On a $1,997 course launch I ran, the baseline affiliate commission was about $800 a sale. A first-time affiliate made 23 sales and roughly $18,400. Two marketers with a list of 6,500 took second with close to $400,000 in sales. A different affiliate, in a different year of the same client’s launch, made 184 sales and won a $100,000 contest prize on top of commissions. These are real numbers from launches I managed, not an industry average.

By Matt McWilliams, four-time Affiliate Manager of the Year (more about my background), who has driven more than $1.8 billion in affiliate revenue across the programs I’ve run and managed.

People ask me this question constantly, usually right after they’ve watched a leaderboard update during someone else’s launch and wondered what the names near the top actually took home. I can’t answer it for every launch. I can answer it for the ones I ran, because I was the one who built the leaderboard, set the prizes, and cut the checks. Here’s what affiliates actually earned, rank by rank, in a $5.7 million launch I managed for Stu McLaren’s membership course Tribe, plus one result from a different year of the same client relationship.

An $800 commission was the baseline, not the ceiling

Tribe sold for $1,997, and the affiliate commission worked out to $800 a sale. That number holds across both launches in this post, even though they happened in different years. It’s the number every other figure here builds on. An affiliate who made 10 sales made roughly $8,000. An affiliate who made 100 made roughly $80,000. The gap between affiliates in this post isn’t a different commission rate. It’s a different number of sales, and that’s the part worth paying attention to.

A first-time affiliate made $18,400 and finished in the top 25

Michele Caruana had never run an affiliate promotion before this launch. No big list, no team, just a plan and a consistent voice with her audience. She made 23 sales, which works out to about $18,400 once commissions on payment-plan buyers finish clearing, and she landed in the top 25 out of hundreds of affiliates, most of them experienced. I interviewed Michele about how she did it, and the short version is she didn’t try to out-market people who’d been doing this for years. She told her own story and sent the emails.

A first launch comes with a learning curve you can shorten. My guide How to Avoid the Mid-Launch Dip in Affiliate Promotions covers the stretch of a launch where most affiliates go quiet and most sales get left on the table.

A tiny email list put Manu Muraro in the top 10 for $16,000

Manu Muraro runs an Instagram strategy business, and her email list going into this launch was small enough that nobody, including me, expected her anywhere near the top 10. She got there anyway, and a large chunk of her result came down to one email she sent on the final day, which brought in close to $16,000 on its own. I talked with her about the mechanics of it in this episode. Her list was a fraction of what most top-10 finishers were working with.

A small list outperforming a big one isn’t an exception. It’s what happens when the audience actually trusts the person sending the email. I break down why in How to Build Trust With Your Audience as an Affiliate.

Heidi Easley made nearly $100,000 finishing third

Heidi Easley had promoted this client’s launches before, and this time she built a prep course as her own bonus and finished third overall, earning close to $100,000 in commissions. She wasn’t new to this and her result shows what a returning affiliate who refines her approach each year can produce. I had her back on the show to talk through what changed, and you can listen to that conversation here.

Justin Demers and Sara Temte took second with a list of 6,500

Justin and Sara run a small membership business together, and their email list going into this launch sat at about 6,500 people, with a Facebook group under 3,000. They finished second, generating close to $400,000 in total sales and earning a $40,000 second-place bonus on top of their commissions. What got them there was a paid warm-up product they ran before the cart even opened, which meant everyone on their promotional list had already paid them money once before they ever mentioned the launch. Their full breakdown is here, and it’s worth hearing straight from them.

Sarah Williams won $100,000 in a different launch on 184 sales

This one isn’t from the same seven-episode series. It’s from a different year of the same client relationship, a separate Stu McLaren launch where Sarah Williams made 184 sales at that same $800 commission and won the $100,000 top-affiliate prize. The year before, promoting the same offer, she made 9 sales. Going from 9 to 184 the next year is the kind of jump that usually comes from a changed approach rather than a changed audience, and she walks through what she changed in this interview. I’m keeping this one separate from the $5.7 million series on purpose. Different launch, different year, same $800 commission.

Earnings drop off fast below the top 25

Line these results up and the shape is obvious. Sarah Williams and Justin and Sara, in first and second, combined for well over 300 sales and six figures in bonus money alone before commissions. Heidi, in third, made close to $100,000. Manu, somewhere in the top 10, made about $16,000. Michele, in the top 25, made $18,400. The distance between third place and 24th place is bigger than the distance between 24th place and someone who made zero sales. That’s not a flaw in how these launches run. It’s what happens any time a small number of affiliates have audiences built specifically around buying decisions, while most affiliates are promoting to a general audience that happens to include some buyers.

Payment plans delay when the money actually arrives

The $18,400 figure for Michele isn’t what landed in her account the week the cart closed. Tribe offered a payment-plan option, and commissions on those buyers come in as each installment clears rather than all at once. An affiliate who made 23 sales with a mix of full payments and payment plans sees some of that $18,400 the first month and the rest trickling in over the following months as buyers keep paying. If you’re comparing your own launch numbers to anything in this post, compare them to the full, cleared total, not the deposit that hit your account in week one. The two numbers can look very different for weeks.

Small affiliates who punch above their list size aren’t doing anything mysterious. The 7 Secrets of Overachieving Affiliates is a $17 report on exactly how affiliates like Manu and Michele out-earn people with ten times their audience.

What a realistic first-launch goal looks like

If this is your first launch, Sarah Williams’s 184 sales and $100,000 prize is not the number to chase. Michele’s $18,400 on 23 sales, or Manu’s $16,000 off a list most people would call too small to bother with, are the more useful targets. Both of them did one thing well instead of a dozen things halfway: Michele told her own story consistently, and Manu leaned entirely into the one channel she actually knew how to work. Pick one lane, work it through the whole launch, and the leaderboard position will follow from the sales, not the other way around.

If you want more of how I think through a launch from the affiliate side, start with How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product, a free two-hour masterclass with a bonus report on building passive affiliate income.

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