Tweet

High Commissions for Affiliates-Good Marketing or Poor

Written by: Jeff Casmer

Article Overview: Why is it that some affiliate programs offer you 50% commission or greater to promote their products or services and others give you a meager 5% affiliate commission? As an affiliate marketer you're always on the hunt for the best products with high commissions for affiliates. But can you guarantee the product is high quality just because the commission is great?

High Commissions for Affiliates-Good Marketing or Poor

Why is it that some affiliate programs offer you 50% commission or greater to promote their products or services and others give you a meager 5% affiliate commission?

As an affiliate marketer you're always on the hunt for the best products with high commissions for affiliates. But can you guarantee the product is high quality just because the commission is great?

Probably not, not unless you test it, which is what all affiliates should do though many of them do not. Those that do however, buy the product through their own affiliate link in order to get the product at a discount. Is this legal?

Well, many merchants fail to ban their affiliates from doing so, thus affiliates feel no reason to feel guilty. After all they need to test the product in order to promote it, and the merchant did make a sale.

There's a battle going on between merchants and affiliates. It's an unspoken one and has, for sometime, been kept very civil for quite some time, but I feel that everyone is beginning to lose their patience.

Offering high commissions for affiliates was a unique selling point a few years ago. If a merchant wanted to have their product stand out they told their affiliates that they would receive a commission of 50, 65, or in many cases now 75 percent on commission.

Affiliates took to this like ducks to water and merchants soon found that in order to get affiliates they had to offer high commissions. It became less of an option and more of a required sales strategy. However, offering high commissions for affiliates did not urge the affiliates to work any harder to sell the products. The 20/80 rule still exists- that is 20 percent of your affiliates are taking in 80 percent of the commissions. Some say it's even less than that, the number seems closer to six percent. What are all the other affiliates doing? Are they lazy or just inexperienced?

Products with high commissions are still high end products and high end products are hard to sell. Many affiliate marketers have little or no sales experience. Thus convincing someone that your 97 dollar ebook is like sliced bread (they can't live without it) will be challenging.

Some may opt for seedy tactics like spamming or stealing commissions to make sales. Should merchants still reward them for this? Does someone deserve a 50% commission to tarnish your name and put your business on the line?

Should merchants lower the commissions? By doing this, they may not be able to attract the good marketers out there. Savvy salespeople are going to want to be heavily rewarded for the efforts they are putting into sending you traffic, building your list, and creating sales.

What about all the merchants out there that can not afford to give their affiliates 65% commission, or feel no need to. Is it fair for a merchant to offer a high commissions for affiliates on well priced product that is an easy sell?

Are we at a crossroad? The internet has made it difficult to go backwards; merchants can not suddenly decide to offer 40% as the new high commission payout. Likewise affiliates can not expect merchants to make the selling process easier so they can all be top sellers.

What do we do? Do we let things be and have each side quietly grumble to themselves? Merchants on one side wishing they didn't have to offer so much for a product that took them months to create, and affiliates on the other hoping that the commission rate will go up even more since they are pouring themselves into a product that they didn't create.

Is there a resolution? We can't make both parties happy, can we?

Related Articles
  Six Tips To Earn Extra Retirement Income With Affiliate Marketing
  3 Tactics To Consider Before Making Money Online
  Best Affiliate Programs - 7 Ways to Find Them!
  Sales Force Compensation - X Marks the Spot
  The 7 Crucial Things The Entrepreneur Should Know Before Starting Any Online Business

Article Tags: affiliate commission, affiliate link, affiliate marketer, affiliate marketers, affiliate programs, ducks, high commissions, high end products, high quality, merchants, patience, quite some time, sales strategy, unique selling point



Related Forum Posts
Re: How many nationalities are on the forum? - Hi there, It is amazing the languages have come into the posts. Now Jude was asked, how many languages she speaks. Please, come and tell us. I speak English, German and French. German is my mother tongue. Some thirty years ago I spoke fluently French. Now English has taken that place and I can better understand French than speaking it. English is now my daily used language. German in second place. However, I never grasped the German grammar very much. Why? The Swiss German Dialect is nothing to be compared with High German. At that time hardly anybody wrote the Dialect. Today it is the 'in thing' to write the dialect. (Letters, stories etc) But we have to be able to read High German, because every book, newspaper etc is in High German. Finally, I guess there are a few more who can vote for their nationality.
Re: Can someone explain Search engine optimization to me? - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could be compared to a big popularity contest: A High School Computer Geek and a High School Football Captain who are trying to promote a party. The computer geek tells everyone in school & even hands out 100's of flyers about his party Friday night...what happens? his friends end up showing up and a few new people...even the new people leave right away because it is not what they are looking for. The High School Football Captain ends up just telling a few good buddies, and within hours the entire school not only knows about it, but everyone wants to come, and everyone does come & stay. One defenition of "optimize is "To make as perfect or effective as possibe." How effective are your article marketing campaigns? Could you be distributing content (that is what search engines index) more effectively? In a perfect world, who would you want promoting your website, web pages, and web content? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is determining this perfect & effective way to do this. Jeff
Re: What is your Business? - We are running a Online Marketing Firm and we have some good clients to which we are offering a complete Digital Marketing strategy like Search, Mobile Marketing, Branding and Design. I think in Online Marketing company online presence can be a wining factor for the success of the company.
Re: 2012 is a leap year! - I have a niece who will be 20 this year (or only 5). Poor girl - she is getting birthday gifts only every 4 years...
Re: FILL IN THE BLANK: One thing I did to grow my business today - Congrats guys! High five from the jungle cat!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

LISTENING SKILLS IN COACHING

Top 5 Tips for Better Online Ads

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.