Just like most things in life, your first steps when trying to make serious money from your betting can sometimes be the hardest.
Often you will have all kinds of questions such as…
- Which tipsters should you follow?
- How much should you stake on each bet?
- When should you take a profit?
- How should you handle bad runs?
And whilst we can certainly help you answer all of these questions as an SBC member, sometimes there is just really nothing better than actually following someone else doing it themselves for real.
Which is where our betting blogger and columnist, Rowan Day comes in – thanks to his real-life betting reports and blog that detail his exact tipster portfolio and just how much money he is making(and indeed sometimes losing – after all betting is not always about counting your winnings, it’s about the overall profit you make).
Rowan’s Betting Story…
Rowan started betting seriously for profit around 4 years ago with the simple goal of making some extra cash to pay the bills and enjoy a couple of nice holidays for his family.
He joined us here at the Smart Betting Club, started following a number of our Hall of Fame recommended tipsters and since then has never look back.
A career writing about his betting experiences then blossomed and since November 2013, he has been penning regular ‘Practical Punter Reports’ for SBC members. They highlight some of the real live issues involved in following a range of tipster services to make good profit. So popular did they prove that earlier this year, Rowan also started writing a more regular ‘Bet Diary’ on the SBC website to go into this in more detail.
After all, it’s one thing finding the best tipsters (which is where we come in) but there is simply no substitute to listening to those who have turned the theory into practice.
The Do’s and Don’ts Of Successful Betting.
To help you sample a little bit of what Rowan provides to members via his real-life betting articles and blog, we have copied below a few of his Do’s and Don’ts of getting a successful betting operation off to the very best start (as taken from his latest Practical Punter Report).
DO prepare yourself mentally for the path ahead.
The better prepared you are mentally, then the easier you will find running a betting portfolio from a psychological point of view.
Make sure you read all the guides that the Smart Betting Club have available for download on the website, especially the ‘Betting X Factor‘ report from February 2015 (available via the Betting Magazines members section).
Engage with people you know have experience and who can provide guidance on social media or via email. Open communication with the tipsters you intend following – they’re a nice bunch, honest! More to the point, you’ll find that they can often help you keep your feet on the ground during their good spells and keep you from too much navel-gazing through the bad. And share your experiences with others who are trying to do the same as you.
All of this will help you to cope mentally with the trials and tribulations that lie ahead. I actually started to write a blog about my experiences, inspired by some of the email conversations I had enjoyed with some of the tipsters I followed. You get to see things from a different perspective and it is always good to avoid being too egocentric when it comes to your betting.
If you’re ready mentally, you’re more than half way to being successful before you even start.
DO focus on the money.
What I mean by this is that profitable gambling isn’t an exercise in finding thrills and spills. Indeed, I know one or two professional gamblers who describe what they do as “grinding” out bets. I don’t know about you, but the word “grind” doesn’t suggest that they’re looking for excitement and massive highs from their betting.
Sure, it’s nice to back a big priced winner at a Festival like Cheltenham, and you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t get a buzz out of that. But on a day to day basis, you should be focusing on the end result of what you do, which is making money. Watching every race you bet in, or following every goal in every match you have a financial interest in, is a short cut to the mad house. You need to be maintaining a healthy mental equilibrium, not be searching out adrenalin rushes.
Gone are the days I used to use my Flashscores app on my mobile to tell me how my bets are getting on. Try spending quality time with the kids when your phone beeps to tell you that Dunfermline are down to 10 men and have just conceded a 95th minute goal, scuppering your 3/1 winner!
DON’T spend a lot on tipster subscription fees at the start.
Look upon your new betting career in the same way you would if you were starting a new business. You want to keep your overheads as low as possible, and then consider reinvesting some money to develop your business, once you’ve actually made some cash.
And besides, there’s no need to. There’s some excellent free tipsters out there, plus others who charge very little and represent remarkable value for money. Find them, and use them. Make some money, and then consider joining the more expensive services in the market using some of the profit you’ve made.
DON’T over analyse and make damaging changes in the way you do things.
It’s massively important to have “down” time when you can relax, forget about getting prices, forget about the chances of missing emails, forget about figures and how you can improve performance, etc., etc.
I found this the hardest aspect of all when it came to betting by following a portfolio of tipsters. My mind would be constantly whirring and the problem is, when betting performance takes a quite normal turn for the worse – as it inevitably will from time to time – and your brain is trying to find solutions for what really aren’t problems, then it will. But these “solutions” are frequently counter-productive, for they force you into making changes that you should definitely not be making. You will find yourself dropping a tipster just before he goes on a great run, changing your staking so that the recovery takes longer than it should, or making yourself miserable when there really is no need to be.
I’m not saying you should never make changes or alter things, but they need to be made little by little. It’s a good idea to set a date when you sit down to assess how things are going. I tend to do so twice a year; at the beginning of January and then six months later in June.
Settle on your tipsters. Settle on your staking. And then go with the flow. Don’t overanalyse, don’t tinker, don’t fret. Chill out, have trust in your initial work in setting up your portfolio, and then go with the flow. The long term results will benefit if you do.
Read More From Rowan..
You can find six more invaluable successful betting Do’s and Don’ts to both save and make you money in the latest Practical Punter Report from Rowan. This and the full back catalogue of ‘Practical Punters’ (18 in total) are available with an SBC membership.
SBC members can also read the week by week progress of Rowan’s tipster betting portfolio via his regular ‘Bet Diary’ posts. Here you can read all about the latest betting issues and how he gets the most out of his tipsters, all of which have been reviewed and recommended by us.
The ‘Bet Diary’ is also a great place to interact and ask questions, so you can find out all you need to know about how to make money following tipsters.
So if you are after some inspiration on how you too can follow Rowan and start making money by following tipsters –
Gain instant access now with a Smart Betting Club membership.
