Traffic vs. Earnings

Do you really want to make a lot of money with your blog? Here is the first key ingredient.

Stop paying too much attention to your traffic, because it’s a vanity metric.

What matters is how much money this traffic actually generates for you. It is totally possible to make money with a small number of visitors. The screenshot below is the proof. 

How? The answer is simple: Affiliate Offers Payout.

The price of the products you promote should range between $37-$500 and offer a 30-50% commission rate. Compare that to the Amazon Associates payout rates of 3-8%.

In the affiliate world, payouts can be massively different. Here is the payout for the first affiliate program I had success with:

NameSilo pays a 10% commission on the first order made by any new customer that someone refers to their site.

The average order value (the price of a .com domain) is around $9 and the average commission is around a dollar per purchase.

I made a puny $382 out of 307 orders.

Compare that to the payout of this other affiliate program:

And here are the stats that go with it - I made $8.441 out of 136 sales from this affiliate program in two years of blogging. There is a 30-day payment delay because of the refund period.

They pay a 30% commission on the all orders made by a new customer referred to their site. Because I have an older account, I get 50% commission per sale. For recurring commissions they pay 25 percent.  

The order value is between $49-$218 and the average commission comes out to $64 per purchase.

Therefore, as an affiliate marketer, it makes more sense to focus on the high payout niches because you will get more return for your effort. A large part of your niche research should be to identify markets with high earnings per sale.