How to Make Money as an Affiliate for eLearning Products

Becoming an e-learning affiliate means recognition for you and money for recommending and promoting an online school. You can promote an online school by recommending its courses to your family, friends, colleagues, customers or your website visitors.

How does marketing for school affiliate work? It’s really simple: You get a link from a website that you want to promote. You attract clicks to your unique affiliate link. The link points to the school’s homepage or to a course page. When someone clicks, lands on the school or course page and, finally, purchases a course, then you earn a commission. They click and buy, you earn.

Essentially, the online school owner generates revenue from that referred enrollment, while you get a portion of that revenue as a reward for referring a student.

Sounds easy right? Well, it is. It also works automatically when you use complete affiliate management systems, such as the one that is built-in inside LearnWorlds. The Affiliate Management feature can be activated in any LearnWorlds school with a Pro Trainer plan or above.

Promote Online Courses as an Affiliate

Now, let’s say that you have agreed to promote a school. How do you go about launching effective affiliate marketing campaigns? There are simple ways to ensure that you maximize exposure and profits.

Let’s go through them:

Blog content: If you have a blog, you can use different types of content, such as product reviews, comparison guides, how-to articles, personal case studies, or even video tutorials that give details about the course. This way you are creating awareness on the product, i.e. online course, that you are promoting.

Online program reviews: In particular, one of the best ways to attract an audience that is genuinely interested in the online program that you are promoting is to write a review. You can go through the course, review it and publish that review on your website. This could also bring in search traffic.

Social media: Don’t hesitate to post your affiliate link to your social media pages, as long as you provide value and motivation for people to sign up. Your audience will be looking for interesting messages in their social media feeds.

Email marketing: You can create an email list and start getting email subscribers to follow your content on a weekly or monthly basis. To do this, you will need an opt-in form on your site where people can put their email, and an effective content strategy that methodically positions the affiliate link in your emails.

Lead magnets: Come up with a guide, a checklist, an ebook, a case study or a report, worksheet or template, use the affiliate link in the content and use the lead magnets to encourage people to sign up for your email newsletter, through which you will promote the courses you are affiliated with.

Free webinars: Webinars are a great tool to share product awareness and stay connected with your target audience. A good webinar needs to be informative and offer a solution to a problem through the product that you are marketing. You can have joint webinars with the course owner and present a subject related to their course.

Podcasts: Whether you are producing or guesting at podcasts, you can get great exposure on promoted products. For podcasts, you will need to prepare a talk, and know the product very well. Again, if you run your own podcast, invite the course creator to speak about their work.

Seasonal offers: Seasonal offers such as Black Friday, Christmas, New Year’s amongst others, are the best times of the year to introduce a new product to your audience. People go on a buying frenzy plus the vendors offer great discounts on digital goods. Connect with the school owner that you are affiliated with, and try to come up with a 12-month promotional calendar that is aligned with the school sales dates.

Co-marketing campaigns: Ask if the school that you are affiliated with is interested in co-branded advertising, cross-promotion, guest posting, content co-authoring or any other custom marketing action that will benefit both sides. More often than not, both parts would be interested in gaining publicity among each other’s audiences.

Relationship marketing: Building long-lasting relationships with customers, partners or prospects in your professional network can help you increase your sales and the possibility of them getting interested in the product you are promoting. Relationship marketing is all about bringing the product and brand you represent to the forefront and offering a customer experience that is based on mutual trust, recurring customer engagement, and respect towards the customer.

Keep in Mind

These promotional tactics wouldn’t generate good results unless your promotions are well aligned with your audience. Look out for the following tips to make your affiliate marketing campaigns a success:

• Promote courses that are relevant to your audience and your content.
• Promote products that you have a personal interest in. They should be products you have tried and know their worth.
• Don’t be salesy when you create content for your blogs or emails. Instead, add value to your audience and focus on the benefits.
• When publishing an affiliate link, state what the nature of that link is, to inform web visitors that your review or recommendation is for a company or product that might compensate you. This way you will abide by the rules for affiliate marketing, and also keep your promotions ethical and transparent.
• In terms of SEO, it’s best to find out what keywords people are searching on Google before you start writing your guides or reviews. This will help your content rank higher in searches and allow it to be discovered by a highly targeted audience.

Once you’re done, don’t forget to check what practices work best for you. Google Analytics can be your best friend as it can help you measure website traffic and track results. Also, when you are affiliated to a LearnWorlds school, you will have your own comprehensive Dashboard with stats that provide all of the information you need to decide what works and what doesn’t. Keep on reading to find out more about the Affiliate Management Dashboard.

How to Start Promoting a LearnWorlds School

Having a plan in place is important when you are an affiliate. The first step in this journey is to choose your favorite LearnWorlds schools you want to partner with. Then approach them to express your interest in working with them as an affiliate, and encourage them to start using the LearnWorlds Affiliate Management.

Then as an affiliate, you need to learn how to use the Affiliate Management Dashboard. This can help you understand what it can do for you and the affiliated school.

The following screenshots will give you an insight:

1The Dashboard

You can access all necessary information from the “Dashboard” page. There, you can get a quick overview of the program and your earnings from it.

From the “Set your payment method” option, you can choose the payment method you prefer:

2Affiliate links

From the “Affiliate links” section, you can immediately create and copy the necessary links for your promotions.

3Your affiliate link

For more information on how to use the affiliate dashboard check out Part B of our guide that provides more detailed information on affiliate links, your commissions, payments, leads, and customers. Also, the school owner should be able to provide you with detailed guidance and tips on how they recommend that you promote their school.

Our support team is always there if you have further questions about promoting LearnWorlds schools as an affiliate.

Kyriaki Raouna

Content Creator at LearnWorlds

Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.