I have to thank Jeremy Palmer for helping introduce a new routine for me this week.

Because of the BlackInkProject, I’d been waking at 5am (later rolled back to 545am) to make it for his live affiliate training (3pm PDT is 6am in Singapore…)

If you’re already an affiliate marketing veteran, what you’ll take away from Jeremy’s lessons is not what he says on the surface, but also “what lies beneath”. Look beyond the surface and you’ll get an insight into how he strategizes his system, develops a process and applies that process with ruthless efficiency when approaching a new niche.

So if you’re on the forums asking “I want to start a shoe blog, I hear they make good money. How do I start?” you’re probably barking down the wrong track.

Instead, take a moment to map out your goals/outcomes, develop a plan of action and be prepared to change course along the way.

As someone who made it to the sophomore year as an EE/CS (electrical engineers, computer science) major before dropping out and making a minor switch to creative writing and psychology, I’d like to think that one thing I’ve carried over from my 2 years of engineering is a systems-based approach to building a business.

Which totally echoes what Scott Jangro mentioned during the recording of our Friday Podcast session.

If you haven’t read between the lines in the affiliate and internet marketing blogs out there, and go beyond the “make quick cash” ebooks you see being flouted and touted and pimped all over the place, you’ll see a trend towards building a business online. And it’s no “big shock” or suprise either.

If you look back historically at the first salesmen selling snake oil and other miracle cures, they were soon supplanted by guys who were the real deal.

Do you think the online world is going to play by different laws?

So just like the dotcom crash of 2000 wiped out the guys who had $5 million in VC money and were buying BMWs and Hermann Miller Aeron chairs for everyone, including the janitor, the real world economy soon gave them a slap in the face and showed them the door.

With internet marketing, we’ve seen the rise and decline of keyword stuffed single page “affiliate sites”, crazy Google Cash-style direct linking campaigns, and in the last 2 years, squidoo lenses and blogger blogs stuffed with scraped content.

I think there’s a definite trend towards building a branded viable site, along the lines of what Kim Rowley is building, where you have a clearly identified personality like a Gary Vee fronting the site, rather than a hidden site owner, sitting behind an obscure and often cryptic “about us” page.

I was pretty surprised that Scott talked pretty extensively about his costume site which he’d mentioned a number of times in the earlier episodes of his Jangrocast podcast (he’s got good music taste, he recently swapped the intro/outro music from the FatboySlim remix of A Tribe Called Quest’s I left my wallet in El Segundo to something equally cool), and Jeremy just mentioned that Scott is probably the biggest costumes affiliate out on the internet.

But if you’ve learned one lesson from their books, it’s that copying their sites and expecting the same results is just like cloning a MacDonald’s and expecting the same results.

To paraphrase a popular phrase, “It’s the system, stupid!”

Check out the BlackInkProject and watch for Scott Jangro’s appearance on the Friday Podcast this Friday.