Im looking through the CJ merchants looking for a couple of vendors to promote. These are ecommerce companies and the commission rate is around 5-6% with the average order value being around $100. How can people make money like that? Assuming a 2% conversion, it would take 10,000 visits just to make $1,000.
Obviously, there are a ton of people who do it, so they must be making money at it. Im just not seeing the value. School me, please.
One of my clients is a very large website that mostly monetizes their users in "other" ways, with affiliate marketing being a relatively small way of them making money (that's why I was hired: to grow that portion into something that was worthwhile). So, having CJ/linkshare/etc is just a way to add some more gravy on the top of their profits.
Just to help your data and see if you think it's worth attempting more full scale (since you have assumptions as to what % convert and such in your original post), these are the stats for a VERY targeted site with highly motivated credit-card-ready visitors (last 7 days traffic):
$16,200 Commission - 3,010 Sales - 445 Leads - 104,893 Clicks - 38,784 Impressions - $15.44 EPC - 3.29% Conversion
$16k is what they make every few hours with their core monetization techniques, so again, this is not usually a feasible approach for the typical "affiliate marketer."
Thanks for those stats. My background is in ecommerce, so I was looking for an affiliate marketing route that was similar to that which I am already familiar. Outside of dropshipping, CPS seems the way to go since I know data feed manipulation, categorization, site structure, unique content and building out large scale PPC campaigns and content strategies.
That average commission is in the $4 dollar range, and the per visit value is $0.15. I think that per visit value stat is what gets me hung up.
CPS can work for paid traffic, but you have to do a lot of hunting around for solid offers. In addition, the payouts tend to be large enough (at least on digital goods) that you need a significant budget just to get statistically significant results.
On the upside, once they're working, CPS campaigns are a lot more stable than CPA in most cases.