Where do I Start?

- I have found some programs through click bank I would like to promote but this is only a start.  Can I successfully market niche products through e-zines?

-Do you have any experience with namestick for hiding affiliate links? 

-Is it important to hide affiliate links when advertising in e-zines?

-I would like to open a presales page website (or many), but don't know where to turn.  Can you recomend a specific software, or service to help get me started.

-I have seen the recomendation to use adsense to guage market response.  Does this advise aply to presales pages meant only for directing traffic to affiliate programs?

-I feel I have some promising ideas, but lack precious experience.  Is affiliate marketing a viable way to make a lucrative fulltime income.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

-Steve

Thanks for the great post.  To answer your affiliate program questions:

1. Yes, you can market successfully through article distribution.  And it can happen quickly.  But, you must write great, informative articles with a very soft sell.  Otherwise, your articles will not make it very far.  Also, you will need to send people to your website pre-sell page, instead of sending them directly to the affiliate.  Otherwise, you will have to have affiliate links inside the articles that you submit, which is bad.

2. Never heard of namestick, however, tracking and displaying a friendly url is important.  Here is an article that I wrote on the subject: http://www.affiliatewatchdogs.org/HidingOutgoingLinks.aspx

3. If you know HTML, then you can use the Template Monster templates to get a nice clean designed website.If you don't know HTML, I recommend possibly hiring someone from Get A Freelancer

4. If you are going to build pre-sell pages, I would concentrate on the affiliate program, however, once you get your traffic upto 200+ unique visitors a day, I would try AdSence out just to make sure that you will not make more money with that.  You can always flip it back if it doesn't make as much.

5. To answer your question about "can affiliate marketing be a fulltime position", the answer is yes.  I am semi-retired now at 28.  Affiliate marketing is hard work in the beginning, and is pretty easy stuff later on.  The only problem is that it's very addictive once you start seeing the money coming in

Travis Newman - Watchdog

Affiliate Watchdogs

I've thought of a few more questions.

Do you buy or subscribe to auto-responder services?  Are auto responders what are used to build opt-in lists?  Do you know a good one?

Is it effective to buy advertising in e-zines?

So, heres my plan.  I was thinking of signing up with an autoresponder service, placing an add offering free info and use the auto-respond url as the the response link.  Then, after they pre-qualify by offering their e-mail address, have the autoresponder send free useful content and endorsement for my affiliate product(s), This way I can start up before I have a website.

Does this idea hold water, or is it a waste of time?

Thanks Again.

Steve

P.S.

28 and semi-retired, huh?  There may be hope for me yet

I have not tried the system that you are trying to put together.  My gut feeling says that this will not work well or will just break even.

It's worth throwing $100 at to see though.  You can try Get Response.com, I think it's about $20 per month.  You will need to have the potential customer email to a certain email address, then you can have the autoresponder reply back with your affiliate program offers.  My guess is that this will be a very low conversion rate (like less than 1%).

Also, buying advertising on the ezines most likely will not work well, because it's not targeted enough.  I'd try AdWords or Yahoo Advertising first and see how well that you do with that.

Travis Newman - Watchdog

Affiliate Watchdogs