I read about this over at 5 Star Affiliate Blogs, but the original post is at Affiliate Blog. I don’t know how he does his calculations, but he has calculated the top 25 affiliate programs at CJ by true EPC. The categories at the very least are not surprising, with financial at the top.
This kind of information can be very useful. However, you do also need to keep in mind that the top paying categories are more competitive, and therefore may be harder to get enough traffic for good results. It’s a decision each affiliate has to make about how competitive a term they want to go for.
My personal preference is to go for a balance. Some of my sites are in highly competitive areas. Others are not. My feeling is that just as I want to have a variety of income sources, I want to have a variety of types of sites that said income comes from. The basic logic is that if one category starts not performing well for me, I still have others to focus on.
Then there’s the other side of that logic, which says that I can’t learn to master everything, so I might perform worse by doing things this way. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say. As I said, it’s a personal decision and one I’m comfortable with. Besides, researching topics is a big part of what I love about affiliate marketing.
Hi Stephanie,
Thanks for posting my 25 Top Sites post. Here’s how I do it: I wrote a spider that goes out to CJ and grabs all of the programs with the data I need to figure out the best ones.
Then I crunch it all up and come up with the list. You’re right…it’s definitely not earth-shattering — I wasn’t all that surprised either. But finding the right programs is SOOOOOO boring and tedious. I wrote the spider to try to cut that down a bit.