The top affiliate programs pay good commission rates because they know without affiliates they have no business. If you come across an affiliate program that is not paying what the market rate is then you are going to pass that affiliate program over.

For example if you look at ClickBank you will see that commission rates run on an average around 50%. There are smart publishers who are willing to pay up to 75%.

Getting a higher commission rate from a top affiliate program must be mutually beneficial. It should benefit you, but it must also benefit the merchant, as well as the sales rep who is working on your behalf to get you a higher rate.

One of the questions that people who are new to affiliate marketing ask is how much can you make if you sell a particular product? The answer, is that there is really no way to know exactly how much money are going to make. It really depends on a number of factors.

One of the first things you can do is take a look at the product and see how much it costs and the commission that you receive from selling the product. The commission is the designated percentage that you'll receive from the sale amount. For example, if you have the $60.00 product and the commission is 50% then you'll receive $30.00 per sale.

The next thing you can look at is the sales page for the product. What you need to do is look at the effectiveness of it. How well does it convince you to purchase the product? Would you purchase the product? If you can honestly say yes then you may have a winning page. A successful sales page will give you a conversion rate of around 2 to 4%. So basically you'd need to get around 50 to 60 people to the page to make one sale.
You can use various methods to get these 50 to 60 people to your sales page on a daily basis. You can use pay per click, article marketing, social networking, organic traffic, forum marketing, etc.