As the owner of your product, you get to choose how much of a commission which you want to offer to your affiliates. If you’ve been an affiliate yourself at one point or another, you’re likely aware of the fact that generally the affiliate gets the larger piece of the commission pie with the merchant taking the smaller piece for themselves.

How to Choose Your Affiliate Commissions Percentage

Whereas most affiliate networks and merchants only offer an average of around 5-10% commissions to affiliates, there are some affiliate networks which put the ceiling much higher. Clickbank enables merchants to offer a maximum 75% commission to their affiliates and many merchants choose to offer that full 75%.

Offering 75% commissions likely sound ludicrous to the average person who is unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, and that confusion is justified; why should the person who took the time to create the product itself as well as the sales page/website and handle all support for that product in full, why should that person (the merchant) be willing to give away the lion’s share of the profits.

Honestly most big name merchants see it that way, hence their only giving away less than a tenth of the purchase price as a commission.

Smaller no name merchants who create their own software and informational products and sell them through these smaller affiliate networks generally can’t get away with doing the same thing for a couple of reasons.

One is because someone else can create a very similar product very easily and list it right next to the first merchant’s product. That first merchant isn’t a brand name and is unknown, so there’s no reason an affiliate wouldn’t just go ahead and promote the competition if they were offering a better slice.

Two is that, unlike the big merchants like Amazon, these smaller merchants don’t have any other form of advertising, all they have is affiliate support. So while Amazon knows that people will come to their website and buy from them no matter what and that they technically don’t need affiliate marketers to thrive, smaller merchants are completely dependent on affiliates as their primary marketing tool.

Ultimately you don’t have to over complicate things when trying to figure out what kind of affiliate commissions to offer.

The fact of the matter is that the more you offer, the more affiliates you’ll have promoting your product and the more QUALITY affiliates at that. Once your product is complete, your affiliates do all of the leg work for you so that you don’t have to lift a finger to see those sales coming in, so the least you can do is take care of them and offer them a sizable commission percentage.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about why you might want to offer 100% affiliate commissions besides ensuring that you’ll get as many affiliates as possible.