Online learning is booming.
With more affordable options available and the ease of accessibility, e-learning is no longer limited to higher education courses or corporate training sessions.
New technology has presented an opportunity for almost anyone to teach or be taught through online learning. Whether it be career, fitness, culinary, art, fashion, or even learning how to talk to animals — there’s something for everyone.
And there’s several e-learning platforms available to creators looking to create their own course.
But once you create a course, how do you promote it?
In this article, we’ll cover how to use affiliate marketing to promote your course, get students to sign up and grow your business.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing incentives individuals (affiliates) to promote your business and refer customers, and in exchange for their promotions, affiliates earn a commission for every successful referral.
For online learning, this is typically when a student enrolls and pays for a course.
Affiliates can promote via websites, social media and blogs — using referral links and discount codes to send traffic to your site. We’ll cover more about affiliates later on.
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Online Courses
Affiliate marketing can be a great starting point for online courses who are just beginning their marketing efforts. And for more well-established courses, this offers a new channel to add to their current marketing efforts.
For online courses, affiliate marketing has a few key benefits.
Builds Brand Awareness
As we said before, e-learning is increasingly growing in popularity. With so many courses available, how do you grow interest in your business, especially when just starting out?
Affiliates provide the audience for you, meaning you don’t need to do intense market research to find where to put your ads.
Instead, they provide you with built-in audiences that they can immediately start promoting to. Whether it be an influencer’s thousands of followers or simply a Facebook post to an affiliate’s inner circle, this is a great way to increase exposure.
On top of that, this gives you the opportunity to reach completely new audiences — including those who may have not have known about your course, or even been interested, in the first place.
For example, if you use Adwords you’ll likely be promoting to audiences already searching for online courses or related topics. But with affiliate promotions, there’s a chance you can catch the attention of someone as they scroll through their social media feeds, and interest them in something they didn’t previously know about.
Reach Targeted Audiences
Along with making your brand known, affiliates can promote to targeted audiences.
This is especially true if your partner with affiliates in your niche. For example, if your online course focuses on investing money, consider partnering with affiliates that share similar audiences like business experts or finance bloggers.
Unique and Effective Promotions
Another challenge is standing out.
Affiliate promotions can reach far beyond the limits of text in Google Ads, with unique content like blog posts, reviews & testimonials, videos, infographics, and word-of-mouth recommendations.
With this content, affiliates are able to give customers a sneak preview of what to expect, as well as a sense of the overall course experience. They can share why they took your course, what they enjoyed and how they benefitted.
This is especially powerful if your course is more expensive or time-consuming. Customers will want to be sure of what they are signing up for, and affiliate promotions can help reassure them that your course is worth-while.
Save on Marketing Expenses
Affiliate marketing is also cost-effective.
The costs of PPC channels like Google & Facebook might be too expensive for those sites just starting out, especially with so many online courses bidding against you for the same keywords.
With affiliate marketing, you only pay for ads that convert. It’s a low-risk investment, with a clear ROI compared to other online marketing channels.
Reward Your Fans
This is also a way to reward those who have taken your course and recommended it to others. Rewarding customers is a great way to build brand loyalty, making it more likely for them to enroll in future courses.
Online school MasterTheHandpan is a great example of combining customer loyalty and affiliate promotions.
“We started considering affiliation when we realized our students were recommending our courses organically. We wanted to find a way to thank them, and it was also a way to encourage them to recommend us more consistently and on an “official” basis, by giving them the right tools.”
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