How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Expand Your Reach and Sell Your Online Course
It can be difficult when you have a small email list and a tiny social media following to find the perfect students for your online course.
One of the best ways to sell your online course when you’re just starting out is using other peoples’ audiences.
This is called affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing can be a win win for both parties. You give your affiliate an opportunity to make easy money and you’re able to find the perfect students for your online course without huge ad spends or other marketing costs.
Why Use Affiliates To Sell Your Online Course
The greatest advantage of using an affiliate program to sell your online course is that you don’t need to have a giant-size pre-launch email list or use paid advertising to find the perfect students to start selling your online course.
Your affiliates can earn truly passive income because they don’t have to be involved in supporting the students; they can simply sell your online course and hand off any student support functions to you.
This performance-based marketing approach provides a strong incentive for them to promote your course and you only have to pay for what they earned.
Affiliate marketing broadens your reach and you are able to reach audiences that you would have had to pay thousands of dollars in marketing costs to find otherwise.
Another huge benefit is that affiliate marketing provides a reputation boost; affiliates help spread the word about you and your products or services. This helps build trust and confidence in your online course.
Affiliate marketing is extremely cost-effective. You save money by not having to spend it on ads to market your products; you only pay out of pocket (i.e., commission) when your online course is sold.
One last benefit of affiliate marketing is the increased traffic to your website which is tracked by your Facebook pixel. This allows you to retarget anyone who visited your website, but didn’t purchase at a later date.
How To Find The Best Affiliates
Finding the right people to promote your products or services is a little tricky. Why? All affiliates are not the same. Some people may sign up for your affiliate program because you provide a sizeable commission but may not have the perfect audience for your course. Here are a few places to look for the right affiliates:
Social media platforms – join Facebook or LinkedIn groups within your market, connect with influencers, and follow businesses within your industry and other professionals
Create a LinkedIn account – this platform is more business focused than the other social media platforms and is a great place to network with others in your niche
Connect with bloggers and podcasters who have a similar audience to your perfect student – they tend to have larger audiences, which gives you a sizeable pool of potential students
Affiliate forums – go to places where affiliates hang out. That is an easy way to connect with affiliates, especially since they use these forums to discuss marketing tactics from more experienced affiliate marketers
Competitors – look at what your competition is doing. See what types of incentives they employ to get affiliates to market their products and see how you can add more to entice them to promote your products
Online Affiliate Summits – a great place to connect with affiliates if your products and services align with what they are seeking
Pin this and save for later
I have found that, hands down, the best way to find the perfect affiliates is to reach out to other influencers, bloggers, podcasters, or businesses in your niche and ask them if they would be interested in participating in your affiliate launch. I’ve connected with them by following them on social media and joining their email list. It was important to me that I got to know them first to see if they would truly be a good fit for what I was promoting.
When you reach out to prospective affiliates, be sure to focus on what’s in it for them and why you think their audience would be interested in the course you’re selling. Highlight the fact that all marketing material would be provided for them and the only thing they would be responsible for doing is promoting on social media and to their email list.
Ways To Reward Your Affiliates And How Much To Pay
In order to attract affiliates and promotion of your online course, attractive compensation is key. Here are some tips in deciding how much to offer your affiliates:
You can create different levels of pay for your affiliates. Make sure you factor in your profit margin when deciding to pay commissions based on productivity. This type of commission lets your affiliate marketers know that their extra efforts in promoting your online course will result in a higher payout. For example, if your affiliate sold 100 courses, the commission would be 40%. If they sold over 100 courses, the commission would be 50%.
Research your competitors and see how much they pay their affiliate marketers. Having this information can help you gauge how much to charge, but make sure it is in alignment with your financial interests. As a benchmark, most affiliate programs for online courses are between 40-50%.
Provide your affiliates with gifts from your brand for achieving certain milestones. Examples include t-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, pens, keychains, etc.
Create bonuses for your top affiliates as an extra incentive for them to market and sell your online course. Going beyond the typical commission is a great way to reward your affiliates who make an effort.
Provide recognition such as a leader board showcasing the top affiliate performers.
Gamify your incentives. There is nothing like a little competition between your affiliates. Provide them with a certain type of badge for reaching a particular level in affiliate marketing. Provide leaderboards and titles. These are great ways to engage your affiliates.
“Acknowledgment is a kind of human magic – a small human connection, a gift from one person to another that translates into a much larger, more meaningful outcome. On the positive side, these results also show that we can increase motivation simply by acknowledging the efforts of those working with us.”
How To Set Up Your Affiliate Marketing Program
In order to pay your affiliates and track which online course sales come from them, you need an affiliate tracking system. Let’s walk through the steps to set up your affiliate marketing program.
Step 1. Choose your affiliate platform (e.g., ThriveCart, SendOwl, or Share-a-sale, or even your online course platform)
Take a look at what your competitors are using and determine what is best for your business.
When you use an affiliate marketplace, they are easy to set up and there is no need to track your sales. The affiliate payments are processed for you.
When selecting your online course platform, it’s important to note that if you plan to launch with affiliates, many of them offer affiliate tools and management. If your online course platform offers this option, I highly recommend going this route.
Here’s how the affiliate tracking works for many affiliate platforms:
You have them create a share link on your platform to share with their audiences.
This link will place a cookie that the prospects browser for a certain number of days.
If their customer purchases from your site using the same browser and the purchase is made within that time period, the transaction is counted as an affiliate transaction and they earn a commission.
Step 2. Determine how you will pay your affiliates
You have several options for your affiliate compensation such as one-time, recurring (subscription-based), or once they reach a certain amount.
Step 3. Decide on your affiliate program guidelines
Do not skip this step! I recommend finding a trusted source to create your affiliate program contract. each affiliate will need to sign your contract prior to enrolling in your affiliate program. My go to resource for legal templates for online course creators is Artful Contracts and you can learn more about my suggested legal tools here.
Step 4. Craft your marketing material
To support your affiliates all the marketing material should be created and personalized for them. This includes email swipes, social media captions and images and customized affiliate links so your affiliate system can track and credit sales.
Consider putting together an affiliate welcome package along with a private Facebook or Slack group for your affiliates where they can ask questions and get support during your promotional period.
There you go! Affiliate marketing can be a powerful marketing tool to find the perfect students for your online course especially when you’re just starting out and your audience is small or nonexistent.