Josh thanks for the question and welcome to the board. This is a tough business to crack into. To be successful will take many hours of work each week and merely throwing up a few pages here or there will not be effective.
There are dozens of very talented professionals who do this full time, 60+ hours a week, and hundreds of other affiliates who put in three to six hours every night after their day jobs. In order to be even remotely competitive you will have devote similar effort for at least three to six months.
It also takes a decent amount of real traffic to start obtaining players in any meaningful numbers. Real traffic costs real money. All the successful affiliates I know do advertise and many of us spend thousands of dollars per month. You can build up to this over time, but eventually you WILL have to advertise if you want to earn enough commission to go into this full time.
Note: Just because you do buy advertising is no guarantee of success either. 95% of the advertising you will be presented is totally ineffective. You have to pick and choose very carefully or you can easily waste your entire budget without getting ANY monetary results. ALWAYS check with other webmasters FIRST before buying advertising. You can get good feedback here and at other message boards like GPWA or SEOchat.
The potential to earn good money is there. There ARE people earning well over $50,000 per month. But believe me, it’s not by accident, they work hard, they advertise agressively and they are constantly on the look out for new ways to develop their business. If you follow their example you can succeed also, but it’s no walk in the park.
Hope this helps
:bigsmile: