Do you remember when you were young and your mum or dad (or other significant person in your life at the time) would tell you something extremely wise and life changing but it totally went in one ear and out the other? Today you might think back on it and say, “I wish I’d listened to them; my life would be a whole lot different now”.

Unfortunately, this is how most of us function when it comes to making money online. We want all the answers but we aren’t always prepared to take them on when we hear them. I know that in the early days, we learned the ins and outs of making money online from James Martell but did we really listen to what he had to say?…no not really. We took what we wanted from it all and played around with the sites and added content and tweaked the themes but when it came down to it, we didn’t really follow what he had to say. Why?…well looking back on it now it was mostly because we just weren’t patient enough and not being patient enough results in a cascade of problems. Believe me we kick ourselves now because had we followed James’ method right from the beginning we would have succeeded a lot sooner than we did.

When you aren’t patient enough you get to a point where you don’t quite believe in the process. And if you don’t believe in the process, you are either going to stop putting it into practice or you will start to tweak it a little putting your own spin on it until eventually it becomes nothing like the original method.

So for us, instead of writing long detailed posts, which is what James recommended, we went ahead and wrote hundreds of poor quality short unhelpful articles. And instead of focusing on just one website, which is again what James recommended, we kept building more and more sites. And instead of backlinking we spent time tweaking the sites. As a result, it took us a lot longer to get anywhere.

This is what happens to a good majority of people. We still get emails today from people who have purchased our Amazonian Profit Plan who have obviously not really taken it all in. For instance, we recommend working on only 5 product reviews at any one time. But instead we get emails from people saying they have added 20 or 30 reviews to their site and wonder why they aren’t making any money. They wonder if adding more will help. Of course it won’t because if none of the first 5 are making any money then why will adding another lot of reviews make any difference?

I know I am rambling on a bit here but what I am trying to get at is that in order to make a good income online you have to first of all be patient and second of all follow through on the process. It’s almost like baking a loaf of bread. If you follow the recipe exactly you get a better loaf. If you start tweaking by adding a bit more flour or a bit more yeast you might still get a decent loaf but if you start experimenting by omitting or changing some of the ingredients then it is pot luck as to whether it is going to turn out or not. You might get there eventually if you experiment enough but it will take you a lot longer than if you just stuck to the recipe.

There are plenty of recipes for making money online but in terms of affiliate marketing and the product review concept there are 3 critical ingredients you need to follow in order to succeed:

• Choose a quality products
• Write quality reviews
• Get quality backlinks

Notice the one word that keeps repeating itself?…that word is QUALITY but most people making money online do everything but provide quality. It’s always more about QUANTITY for most people and it was for us also – hence why we built website after website. Fortunately we stopped at around 20 or so but a lot of people just keep going.

I know we have spoken many times about ‘Quality vs Quantity’ on this site but it’s something that needs to be repeated constantly because a lot of people just don’t get it. You really have to make quality your main focus and now more than ever because it is the direction that Google is taking. Google want to have quality sites ranking in their search engine. They don’t want to see poor quality spammy sites in the top 10 for any of their search results.

Even if we put Google aside for a minute, then it is still obvious that quality is important. It’s important because when anyone comes to your site they are doing so because they want answers. If you have a product review site they want you to tell them why they should buy the product. They don’t want to see a site full of ads, pop-ups and a short unhelpful review.

If you don’t focus on quality then you will really struggle with making money online. You have to make quality your number one priority if you want to succeed.

Let’s take a look in more detail:

1. Choose a Quality Product

When most people build websites they immediately start thinking about what niche they should pick. This is a big mistake in our opinion. There is this concept that some niches are better than others but nothing could be further from the truth. It has nothing to do with the niche because in reality every niche has both good products AND bad products.

People think that the secret to our success are the niches we have chosen so they go searching for our sites and try to replicate it all. But it has nothing to do with the niches because we make money from all sorts of niches. There isn’t one niche that does better than any other because it’s not about the niches…it’s about the quality products we have chosen within those niches.

Your readers don’t want to buy poor quality items. They want the best they can get for their money and your job is to find the best quality products and write about them. It’s simple really but a lot people don’t want to take the extra effort it requires to do that sort of research. They want to make money online but they don’t want to work for it.

2. Write Quality Reviews

Once you have chosen a quality product you then need to write a quality review. This is really a critical factor if you want your reviews to convert. It’s not just about getting your readers to the merchant and letting the merchant do the rest. Believe us when we say that because we thought the same thing. We wrote 300 word reviews for a long time thinking that the shorter the review the better as the reader would simply click over to Amazon for more info. Most didn’t stay on the page long enough to do that. They immediately saw the short review and clicked the back button. Those who stayed and clicked through to Amazon didn’t buy. Why?…because we gave them no reason to buy.

To ‘give someone a reason to buy’ means telling them why the product is going to benefit them in some way and/or why it is the best available compared to other similar products. If they have the benefits in their head, by the time they reach Amazon they are more likely to buy.

But it’s not just about slapping a few benefits on the page and hey presto you will make sales. It takes more than that. It means thoroughly researching the product until you know it inside and out because in most cases you won’t actually own the product. This means spending time on Amazon reading customer reviews and searching the manufacturers site for detailed information about the product and scouring the net for what others have to say about it.

It also means writing long detailed reviews that are around 1000 words or more. Our longest review now sits on our Affiliate Reviews HQ site and is over 4000 words long and we could have written much more. Remember that the person reading your review doesn’t have the product in front of them so they will want to know everything they can before buying. Don’t be afraid to add even the smallest of details.

The only way you are ever going to write really good quality reviews is to forget about the search engines because if you think about what the search engines want to see in the review then you are thinking about the money first and your readers second. So instead of worrying about the search engines, worry about your readers and what they would like to see in the review. If you do that you will always end up with well written helpful reviews.

3. Get Quality Backlinks

The final step in the process is getting quality traffic. This is where most people fail. They can often choose quality products and write quality reviews but the traffic part eludes them. The reason for that is that they are not patient enough. They start out all keen and send out some guest articles and maybe write a press release and do a bit of social networking/bookmarking and leave a few blog comments but because they don’t see anything happen straight away they lose focus. Their interest starts to wane and before they know it they are building another website because ‘the next website will be the one that makes it’ or so they think.

Or worse yet, they might pay someone $20 to get 1000 backlinks to their site. It just doesn’t work. We know this from experience, because like almost everyone else we too have tried this method in the past. You need QUALITY backlinks if you want to rank well in Google or any of the search engines for that matter, and the best quality backlinks you can get come from guest blogging. Yes, it takes time but it works. You can choose to continue to ignore backlinking or get someone else to add hundreds of spammy backlinks to your site or you can do it the right way and only focus on quality backlinks.

Just keep in mind that one good quality backlink is often better than thousands of poor quality ones.

The Final Ingredient

So what is the final ingredient? The final ingredient is you and whether you are patient enough to stick with the plan. Just remember that:

• If you have chosen quality products then they will sell.
• If you have written a quality review then it will convert.

All you need is the traffic but it can take a year before you really start to see some real action with backlinking. Are you prepared to stick at it for that long? You really have to answer that question because if you aren’t prepared for that then this isn’t the business for you and you will only find yourself in what we call the Affiliate Marketers Cycle of Doom. Sure you might have success in a month or two – lots of people have – but if it doesn’t happen in a month or two are you willing to keep at it until you do or will you just be off to build yet another website?