The standard affiliate commission ranges from 5%-30%, with physical products paying less than digital ones. Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and pays between 1% and 20% commissions, with most products falling between 3% and 10%. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.
Digital products pay much more with standard digital products paying 30%-40%. Some pay even more and those which have a high ticket up-sell product range can even pay 100% commissions on the front end product range. See SFM Digital Business System.
Not all affiliate products will pay a percentage commission either. Some of them pay per click or for traffic. EPC or earnings per click programs are typically paid ads. You get paid for each click of an advert displayed on your website. It can be argued that some of these programs aren’t technically affiliate programs but advertising platforms who pay you for advertising space on your website:
- Adsense
- Media.net
- Ezoic
- Mediavine
- AdThrive
- SkimLinks
and ..
- CBMint
- EntirewebEzoic
- Linqia
- wecantrack
- Cheapflights
- Skyscanner
Most pay per click revenue sharing programs will pay less than $1 for a click. But this will depend on the topic of your website. More competitive topics offer larger rewards.
Standard Affiliate Commission – More Bang For Your Buck
If you’re an affiliate you can maximise your earnings through affiliate marketing by choosing programs which pay high ticket and recurring commissions. High ticket programs typically offer commissions of $500 or more. They have larger price tags and even physical products which are priced at over $1,000 will pay a lot more than your standard affiliate product will.
Affiliate products which offer recurring commissions are things like memberships or software products. With these kinds of products you can earn a lot more for what can amount to the same amount of work, if you’re an affiliate.
See also what is high ticket affiliate marketing.
Higher Valued Products
By choosing higher valued products to sell, affiliates can earn a lot more even with less sales. If you sell a standard priced product from Clickbank, for example, you’ll usually make 40% commission from a product valued at around $100. So in order to make $4000, you’ll need to sell 400 of them! Or you could sell a high ticket item worth $2000 instead and earn $160 – at 8% commission. This means you’ll only need to sell 25 items to reach the same target of $4000!
Better still, you can find products to sell which are valued above $100,000! With even only an 8% commission rate, you can earn $8000 on a single sale.
Here’s an example of a high ticket product available on the site Hammacher Schlemmer. At 8% commission, this submarine can pay out a tidy commission of $216,000!
Summary
Although the standard affiliate commission ranges from 5% to 30%, there’s a huge variety according to the kinds of products you choose to promote. Physical products tend to pay lower rates of commission than digital ones do. Typically physical products pay from 3-10% while digital products typically pay from 30-40%. Digital products require fewer costs for delivery and manufacturing, which might explain the higher level of commission.
There’s also high ticket products which either offer higher commission levels or a higher price tag (or both). Some subscription based affiliate products offer ongoing recurring commissions to affiliates. These are good to use for a regular revenue, especially for beginners who are learning.
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, access this free video series.