What is a Good Affiliate Deal for You?

Yes, absolutely higher commissions are nice, but they can also work against you if the product itself is then overpriced to compensate for the high comission rate. And really when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter what percent of each sale or even how much money on each sale I'll get. Rather for me it comes down to (1) what my total potential revenue is for promoting a specific product and (2) whether I make more money in total promoting another product in its place.

For instance, in my niche, I could promote a ClickBank product from someone that nobody has ever heard of that costs $100 (of which I'll get $50) or something similar on Amazon that looks respectable, costs half the price, but for which I'll only get 8.25%.

For me, it's a no-brainer. I'll go with the Amazon product. Because for me, in my business, in my niche, using my methods, Amazon is a trusted name and I know that at that lower price point I may sell 100 or 1000 of those widgets whereas I might be lucky to sell just one of the Clickbank version.

Or put mathematically:
Clickbank: $100 * 50% commission * 1 sales = $100
Amazon: $50 * 8.5% commission * 100 sales = $525

I should also note that in the example above, we'd likely get 1,000 shares on our Facebook page for the Amazon product and maybe 10 for the Clickbank product, leading to 10 new Facebook likes on Amazon and 0 on Clickbank. Good selling isn't just about the product on offer, after all; it's about building your lists and credibility for the future. Which is why even if I made more from Clickbank, I'd have my reputation to worry about. Sorry, but that's not worth an extra hundred bucks.

As another example, we once promoted a $20 product that only paid 3% commission. Yes, 3%! Ridiculous, right? But the thing was, this was a product that we and our customers had been tracking for a long time so we knew there was very high demand; it was a very limited run; and it was only available in one place. So basically, it was take the 3% or get nothing. So we took the 3%, sent out one Facebook post, literally sold them out within two hours and came away with $500. Sure, I wish that 3% was 30% (especially because in this case, people would have still bought it at $30 instead of $20), but what I also wanted was for them to have had 3000 of those in stock instead of the 1000 or so they had -- because we probably would have sold them all. But in the end $500 for a single Facebook post wasn't a bad haul -- even at 3%.