Getting a price that is technically above what it ought to be is a big key to earning consistent profits from betting on horses, and is central to my own betting strategy. I teach a lot of my members this from day one.

It is down to you to effectively change your betting habits, and very often you wouldn't even know that you had these bad betting habits, until they were pointed out to you, so don't go blaming yourself here.

So once you've learned to look at value bets, and eliminate the habit of just betting on horses that are favourites to win their respective races, you can move onto the next good habit that you should have in your betting armoury.

Create a suitable betting bank that is appropriate to your financial circumstances.

How A Betting Bank Can Help You Achieve More Profits

This sounds such a simple concept doesn't it? Do not let its simplicity fool you in to thinking that its not important, because it is absolutely vital to your success.

Not having a betting bank can often mean you do not know how much you've bet this month, and just as important; how much you won versus how much you've lost.

The reasons for having a betting bank are so key for success when betting on horses. First of all, you are able to monitor how much you've bet, and how much you've won (or lost) each month.

This is critical, particularly if you use a horse racing tipster service and you want to know how successful and reliable it is.

Secondly, it enables you to stake correctly on each horse that you bet on. For example, I advise my members that they use what's called a ?points system? for their betting.

Simply put, all this involves is dividing your betting bank, let's use a figure of ?100 for example, into 100 points. This means that you have complete control of what you're betting.

How A Points System Correctly Structures Your Betting

You may decide, as I do with my service, that horses who you feel have an excellent chance of winning are worthy of a five point bet (the maximum bet I place on horses), which in this example would therefore be five per cent of your betting bank, so ?5.

Conversely, you decide that horses that have just a good chance of winning, may only need a one point bet, as the information you have about the horse, coupled with the horses form, is not as conclusive as it would be for a five point bet.

So in this instance you would only bet one per cent of your betting bank, and therefore only wager ?1 on your horse.

This type of betting ensures that you can weather and recover fro the bad runs ? as these are inevitable unfortunately, but you can also take advantage of the good runs too.

Furthermore, you are in complete control and know exactly where you are from day to day, which is so important.

What You Should Not Be Doing When Betting On Horses

One of the big mistakes you as a punter can make, is to stake too high in proportion to your betting bank, and this generally comes out of wanting to make money more quickly.

You have to think of the long term picture, more than the short term. If you have a betting bank of ?100, as in our example above, you cannot realistically expect to make ?100 per month in profit, this is just not feasible.

The temptation for get-rich quick is so rife these days, due to the many claims out there that it is possible to become a millionaire overnight.

Let me tell you, it really is not. Lets look at how slowly, slowly really can catchy monkey...

How Small Gains Can Produce Great Results

Lets use our ?100 betting bank again to illustrate just how powerful staking with an effective points system is.

If by betting on horses each day, you only increased your betting bank by a mere one-half of one per cent (0.5%) every day, you would have a balance of almost ?250 (?244 to be precise) after just six months, such is the effect of compounding and using a long term strategy.

So in six months, you could potentially more than double your investment with very minimal points gains. Not bad for starters and of course, this can be multiplied depending on how much your betting bank is.

So in summary, you can now see that by finding value bets, and betting correctly that your betting bank will grow. And of course as your betting bank grows, so you are able to increase the size of your stakes and therefore make more profit.

In Part Three of this series of articles, I will discuss more bad habits that punters do while betting on horses, that cause them to lose money hand over fist.