It’s Not All About Your Commission Rate
Everybody likes to earn more money. Whether you are a teacher, a cop, or even a CEO, you wouldn’t mind it if someone offered you more money to get your job done. The same concept applies to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers do not have the luxury of a stable income. So if you don’t perform as an affiliate, you are not going to get paid, and you might end up going out of business. Expert affiliate marketers understand how to get the best out of each affiliate program. They don’t necessarily go after the items with the highest commission rates. They focus on products that convert at a high rate. But that can’t be said about newbie affiliate marketers.
A lot of affiliate programs go about recruiting new affiliates by printing up these brochures that talk about how much money you are going to earn per click. The concept of EPC has been around for a while now, and a lot of people assume that an item that comes with a high average EPC is a winner. In truth, many affiliate programs do not remove outliers from their numbers, so you end up with an EPC that is bloated. EPC also doesn’t count the amount of money that you will have to spend to generate a valid lead. Many newbie affiliate marketers don’t take into account their overall CPA, and that could lead to your fast downfall.
I remember when I started with affiliate marketing. I didn’t know exactly what I needed to do, but I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. So I started going after products/services that gave me the largest amount of money per sale without figuring out whether I had a chance in making a profit with my campaigns. It’s true that mortgage companies are willing to pay you crazy amounts per each approved lead, but you are going to have to do a lot work to set up your campaigns in a profitable manner, and you will still be at the mercy of Google Adwords and other pay per click services. Besides, let’s not forget that those high-commission products are usually in mature markets, so you are going against people who have been in business for a while and are ahead of you on the curve.
Nobody hates getting paid $500 per lead. If you happen to be a super-affiliate with big following, you can probably demand that kind of commission from your affiliate program managers. Superstars are well worth the money. But not everyone gets there. Besides, high commission items are much tougher to convert. Super affiliates get the job done by driving millions of visitors to their offer pages. Most newbie affiliates can’t possibly drive that kind of traffic to an offer page. It’s OK to be optimistic and throw a page out on the web hoping and praying for people to take you up on your offer. But don’t build your business around it. When it comes to making money online, it’s always better to generate 1000 leads for a low commission item than no commission on a super high-commission item. At the end of the day, your goal is to actually do make money online and not dream about how much you can make if thousands of things go right for you. Over-optimism can be dangerous.
