You’ve created an amazing online course, and you want to spread the love, create something that brings new students into your couse, AND wanting to create a win-win scenario that could allow your students to bring in passive income for themselves.
You might want to explore the option of creating an affiliate program. Below, I’ll be sharing everything you need to know to start an affiliate program for your online course.
What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program means that you will pay a percentage in commission to students who bring new people into your course. This generates a new lead and income for you, that you likely wouldn’t have had without the affiliate. And the affiliate gets that commission for bringing that new student and new course sale to you. They might do this by sharing the information about your course via social media, their blog or email list, using an affiliate link you provide them with.
The Benefits of an Affiliate Program
Less marketing for you! The obvious main benefit of having your own affiliate program for your courses is that your affiliates help do the marketing for you. You get more course sales at a slightly lower sale amount (after their commission) with little effort. Your students as affiliates are sharing their testimonials with their audience and helping you grow your business, establish your authority and build trust.
Creating an Affiliate Program For Your Course:
1) Determine the Commission
When you decide to start an affiliate program, the first step is to set the commission percentage that you’d like to reward your affiliates with. Generally, for courses, this number is anywhere between 20% and 50%.
Remember that you want to set a percentage that leaves you with a figure that you feel comfortable with.
2) Create Promotional Assets
I suggest you create promotional assets to help your affiliates promote and market your products. This could include graphic templates for social media, social media caption swipe files, and email newsletter swipe files. Anything you can create that helps make marketing a little easier for your affiliates is worth spending some time on upfront as you increase the chances of your affiliates promoting your course with more ease.
Also, another important point is that by creating the promotional assets yourself you can be more certain that your brand image and messaging are being kept consistent across the board.
3) Set Your Affiliate Terms
The next step to setting up your affiliate program is to set your terms.
When and how are payments going to be made to your affiliates? Most programs have a 14-30 day pay-out time to account for any refunds that might occur, so make sure it fits with any guarantees or policy info you have for your course.
Another thing to take into account is to determine how long you want the affiliate link to be active for. This is usually something you set up inside the program you are using for affiliates and means how long between someone clicking on an affiliate link and they make a purchase. This can be anything from 30 days, a year, to lifelong.
4) Set Up Your Affiliate Program
It’s time to set up your affiliate program! If you are using a ‘all in one’ course platform like Kajabi, you can use their built-in affiliate program. However there are many affiliate product out there that will help you achieve this. Here are a couple of options to use:
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