Many bloggers and affiliate marketers may not ever find the answer to that question because they won’t do it. Even though I’d never recommend anyone get involved in an MLM business, my 2 ventures into that dark realm were very valuable lessons. We learned that to be in the top 10% of mlmers all you had to do was show up to meetings and events, and then to be in the top 5% all you had to do was show up on time and be prepared to do business. Those seem like brain dead simple things to do, but it was utterly amazing how many people didn’t do them.

Translate that into blogging and online business and you’ll find the secret to making at least some money on the net is no secret at all. The secret is called work. Being in the top 10% of bloggers and affiliate marketers requires that you just do something besides shop on eBay and read the news all day. If you are going to blog, then quit screwing around with it and do it every day, no excuses. Being in the top 5% probably requires little more effort than adding 10 comments and 2 forum posts a day and 1 article to an article directory per week.

It’s a joke to think making any money in the online world is easy. It is not, and the minions of ebook pimps selling their seductive elixir are liars if they tell you different. But don’t kid yourself, a few thousand dollars a month in earnings is well within your grasp if you just follow some simple guidelines and do them every day or as required, on a consistent basis.

What are they?

1. Blog or write content for your web site every day. If you can’t do this, then just flip burgers for a living and get out of the way of the rest of us.

2. Leave 10 comments on blogs in your niche every day and especially try to find blogs that award top commentators with links back to their sites. I also prefer not to be too negative or crude in my commenting, but some creative disagreement might bring a good amount of traffic to your site from people wanting to know more about your perspective.

3. Write 1 article a week related to one of your niches and submit it to 3 article directories for additional links back to your site. My top article directory is ezineArticles.com .

4. Leave at least 5 forum replies or new threads each day in forums like the DigitalPoint Forums or Bloggeries.com .

5. Grab some sort of attention for your blog at least once a month by ordering a review, writing a guest post, sending a blogger a pic of yourself in their logo t-shirt hoping they will blog about it, paying for a quality ad spot or something else to get featured in a major blog.

Sure, to get to the top blogging and affiliate marketing levels may require some evil tactics that John is an expert at, but there is so much money to be made and so much opportunity at the lower and middle levels that can be had just by doing basic things. We all have to work our way through these levels if we ever have any hope of making it to the top. Probably more than anything else, your level of commitment to your work (there’s that 4 letter word again) will determine your level of success.