LenaShaw,
I was expecting that my question might have gone unanswered. So I did find the answer myself.
Looks like you are paying $0.05 per search performed through the search widget your affiliates are using. As far as my experience goes an average blogger will have a very hard time to earn $500 or more per month. Even though your payout is similar to let say payouts from Kontera or Infolinks, many will tell you that to earn any significant amount of money with either Kontera or Infolinks you need tons of traffic. Both Kontera and Infolink commissions are based pay per click model- the visitor is required to click. Your program requires a search to be performed.
However your company might be much better off to implement the affiliate program tied into your "advertising model". This in one shot will eliminate "cold calling" your company is engaged in, the negative feedback from those clients who hate to be on receiving end of cold calls. If you pay only 5% of commission on a "keyword" sold to affiliates you might be one of the most competitive affiliate programs out there while saving some money on employing sales people.
Also most of your widgets are accompanied by a plain HTML link (while the reset of the code is in javascript)- this along can be seen as a bit spammy by some.
Good luck with your affiliate program!
