The best way of catching up is to read this forum, particularly posts by phpbuilt and other jnr vips who do post good stuff. (Just dive right in and read TBH) phpbuilt did a post on here about authority websites - a very good read and still useful to this day. There's also a very recent thread where a few jnr vips are working together to build an authority website. Even early on there's some gems in there about how they scout for possible website ideas.
What I would warn you against is reading SEO blogs. A guy called Matthew Woodward created this BS blog with completely hopeless SEO advice and it's now become a right of passage for new affiliates to build an "SEO Expert Blog" and plaster it in aff links for everything. I'm guessing you were an SEO / affiliate way back in the day, remember when everyone built a shopping directory? Well, these SEO blogs are now kinda like that really.
The main issue is non of these self confessed guru types have ever actually ranked a site. I've even spotted one or two ripping stats pages and reports off other guru styles sites to bulk out their "amazing in depth guides". Just don't even go there buddy!!!
Just read this forum. Find the Jnr vips who appear to have something interesting to say and read their back posts. It's in those back posts and reading between the lines that you'll find those nuggets of info that are genuinely useful. Have a search via Google on here for "payday loans matt cutts" and read an amazing thread, then read between the lines. One guy on here was heavily into the technique and although sadly the technique is now dead but when it was live there was a whole SERP (payday loans - Google UK) that was full of interesting websites to pick apart and understand how the whole "link juice" thing worked in practice.
When you start connecting the dots you'll begin to learn stuff that's amazingly technical and if you're interested in SEO you'll find yourself deep in the rabbit hole! There's also a really interesting thread on here about Viral Nova and how they used viral content on Facebook as a traffic arb to drive huge traffic numbers and revenue. Again, this technique have since changed (Facebook made it harder to reach without Boosting) but it's an amazing insight into how these guys discover loopholes and build plans to exploit them for profit.
I would definitely save up for jnr vip status and get chatting to these guys too. The mindset some of them have is wonderful and totally profit orientated! No BS "hey sign up for my newsletter" just people who are genuinely at the top of their game and quite happy to share ideas.
