Complete Guide — How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Sell Online Courses

And the best part is that it’s very easy to implement everything mentioned in this post.

No technical or special skills are required.

In fact, in the next 10 minutes, you’ll learn how to run a successful affiliate program for your online courses.

Let’s get started!

First things first.

You probably have an idea of what affiliate marketing is, but just in case, this section will cover its definition and why is it super effective in selling online courses.

Looking at it from a marketing strategy point of view, affiliate marketing is actually a genuine way for small businesses to:

For course creators that means more enrolled students, increased reputation for their skills and results, and a sustained revenue stream to put food on the table.

So it’s not a question of “should you set up an affiliate program to sell your courses?” but rather “Why don’t you have one yet?”.

(Because you probably lack knowledge about it and may think affiliate marketing software is expensive, complicated, or time-consuming — but this post is going to fix that!)

Here’s why affiliate marketing is right for you as a course creator:

Chances are, you’re low on one of those assets (money and time) when starting out, if not both.

This is where affiliate marketing comes in to protect you from the risks of losing money on marketing endeavors.

For example, you can spend $1000 on ads and get zero course sales.

You’re never getting that money back, nor the time you invested in the process.

The best case scenario is that you’ve learned from your mistakes and have the ability to do better next time.

But with affiliate marketing, you’ll only pay affiliates a commission when they make sales.

Affiliates will handle getting impressions, leads, and genuine course sales from interested individuals in your target market.

That means all you really have to do is to get competent affiliates to join your program for affiliate marketing to start doing its thing.

We know, easier said than done — but that’s exactly what we’re going to teach you in a few sections.

Note: affiliate marketing will also clear more time for you to work on other marketing channels.

It’s a given that the more space you occupy on the internet, the more you increase your search engine optimization (SEO) authority, especially on Google.

Once you set up an affiliate program, you’ll have automated payouts for affiliates, detailed analytics, and precise tracking.

The fruits of your affiliate marketing will get bigger and bigger when more affiliates join your program.

No need for you to actively work on your own affiliate program all the time.

Your relationship with your affiliates is a win-win situation for everybody involved.

Granted that you’re offering them an amazing commission, they’re more than happy to use their influence and skills to bring you sales.

But what’s absolutely beautiful — while this relationship is maintained and nourished — is that you’re constantly networking with brilliant people to grow with and build your online business.

This is probably the most time-consuming route you can take.

It will require you to create your own website first and upload your courses there.

Then you want to join affiliate networks like ClickBank or FlexOffers to access a large pool of affiliates that’ll promote your course.

But to be frank, this method isn’t ideal for course creators, simply because of the nature of these networks and the products they usually sell.

Plus, the number of platforms you’ll deal with can get distracting.

For this option, you can upload your online course library to platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, and the likes of them.

This is great because you’ll have access to a larger base of students, but what’s not-so-great is that you’ll have to play ball with their own affiliate programs that allow affiliates to promote your courses.

This means, it’s their affiliates, and it’s their rules regarding commission, payout cycles, what’s permissible and what’s not, etc.

If you’d like more control, then you can choose a platform like systeme.io where you can upload your courses, sell them, and manage your affiliate program with a few clicks.

Usually, all-in-one marketing platforms come at a high price tag, which is understandable when you consider how much functionality they provide.

(Ehm, we’re happy to say that we’re practically a unicorn when it comes to pricing — but that’s a chat for later)

Note: these 3 options aren’t mutually exclusive, for example, you can still choose an all-in-one platform and upload your courses on places like Udemy.

But say you want full control and went with option 3 first, that’ll let you:

Let’s give you some affiliate marketing training to run the best affiliate marketing program possible!

Every successful affiliate program will take care of these elements:

If you want skilled affiliates to promote your online courses, then you better offer them an amazing commission for each sale they make.

And we’re not talking about a fixed number or range here, we’re talking about a percentage of the retail and/or discounted price of your online courses.

Somewhere between 30% - 60% is highly attractive, especially if you price your online course to be more than $100.

For those who don’t know, a landing page is a post-click web page that online traffic “lands” on after clicking on an ad, social media posts, or other resources.

You’ll need to have a landing page that affiliate links lead to.

Depending on what it is, and what it contains, affiliates would build their marketing efforts around it.

In your designated platform for affiliate marketing, you probably have a section where you can customize the links that would be given out to affiliates.

Most of the time, it’s not more than just choosing your landing page and setting a cookie duration for the links.

If you don’t know what that last part means, it simply refers to the amount of time an affiliate would be credited for a sale after someone from their audience clicks on their affiliate link.

Usually, the industry standard is 30-60 days.

If we use that as an example, anyone who clicks on an affiliate link of one of your affiliates will have 30-60 days to purchase your online course and that affiliate would still get a commission from the sale.

You’ll need a streamlined way of getting affiliates to join your program.

It starts with promoting your affiliate program — coming up in the next section — and continues with affiliate training.

You’ll need to be 100% on the same page as your affiliates regarding your online courses.

Try to come up with resources that convey your message, what you stand for, your story, and what you want to achieve.

But don’t stop there, make sure that your online courses are detailed in terms of their value, impact, and benefits.

This will immensely help affiliates promote your online courses and position your affiliate program to be as attractive as it could be.

Important note: you’ll also need a different landing page from the one we mentioned earlier — this one should allow visitors to sign up and become affiliates.

(Your affiliate marketing software should let you customize this page, or at least provide a link to it)

If you know that email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for each $1 spent, then you probably have an email list.

If you don’t, then please start building your email list today, it’s not an exaggeration if we say your success as a course creator could depend on it.

Back to our topic though, you can easily mention your new affiliate program in your newsletter or even in a dedicated email.

After all, there’s a good chance that your list members have already gone through your online course and they’re happy to promote it by sharing their own results.

If you’re not comfortable with email marketing for whatever reason, content marketing is the best next thing.

Starting a blog is one of the most successful ways to promote anything — yes, your online course affiliate program included.

Case in point, you’re reading this very blog post and our hidden agenda is to show you how awesome systeme.io is and how it can actually help you.

You can quickly mention your affiliate program as a small pinned pop-up on the side of your posts, at the main menu and at the end of your page, and wherever it feels sensible to do so.

Great content has massive convincing power and can help turn visitors into potential affiliates.

Note that great content isn’t restricted to just blogging, the same principles can be applied to:

The downside to this method is that it takes time to reach your audience and hook them to become affiliates — this will bring faster results if you directly promote your online course(s).

If waiting to get results isn’t on your game plan, you can try the next option.

Definition: an affiliate marketplace is a place where you can promote your affiliate program — and for affiliates to choose programs they want to promote.

These marketplaces were created to serve the goal you want — get affiliates to join your program, fast.

You see, from an affiliate point of view, tracking multiple programs is tedious.

They’d rather have a singular dashboard to monitor all of their affiliate marketing efforts across different programs.

Good examples of these networks are Commission Junction’s marketplace (widely known as CJ), and systeme.io’s marketplace.

If you’re looking to sell your product (digital or physical), simply navigate to the sales funnel that has your product — like an online course for example.

Then head over (on the top right corner) and “Create marketplace offer” on systeme.io’s marketplace.

After that, you can set your commission rates.

(You can set 2 tiers of commissions)

Easy peasy!

If you’re an affiliate, head over to systeme.io’s marketplace and select the offers or affiliate programs you want to promote.

Navigate to the “Affiliate Programs” page, then choose an offer you like, and you’ll access the following details:

Just choose a course or offer you’d like to promote, then click the “Promote Offer” button (as seen below):

The Internet is chock-full of websites that review and compare products and services that people care about.

Review websites attract lots of traffic because they rank difficult keywords that most product vendors would take a long time to rank for.

And if you get their goodwill, you could potentially put your affiliate program in front of thousands of affiliates who are ready to “catch the next best thing”.

Here’s how you can do that as a course creator:

Important: this can — and should — also be expanded to other marketing channels like social media influencers, YouTubers, and the likes.

And for that last bit, you’ll get the exact same piece of software that we use to run our own affiliate program.

(In fact, everything you interact with on our website was solely built with systeme.io.

This means that you have the power to replicate the same results)

See what do we mean by “all-in-one”?

With that said, our platform has 4 scalable pricing options:

Systeme.io’s Free plan is forever-free, we won’t ask for your credit card details or information when you sign up!

Paid plans would raise the limits you have in the Free plan, and once you sign up for the Unlimited plan, you’ll get limitless access to all of our tools.

Furthermore, you get a sweet 30% discount on all annual plans with the option to migrate your entire online business into systeme.io.

With the e-learning market expected to grow globally by almost $240 billion by 2022, it’s safe to say that this is the best time to harness the power of affiliate marketing to promote your online courses.

If you’re selling course bundles, individual courses, or course memberships, you need a robust affiliate marketing program to help promote your courses.

And we’d be more than happy to make that a reality for you with systeme.io.

Sign up today for free and start publishing your offers on our affiliate marketplace (and your own affiliate program) for thousands of affiliates to see!