Posted on June 26, 2007 by Tim Schroeder

If you are just getting started with affiliate marketing and unless you have a really high traffic website, low commission offers may quickly frustrate you. I generally do not promote an affiliate program that pays less than 35% per sale and/or less than $10 per lead.

Higher commission products or services will also give you more leverage to experiment with pay-per-click advertising. For example, if you were to join the Amazon.com affiliate program and create an affiliate website based on a genre of books, you are going to have to sell an awful lot of books to make any substantial income. Their base commission is 4%. Even if your website had enough traffic to sell 50 books a month, at an average cost of $12 a book you would only make measly total commission of $39 a month (6.5% tier).

Having said that, I know there are many affiliates that do very well selling Amazon products. The most successful Amazon affiliates use PPC traffic pointing to Amazon products in the $100+ range. Afterall, Amazon now seems to offer just about every product in the world and they are a trusted source.

While there might be a few exceptions to always avoiding low commission affiliate programs, there are just to many higher paying affiliate offers to discover. You should be after the BIG commissions.