CPA selling madness?

So i've been doing alot of research into cpa and selling for people like clickbank and maxbounty...

Firstly all, over the place i see people saying "it doesnt cost much to get started about $25-$50 for a test campaign" Fair enough, that sounds like theres money to be made dead easy. But am i right in saying that that $50 is going to get you no-where? Even the great Vick says you dont need a website or anything else just the test campaign, but thyen i see everyone talking about squeeze pages which cost money, you'll need to host this aswel, which costs more money, building a list paying aweber or similar to mass email, which again costs money.

I've seen some pretty good pages from the seller that give out reviews and testemonials etec, so why bother redirecting to a landing page? and also ive seen that some PPC networks dont allow direct linking? Im not quite sure exactly what that means so if someone could clarify thatd be cosmic.

So if i start out with $50 im literally just throwing it away without first spending money on squeeze, hosting, tracking and email emailer right? So whats the cost here? $500 to actually get started on something that you can refine and scale?

I'm broke as **** and where as i could spend $50 on a campaign that would go straight to a vendors mainpage (albeit it seems as though a $100-$200 upfront investment is a mandatory minimum in most cases) is that even likely to bring in any results without all the other stuff added on that i literally cannot afford to utilise until i make a few decent sales.

Cheers for any heads up guys.