Hello....and a few questions.

[GregY]

Hi, my name is Greg. I am relatively new to IM, but I have set up couple of blogs, including one on mortgages that is making a bit of money from Adsense, sponsored reviews, and the odd affiliate sale.

I am not totally crazy about the idea of maintaining a 5 day a week posting schedule with fresh blog content so I am exploring affiliate marketing. I read Day Job Killer (I am not sure if that is popular around here or not, but anyway I read it).

I opened an Adwords account and I have been direct linking with some success. A product on Shareasale sold for $200 with a 20% commission and the clicks cost less than a dollar. I have had success with Amazon as well.

The direct linking is requiring constant monitoring, because of Google's duplicate URL policy. I am constantly getting bumped and having to adjust my bids. Which leads me to landing pages and a few of my questions:

1) Why are most (all?) landing pages I see a mile long? Is this a proven technique? Do you have some recommendations on where I could learn how to build/write an effective landing page.

2) Is there a best CMS or platform for building landing pages? I am now very comfortable with Wordpress, could this be an effective tool for affiliate marketing (outside of a blog that requires regular babysitting). Tech is my hobby (I am a banker by day), so I don't mind learning HTML/CSS if that is neccessary and I am sure I could pick it up. I just don't want to was a bunch of time heading down a path you know to be ineffective. I would rather spend that time learning to write good copy etc.

Reading this back, it seems like I am looking for the easiest way to make money online and that is not the case. I enjoyed marketing the blog and building the blog, I just didn't enjoy thinking up topics all the time. Like I said, I love tech, and I would love to switch careers.

Any thoughts?

Oh, and one more thing. Who are the Darren Rowses/"Problogger" equivalent of affiliate marketing? Who's site, (besides this one) should I be certain I stay up to date with?

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Greg,

Welcome to 5 Star. So sorry but I ODed on Halloween candy and am having a major sugar crash. Seriously I can't hold my eyes open. I'll try to answer tomorrow and hopefully some of our members will too.

Quick answer to your ProBlogger question. The 5 Star blog is one of the leading industry blogs and if you look in the sidebar on the blog, I syndicate most of the other top affiliate blogs too. If you go to my other site Affiliate Marketing Buzz it's easy to just scan all the headlines of all the top affiliate blogs to see what you are interested in reading more about.

More tomorrow...