your stats religiously waiting for ‘the change’, but if you’re not feeding fuel into the fire then you will be whittling away the hours waiting for something that just isn’t going to take place. This why you need to keep a clear head, and get focused with your work.

This is how I keep myself focused…

I always have a list of things to do

This for me is the most important thing that helps keep me focused and helps me to get down to work. If I don’t have anything in front of me reminding me about work that needs to be done, I’m pretty much lost. If all my work plans are stored up in my head, they just become too overwhelming, and I just end up falling into the downward spiral of stat-checking instead.

It may sound pretty daunting to always be faced with a never ending list of tasks, but I always see a dollar sign attached to each piece of work that I am faced with. This helps to remind me that the more I get done, the more money I will be making in the near future. Whilst some things will not directly affect my earnings, as long as I am developing my sites in some way I can be sure that it will be contributing the final figures in my monthly payments.

I avoid all distractions

• I never have MSN/Yahoo/Skype or any IM programs on
• I rarely have any music playing in the background

I will admit that I keep my web browser running, as this normally helps contribute to research, or for when I intend to have a quick break. But I’m pretty strict with this, and I don’t spend too much time browsing around pointless stuff that just leads to further procrastination. Of course this is assuming that I do not need to browser to do work, for example if I’m writing content in Word, designing in Photoshop or modifying my sites in Dreamweaver.

The more distractions you have whilst you work, the more opportunities you have available to you to prevent you from being focused on the work at hand. So make sure you set yourself up to be as productive as possible when you sit down at your desk.

>The fewer distractions you have, the more focused you are.
>The more focused you become, the harder you will work.
>The harder you work, the more money you will be making.

It’s a simple series of events, but it is one that works perfectly well.

I set myself goals

If I’m being honest, I never used to set myself goals in the past. Setting goals always used to sound like one of those things that ‘other people’ did to try and help themselves get more motivated, probably ending in little to no success. However, I realised that setting yourself goals can have a powerful effect on the way you approach your work.

If you set yourself realistic goals, you have something to shoot for each time you get down to work. This helps to drive you to get things done, as it is a great feeling to achieve your goals and cross them off the list. You will be surprised at how good it feels to complete your own personal goals, no matter how small they may be.

Without goals in front of you, your overall work ethic is a little more lax and you no longer push yourself to achieve more than you would be able to if you had something to aim for. So never underestimate to power of setting yourself goals.

Just make sure to set your goals as follows:

• Set your goals around how much work you can get done, rather than based on results.
• Set goals over short periods of time; they are much easier to stick to and complete.
• Set attainable goals so that you do not overly stress yourself.

If you follow all of these rules, your work will be incredibly focused and your productivity will be at an all time high. So stop reading, and start making some money.

At the start, it’s exciting to think about the fact that a person on the other side of the world is visiting your site and reading through all the pages you have written. Your hard work is making a difference to someone else’s life in some way. It may not be by much, but it’s still a great feeling that someone is better off because of the information you have provided on your website. This is why it’s a great shame to forget about this as you progress as an affiliate, and let those visitors just turn into numbers, instead of being individual people looking for help.

Therefore I always try and remind myself that each number in my statistics is a person that I could have helped in some way. By doing this it gives extra value to the work I do on a daily basis, rather than just working to try and increase my earnings for the month. Of course I want to earn more money, but it makes it more worth while to do work when you know it’s going to be appreciated by someone else.

If you make a website with the intention of providing top quality content and creating the top website in your particular niche, there is no doubt that you will do well. However, if you are driven by the figures in your affiliate account rather than the experience of your visitors, you are setting yourself on the road to failure as a new affiliate.

Say for example a family member or friend asks you one day what it is you do for a living. Would you be proud to show them the site(s) that you own? At the end of the day, you are the one that is going to have to put your name to your work, so you should never aim to settle for second best.

So the next time someone asks you what it is you do for a living, how is the conversation going to go?

Friend: So what is it you do for money these days?
You: I make poker websites.
Friend: Sounds cool, can I take a look?
You: Err, yeah okay…
Friend: Oh I see… that’s nice. *In the most insincere tone of voice you’ve heard all year*

Or

Friend: So what is it you do for money these days?
You: I make poker websites.
Friend: Sounds cool, can I take a look?
You: Yeah sure…
Friend: Oh awesome. Where did you learn how to do that?
You: Well there’s this super awesome guy called Greg from newpokeraffiliate.com… etc.

The last line is optional, but you see what I mean. It’s not often that you get to impress other people with your work as an online poker affiliate, but it sure as hell is worth it when you get to show someone the result of your efforts and they are genuinely impressed.

It can be pretty cold and lonely as a poker affiliate. Even though you might be helping and entertaining hundreds or thousands of people every month with your articles, it’s not going to be often that you will get recognition and praises for your work. However, it really is one of the best feelings that you can get when you get that random email saying “thank you for your help”. It helps to bring things back into perspective once more, and remind you the true value of creating useful and informative websites.

So simply aim to make websites that you are proud to put your name to, and the success is sure to follow. In my opinion, it would make it all worth while just to receive that “thank you” every now and then, even if I wasn’t earning any money. But I’m not going to argue with the monetary bonuses that come my way!

It’s simply the way things work when it comes to trying to make money by promoting online Poker rooms. The key difference between the affiliates that make money and the ones that do not is perseverance. If you can see the rewards in the future for your current efforts rather than your immediate results, you are likely to do well as a poker affiliate.

When it comes to being a poker affiliate, there is a period of about 3 to 6 months where you will see little return on your work. You may be working hard day in and day out, without seeing any results in your affiliate accounts. This is often a very frustrating time for new affiliates, and will often be the breaking point where a number of affiliates decide to pack it in and call it a day.

The problem is that in the first 3 to 6 months it is unlikely that you poker site will rank well in the major search engines, and you will see very little traffic. This is because your site will be placed in the sandbox, which prevents it from ranking well until it has proved itself to be a worthy resource to visitors. This happens because lots of new poker sites pop up every day, and search engines like Google do not want poor sites ranking well for good search terms. For more information on this you can check out the article on the Google sandbox.

Many people will see the big $100 CPA commissions and jump into the world of poker affiliating. Those figures are all too tempting, and people can’t wait to start earning some money. However, many will fail to realise that becoming a poker affiliate isn’t really a short term game, because if you want to make serious amounts of money, you have to prepare to be in it for a good while. This is why many people abandon ship when they don’t see any money in the first few weeks or months.

When I first started, I hit the breaking point (as many new affiliates do) and considered whether or not what I was doing was worth my while. However, I stuck at it purely because of the fact that I enjoyed making my poker site and seeing people visit my site to read the information on offer. Making money was the goal for the future, but at the time I enjoyed working to make the best site possible. But how did it work out for me in the end? Let’s just say that I have never looked back on my decision to stick with it.

There is no doubt that it is incredibly tedious to work hard for what seems to be nothing in return, but there are some serious rewards at the end of the tunnel if you can persevere. It takes a while to build up a great poker portal and start bringing in traffic from the search engines, so you should always look forward and think about where all your current hard work will land you in the future. The harder you work now, the bigger the payoff will be in the coming months and for years to come.

The successful affiliates are the ones that are not dependant on the figures in their affiliate accounts to determine how well they are doing. The successful affiliates work hard regardless of how many hits they are getting from the search engines because they know things will brighten up in the future. This optimism and confidence is a great combination, and is the perfect recipe for new affiliates that want to do well.

I can tell you now; if you work hard for those months where nothing seems to happen, you will be making solid amounts of money in the future. It’s hard to work and not know if you are getting anywhere, which is why I’m letting you know that there will be a return on your efforts in the coming months. If you can continue to work through the breaking point, you will be doing better than 90% of all people that start out as poker affiliates, and you will be on the road to success.

It’s always much easier to quit and convince yourself that making money online is not possible. It seems that people would much prefer to give up and try something else rather than persevere with something that they know would work if they just committed themselves a little bit more. Poker affiliating isn’t difficult, it’s actually pretty simple. Put the effort in, and you will see great results. So keep learning, keep writing, and make the most profitable poker website you can. You will thank yourself for it in the future.

However, there is always the small matter of procrastination that always seems to manage to creep into everyday life to offset your productivity.

Working for yourself as an online poker affiliate means that you choose your own hours, and never have anyone on your back pressuring you to get work done. Whilst this is a dream come true for most people, it is the very reason as to why we are so susceptible to procrastination and find ourselves whittling away at our valuable ‘working’ time.

If you think back to your time in school or in past/current jobs, I’m sure that you can remember having to knuckle down from time to time. If there was a report or essay that needed to be in on a specific date, you would normally be able to get it in on time for fear of suffering the consequences from your boss or teacher. But now without this lack of pressure, we are pretty much free to work as little or as much as we like.

When I first started as an affiliate, I used to enjoy sitting down at my computer preparing for a few hours of work. I liked the thought that I would be developing my business in some way, so it never really felt like real work. At first I would just start up my laptop, check a few emails, go through my stats from the day before, browse over a few forums and see how my traffic was doing. However, this would almost always be the starting point for long periods of procrastination.

There always seemed to be that one piece of statistical information that I had to check over again, or that one email inbox that I had to refresh to see if there was anything new. I also had to scour the Internet Marketing forums for any new gems of information that popped up, spending a good time to make sure I left no stone unturned. At the time it seemed like a pretty productive thing to do for me and my sites, because after all I was working… wasn’t I?

Taking a step back and looking at where all this ‘work’ got me, I can safely say that it didn’t get me very far. It’s interesting to check your stats and browse forums, but it rarely contributes anything to the development of your business. You will never have anything to show for all the time you spend checking stats each day. So it’s important that you get focused and start doing things that will get your business moving, rather than just sitting back and looking at it.

I feel that things started to really change for me when I gave myself a ‘to do’ list for each day, with a simple sentence to highlight a different thing I could do within my working hours. After completing one thing, I could just cross it off and do whatever was next on the list, working my way down the page from day to day. Being able to physically see what needed to be done helped me to get focused and allowed me to work on the important stuff, rather than delaying the real work through procrastination.

I would find that I could do more in about an hour and a half with a to-do list in front of me than I would within 4 or 5 hours without one. All the time procrastinating just padded out the working hours made me waste big chunks of my day doing nothing important.

In my opinion, the cause of procrastination is not necessarily the laziness of the individual, but the lack of focus on what needs to be done. If you just have work floating around in your head, it’s hard to pick and choose between what you need to do next.

It may be a bit primitive, but I always like to keep a sheet of paper on my desk listing all the things that need to be done. It’s always there staring me in the face, so it helps to keep a safe distance between me and procrastination. At the end of the day, it’s the ability to see the work in front of me that pushes me to get things done, rather than mull about all day getting no where and making no money.

So get your paper, whiteboard, notepad file or whatever you want to use, and start writing a short to do list. You will realise that all the stat checking and forum browsing that you once did is never something that you needed to do, and you will be setting yourself on the right track to making more money more quickly.

The harder you work, the more money you make. However, you can check your stats as hard as you like, but nothing is going to change.