Why are affiliate payouts so high?
Q: Why are affiliate payouts so high on a lot of info products? It seems like a scam to me, and I don't want to get cheated.
A: It's not a scam, it's just the free market at work. Way back in the day, people offered low commissions on information products, usually around ten to twenty percent. When people then tried to break into the market with a new product, they had to have some way to get all of the affiliate marketers out there to push their new product instead of the established products that had been selling for a while. Their answer? Better commission rates.
Once that ball got rolling, it was hard to stop. People kept raising and raising the affiliate payout percentage to try to keep ahead of the competition and make their product more attractive to perspective marketing partners. We've gotten to the point that a lot of products pay ninety percent of the sale price in affiliate payouts, which is awesome to those of us that are marketing products, as it makes the field extremely lucrative. It's still quite profitable for those selling the products, as well, because even though they're making less money per sale, they've got a larger army of affiliates out there doing the sales work for them. What they lose in profit margin, they make up for in volume.
So rest easy knowing that high affiliate payouts are not necessarily indicative of a scam. Now, with almost anything on the Internet you need to be worried about someone looking to cheat you, so always be on your guard. Just don't have any special flags raised because someone's giving you nine bucks for selling something of theirs that costs ten bucks; chances are, they're just trying to get their product out there.