What are the best affiliate programs?
Depends entirely on the traffic, the domain you're using, and the offer yolu're putting to it.
Clearly, people are not going to go to cutestpuppies.com and purchase basket ball shoes.
Do you perhaps mean "best affiliate network"?
If so, once again, it depends entirely.
Not meaning to toot my own horn, but the lot I throw in with are pretty damn good for domainers that happen to have entertainment media and P2P related domains.
We've got one guy who's got a typo of Pirate Bay's domain, and is, amazingly, pulling in a grand a day from that little nugget alone.
Are there problems with Cons and do they all pay up?
There ARE issues with some guys being con artists, or merely a 3rd party pooling offers from other networks, getting a good payout terms due to the high volume of traffic "they're sending", when really they're just doing arbitrage on your traffic to the network.
Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
YOU have to do due diligence.
Talk to people, do some studies online.
And looking up negatively loaded words in context with the network's not going to do you much good. You'll inevitably find a few dozen posts from angry schmucks who tried to cheat the system and got their arses kicked off and claim they're owed thousands of dollars... Maybe if the traffic hadn't been fraudulent, they would be.
Any tips on getting started?
Jump right in and actually just do it. The only thing you're wasting is time, and even then, it's a learning experience.
Go to a site like Affspy or AffiliateSeeking and look for terms that match some of the domains you have at your disposal. Join ALL of the networks that have offers that are relevant and seem legitimate, because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket.
You may also want to join an affiliate marketing forum. I think Lord Brar will back me up on the recommendation of WickedFire, although you have to
a) do a bit of research and experimentation first, as people aren't going to do anything for you if you won't even bother to do it for yourself;
b) ask
specific questions because people hate having to write long winded posts like this one because the people that ask them are generally looking f0or a turn key solution and won't bother reading something this long; and
c) not have issues with being redirected to gay porn that hijacks your mouse.
I have used parking revenue only, what do I need to do create landing pages?Content for pages? Or, do I need to put ads on successful sites?
DO NOT PUT ADS ON A LANDING PAGE!
Not only does this kind of piss off advertisers that may randomly check your pages, you're also giving YOUR traffic an easy way off of your site for the sake of a few cents.
If you are going to put ads on there, make sure it's an ad for
another one of your own landing pages. This is a surprisingly effective technique. Especially if you make the ad block look like an AdWords block.
As far as creating the landing pages, seeing as it's obviously not your forte, go to a site like Digitalpoint, and get some Indian slave labour to make the pages for you. Make sure you correct their terrible English when they're done.
If you want it to be a site you can continue to update, specify the CMS you want them to use, i.e. Wordpress.