How to Start an Affiliate Program for Your Digital Courses
You’ve created an amazing digital course, and your students love it! If you want to create something that brings new students into your course and allows your students to bring in passive income, the answer is creating a great affiliate program.
In this post, I’ll be sharing everything you need to know to start an affiliate program for your digital courses.
What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is simply an arrangement that means that you will pay a percentage in commission to any registered affiliates who bring new buyers to your course.
What this means for you is that you can generate new leads and income that you wouldn’t have likely had without your affiliate’s connections & promotional efforts. And for your affiliate, they’ll get a nice commission for bringing that new student and new course sale to you.
It’s what I call a true win-win scenario!
The Benefits of an Affiliate Program
The main benefit of having your own affiliate program for your courses is that your affiliates help do the marketing for you and reach a larger audience than you likely could on your own. You get more course sales at a slightly lower sale amount (after their commission) with little effort.
You can even encourage your students to sign up as affiliates and share their testimonials with their audience to encourage them to join your course - which is a super authentic way to vouch for your course and a great way to show off the quality of your work!
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 number you feel comfortable with and that feels fair for the amount of work you’ll be asking of your affiliates.
I also like to make sure I’ve accounted for the tax and fees I’ll have to pay on the course sale to make sure I keep enough back for myself.
2) 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, so make sure it fits with any guarantees or policy info you have for your course.
How long does the cookie live? This means how long between someone clicking on an affiliate link and they make a purchase.
First click or last click cookies? Will you award the affiliate sale to the affiliate who brings in the first click to your site or the last click before purchase?
3) Create Promotional Assets
Now it’s time to create some promotional assets to help your affiliates promote and market your products.
This isn’t 100% necessary to start your affiliate program but it makes a huge difference when asking your affiliates to promote for you!
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 a great asset to spend time creating!
Creating these promotional assets also allows you more control over how your product, course, or program will be marketed or promoted which ultimately builds trust with your buyers since it will feel consistent with what the affiliate was selling them on.
4) Set Up Your Affiliate Program
It’s time to set up your affiliate program! If you are using a course platform like Podia or Kajabi, you can use their built-in affiliate program. If you need a separate affiliate system, here are a couple of options to use:
And that’s it! You’ve officially got your affiliate program up and running!
