Thrive in Affiliate Marketing - 1-2020

How to Thrive in
AFFILIATE
marketing
The Ultimate Guide
for Online Schools
LearnWorlds is an e-learning company that is transforming self-paced learning. We
wish to become the best “educational amplifier”, empowering trainers, educators
and content authors to create unique, enjoyable and social learning experiences.
Our cloud-based, white-label, e-learning platform offers to professional trainers,

businesses and organizations an easy, hassle-free way to create their own, per-
sonally branded, online schools and professional training centers, and share or sell
interactive, self-paced premium courses to their learners and employees.
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Authors
Panos Siozos, PhD Stella Mikraki Kyriaki Raouna

Panos Siozos is the CEO and Stella Mikraki is a Marketing Kyriaki Raouna is a Content
Co-Founder of LearnWorlds. Specialist at LearnWorlds. Creator for the LearnWorlds
He holds a PhD in Educational She is equipped with 20 years team with more than three
Technology and has worked of experience as a consultant years of experience in digital
extensively as a computer and marketer working with marketing. Graduated from
science educator, software B2B, software and SaaS com- the University of Hudders-
engineer, IT manager and re- panies. She has a 360-degree field with a Guidance degree,
searcher in many EU funded knowledge of online business, she has equipped herself with
research projects. Before fol- and an MBA from the UK. hands-on experience in edu-
lowing the startup route, he Stella loves all things market- cation management and ca-
was working in the European ing and technology. reer guidance.
Parliament as a policy adviser
for research and innovation.
©2020 LearnWorlds. All Rights Reserved.

LearnWorlds eBook Series
Contents
INTRODUCTION 6
CHAPTER ONE:
What Is Affiliate Marketing? 7
What Is Affiliate Marketing? 8
The Affiliate Marketing Relationship 8
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? 12
How to Determine a Fair Affiliate Commission Rate 12
How to Set the Price 13
CHAPTER TWO:
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing 17
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing 18
CHAPTER THREE:
Creating A Successful Affiliate Marketing Program 22
Setting Up a Commission Structure 23
Create Promotional Material 26
Publish Your Affiliate Terms & Conditions 26
CHAPTER FOUR:
How to Set up Your Affiliate Program in Your LearnWorlds School 29
Why You Should Try Out the Feature 30
A. Ηow to Set Up Affiliate Management for Your School 31
1. Basic Affiliate Program Settings 33
2. Affiliate Registration Page Settings 35
3. What the Affiliates See Once They Are Logged In 37
4. Set Payment Methods 38
5. Affiliates 39
6. Commissions 43
7. Payments 44
8. Leads 45
9. Customers 46
10. Dashboard 49
H o w t o Th r i v e i n A f f i l i a t e M a r k e t i n g
B. The Affiliate Dashboard 50

1. Affiliate Links 51
2. Commissions 52
3. Payments 53
4. Leads 54
5. Customers 54
CHAPTER FIVE:
How to Build and Grow a Network of Affiliates for Your School 56
How to Build and Grow a Network of Affiliates for Your School 57
Approaching Your First Affiliates: Your Students 58
Expanding Your Reach: Active Networking 60
Step 1: Conduct Research 60
Step 2: Send an Email or Two 62
Step 3: Make Your Offer/Propose an Agreement 63
Beating the Competition 64
Growing Your Network Organically 66
CHAPTER SIX:
The Ingredients of a Successful Affiliate Partnership 70
The Ingredients of a Successful Affiliate Partnership 71
CONCLUSION 74
Introduction
Affiliate marketing. We hear so much about this territory of online marketing,
but still, there are a lot of business owners and online course sellers who are
not yet familiar with the impact that affiliate marketing can have on their
business. It’s also true that affiliate marketing has evoked much dispute over
the years –and we’ll address that in this course– because some people seem
to be all up for it while others stand right up against it.
The stance you take on the debate about affiliate marketing depends signifi-
cantly on whether you know how affiliate marketing works or not. Then again,
there are also those who would like to know more about it, however, haven’t
had the chance to delve into affiliate marketing, or thought it was too compli-
cated and gave up trying in the first place.
To shed light on this powerful internet marketing tactic, we have created this
course to provide more information about what affiliate marketing is and
what it can help you increase your online revenues.
Each part of this course is structured in a way that takes you step by step to
setting up and growing your own affiliate program to boost your marketing
efforts, increase your online course sales and grow your online business faster
than ever.
Let’s begin!
H o w t o Th r i v e i n A f f i l i a t e M a r k e t i n g 6
c ha p t e r 1
What Is Affiliate
Marketing?
What Is Affiliate Marketing?

There are many ways for an online business to earn more money, and affiliate
marketing is one of the most lucrative methods.
Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic and a business arrangement be-

tween a vendor and a third-party business by which the vendor pays com-
mission to the business (or a third-party website whatsoever) for business
leads or sales generated from its promotional efforts and direct referrals.
In other words, an affiliate would promote a product, and every time a referral
registers on the vendor’s website or buys a product, the affiliate would receive
a monetary amount as remuneration.
Affiliate marketing is a low-friction-to-market opportunity because affiliate

partners don’t need to create their own products or services to earn money.
However, selling anything will require a significant investment of both time
and money. The truth is that without traffic, someone will struggle. This is like-
ly the problem that many would-be affiliates face today. However, by keeping
a few principles and steps in mind, someone can dominate in the world of
affiliate marketing and earn money while they sleep.
As you will find out in this course, the way affiliate marketing works is simple.
In this course, we are going to discuss how to use affiliate marketing, posi-
tioning you as the vendor. Specifically, we are going to focus on how you can
capitalize on affiliate marketing to sell more online courses.
This course aims to help you understand how you can use affiliate marketing
for your own business needs, how to grow your target audience and build your
own army of affiliates and eventually make more sales in your online school.
So, whenever you come across the word ‘vendor’ in the text, bare in mind that
it refers to you as an online business owner and course creator.
The main business benefit of affiliate marketing is that you get to have your
own group of advertisers (your affiliate partners), who have agreed to pro-
mote your products, thus forming a sort of sales network with virtually zero
maintenance costs.
Once your products (a.k.a. your online courses) are sold, then the promoter
(the affiliate who referred the sale) will earn a commission for their marketing
efforts. The commission will be a percentage of the revenue generated by the
particular purchase. You see that this business arrangement is based on reve-
nue sharing, so it is a win-win deal, and it allows you as a vendor to earn more
without having to hire more sales reps or account managers.
In this respect, affiliate marketing is regarded to be a unique form of market-

ing partnership because you become partners with other people/businesses,
while they remain an independent legal entity, and they help you sell your
products or services. As a unique type of marketing with a lot of flexibility and
benefits, affiliate marketing is becoming popular in the business world, and
recent research and market statistics prove that.
According to BigCommerce:
81 percent of brands and 84 percent of publishers use affiliate marketing.

This is a statistic that will continue to increase as affiliate spending rises
every year in the United States.
Content marketing costs were gauged to be 62% of traditional marketing
schemes in 2018 while simultaneously generating three times the leads of
conventional methods.
About 16% of all 2018 orders made online can be attributed to the impact
of affiliate marketing.
Between the years 2016-2017, the search interest grew 30 percent for “affi-
liate marketing”.
By 2020 the amount of money spent on affiliate marketing will reach $6.8
billion, considering that every year there is an increase of 10.1%.
Almost 80 percent of marketers leverage affiliate marketing to drive con-
versions, increase purchases, and engage existing customers.
About 83 percent of marketers use affiliate marketing to increase brand
awareness.
Looking at these figures, we can’t deny the dominance of affiliate marketing

and its immense influence on today’s online market.
This leaves us with a bright business tip: You, as an edupreneur, should leave
your ‘observer’s seat’ and prepare to harness the power of affiliate marketing
for your online school.
Affiliate marketing is all about exploring new ways to promote your courses!
(Image Source: Unsplash)
The Affiliate Marketing Relationship

To better understand how the affiliate marketing process works, you need to
consider three main components: The vendor, the affiliate, and the customer.
A) Vendor: The vendor is usually a company or a business owner who
runs the affiliate program, and is the creator of the product/service that the
affiliate promotes. The vendor is you, and the product is your online courses,
subscriptions, or related services.
B) Affiliate: The affiliate is the company or person who promotes products
or services of the vendor and gets a percentage of the sale made (or a dollar
amount for a lead generated). This person is often called ‘associate’, ‘part-
ner’, ‘referrer’, ‘ambassador’ or, only, ‘promoter’.
C) Customer: The customer is the business prospect who is interested in
buying the vendor’s products, which are promoted by the affiliate. This is the
‘end user’ in the affiliate marketing funnel. The customer gets referred to the
vendor’s website either to find out more about their online courses or to buy
one. The consumer will not typically pay a higher price to the affiliate market-
er, as the cost of the affiliate network is already included in the retail price.
This three-party business relationship is shown in the graph below:
The three parties involved in affiliate marketing

Image Source: Neil Patel
As you can see, the picture shows the three parties that are the critical com-
ponents in describing any affiliate marketing channel. The ‘affiliate program
terms & conditions’ details the specifics of the business arrangement between
the vendor and the affiliate. It represents the commission percentage or mon-
etary amount, entry and exit, and other important terms that define how the
whole affiliate marketing system works.
When affiliate partners agree to the affiliate program terms, they are required
to abide by the rules and use best practices to promote the vendor’s products.
More about the legal aspects of affiliate marketing can be found later in this
course.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Αffiliate marketing allows your partners to promote your online school in sev-
eral ways. The process of how it works is described in the legal documents
which define the partnership between the vendor and the affiliate partners.
The primary way for affiliates to promote your online business is by placing
a link on their website that drives web traffic to your products. If you plan to
pull the trigger on an affiliate program for your course, you can host it yourself
right on your LearnWorlds site. By activating LearnWorlds’s affiliate feature,
you can have complete control over all aspects of your affiliate program. You
set the commission rate, choose the course pricing, and even choose which
affiliates you approve.
Each affiliate receives their unique link known as the ‘affiliate link’ which they
can use to promote your courses. The affiliate link points to the URL of your
homepage (or other pages on your website), and it has a parameter appended
to it. The parameter (which essentially is a unique affiliate id) passes data to
the affiliate management system so that the system interprets where the traffic
came from and can attribute the right commission to the correct affiliate.
An affiliate link would look like this http://www.yourdomain.com/?aff=id.
Every time a prospect clicks on an affiliate link, they are referred to your web-
site. The click is tracked throughout the marketing funnel, and when the pros-
pects complete a purchase, then you generate revenue, and a portion of it is
added as commission to the account of the respective affiliate.
The vendor gets the sale, the affiliate earns a commission, and the customer
receives the product they ordered. All three parties are happy. Once the affil-
iate program is set up, and you have affiliates signing up to sell your course,
the program will entirely run on its own. Υou dοn’t even have to handle paying
affiliates yourself. Υou’ll only spend a small amount of time each month rec-
onciling your affiliates’ transactions and getting them paid.
How to Determine a Fair Affiliate Commission

Rate
Provided that you already have an established online business (your online
school) and a platform hosting it (LearnWorlds), within this process as a ven-
dor, your responsibility lies in the ‘hunting procedure’ which is the outreach to
recruit more affiliates found in the communities of entrepreneurs, bloggers,

website owners in your niche.
However, even before building a strong network of affiliates, you need to de-
cide on a standard commission, you’d be willing to pay for every new lead or
sale made. Now, some vendors only pay the affiliate when a customer clicks
on the affiliate link (Pay Per Click) or fills out a lead generation form (Pay Per
Lead) or makes a purchase (Pay Per Sale). Other vendors may choose to pay
their affiliate partners on two or all three of these occasions.
It depends on your strategy and preference, and it’s up to you whether you’d
like to pay a commission for leads or customers or just for the referral traffic
you receive on your website. We recommend course sellers to go for the Pay
Per Sale option and create a lucrative affiliate program that pays out com-
missions for every course sale generated by your brand ambassadors. You
win, your affiliates win. It’s a fair business exchange.
How to Set the Price

Going down to specifics, the exact rate of the affiliate reward system is up to
you, but it also varies from one niche to another, depending on the compe-
tition and the average profit margins in the industry. Before you determine
the optimal commission rate look at what your competitors do, and also take
your gross profit margin into account. You want your commission rates to be
competitive compared to similar companies but, at the same time, you want
to keep a positive marginal profit for your company.
You can also determine the commission rates by taking into consideration
your customer retention rates and customer lifetime value. With high reten-
tion rates and customer lifetime value, you can get excited thinking about the
commission you can offer your affiliates!
A commission rate needs to be high enough to entice affiliates to put the work
in, but it still needs to be low enough for you to maintain your affiliate pro-
gram as a profitable marketing channel. Some vendors tackle this by creating
more complex reward schemes. For example, you can offer
Offer performance bonuses to affiliates that hit a specific volume of
sales, or
Create a tiered commission plan, which means that the more referrals
an affiliate brings in, the higher their commission rate becomes.
A short-term incentive, such as increased commission, can work very well in the
case of launching a new affiliate program in a highly competitive market, or
temporarily when you want to boost sales a specific time in the year. Also, as
your network of affiliates expands, you could assign higher commission rates,
different than your standard ones, to super affiliates, i.e., affiliates that generate
a significant sales volume consistently and are your top-performing partners.
Now, let’s dive into the different payout methods typically associated with af-
filiate programs so you have the complete picture of how affiliate marketing
works and you know what you’re competing against. It’s like when companies
are competing for talent throughout the hiring process; they also need to fight
to attract the best affiliates to promote their products and incentivize to keep
promoting actively.
The following list contains key terms which can help you understand the different
affiliate compensation methods:
Pay per sale: This is the case where you agree to offer a fixed rate on the
sale price whenever the affiliate partner manages to sell your course. It is
strictly based on purchases upon your courses, and as the vendor, you have
to be concerned not only about the quality and the number of people you
have in your network, but also the quality of the advertisers and their availa-
ble resources, e.g., website.
Pay per click: With this arrangement, you agree to offer money to the
affiliate partner whenever a site visitor comes to your website following the
affiliate link of the affiliate partner. The actions measure pay per click pay-
ments visitors make on your site, including clicks, impressions, and leads.
Pay per lead: This is between the two options above. You offer money to
the affiliate partner whenever a site visitor comes to your website and pro-
vides their contact information. In this case, payment takes place when a
customer requests for more information about your courses or when com-
pleting the opt-in form with their email.
Paying per lead is a rather tricky payment type considering that there is the
risk of fraud prevention. Dishonest affiliates might autofill the form multiple
times, causing financial problems to your business. A solution would be to
hire a dedicated affiliate police partner to deal with these issues.
Pay per call: In this agreement, you offer a fixed percentage on the sale
price by the number of requests that come to you by customers who show
an interest in your courses. The commission is measured and paid out by
the number of calls that come to you from your affiliate partner. Sometimes
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more specific factors come into play such as call duration and location. Al-
though this type of marketing sounds to be an old-fashioned approach, it is
becoming more popular with the use of smartphones.
Pay per impression: You agree to pay your affiliates based on the num-
ber of impressions ads that are served on the website and are viewed by
visitors. These are often seen in niche websites with a targeted audience and
are more carefully guided.
For people who are outside of the online business world, these terms may
sound new, but to understand affiliate marketing, you have to become famil-
iar with them as they are part of how affiliate marketing works. As a vendor,
you need to discover what’s the most beneficial for your business, and your
affiliates, and incorporate these sales strategies in your commission structure.
Tip: The affiliate link is what makes everything work as it is the connect-
ing link between the three channels. The affiliate link is a unique link that
is given to the affiliate partner by the vendor and always links back to the
vendor’s site.
c ha p t e r 2
The Benefits
of Affiliate
Marketing
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

There has been a lot of debate around the ethics and practices involved in
affiliate marketing. Since anybody can put up anything on the internet these
days, this type of online promotion can often include scams, like get-rich-quick
schemes or marketing of phony training, courses and other digital goods of
really low quality. As with any industry, there are the good, the bad, and the
ugly marketers, so you always need to have a way to qualify your business
partners before you start working with them.
However, market data shows that affiliate marketing is becoming more pop-
ular every year. It started gaining in popularity because of its unique perfor-
mance-based nature. It practically costs nothing to have an army of sales
people promoting your product. You only pay when they bring in a sale, and
they are rewarded based on their performance. It is a win-win business rela-
tionship. What’s more impressive is that as a Rakuten Affiliate Network re-
search showed, almost 90 percent of advertisers reported that affiliate mar-
keting has become an integral part of their marketing success!
This evidence alone shows the genuine interest of entrepreneurs and busi-
nesses to become more familiar with affiliate marketing as a means of gener-
ating profit and gaining recognition.
Affiliate marketing is considered to be one of the best marketing programs

out there since it comes with a cost-effective and measurable approach to
long-term results that have no immediate risks.
For a well-rounded approach to understanding affiliate marketing in terms of

what it can offer to online course instructors, we need to explore the different
types of relationships between vendors and affiliates.
These basic types of affiliates are the following:
1) Unattached affiliate marketing: This is the type of affiliate mar-

keting in which your affiliate partner has no presence or authority in the
niche of the product they are promoting. In simple words, they may have no
interests in courses or the subject you teach and are affiliates for the sake
of the income they can potentially earn. It’s a pay-per-click business model,
but one that does not allow any relationship between the affiliate partner
and the end user/customer. The affiliate partner inserts the affiliate link into
crucial places on the third-party website through advertising networks and

waits to get click-throughs that will potentially lead to a sale.
2) Related affiliate marketing: In this kind of partnership, your affil-
iates have some online presence whether it is a blog, website, podcast or
social media profile, that relates to the niche that you are in, and they are
interested in promoting your courses. The only difference is that the affili-
ates aren’t consuming your content. So they might be featuring ads on their
site that are related to what they are doing online to generate income even
though they are not using your products themselves.
3) Involved affiliate marketing: This is perhaps the ideal partnership
between you and your affiliate partners as it requires active involvement
on their behalf. This means that they have taken one or all of your courses
themselves, and they are also promoting them to their audience. This ap-
proach outruns the other two because affiliates are also your customers and
fans. They have tried your courses, liked it, and believe in it, and this is why
they are now ready to recommend your products to others.
In a way, these three types of affiliates describe the level of commitment that
your business partners are ready to show as they promote your courses. The
ideal kind of marketing to practice, which also explains the type of relation-
ship you want to have with your affiliates is the ‘full-on engagement’ through
the practice of the third option - involved affiliate marketing.
When affiliates manage to achieve this type of involvement and have the
appropriate experience with your courses, they are unconsciously making it
more attractive to others, and it always wins - and this is the kind of relation-
ship should be looking for with your affiliates at all times.
Try out different marketing techniques until you find the ones that work for you!
(Image Source: Pexels)
As a vendor, you are only required to pay a referral fee to your affiliate partner
for every lead or sale that is generated. Looking at affiliate marketing from
this perspective, we understand that it’s a practice that is safe, considering
that there are no significant expenditures to it, minimizing this way the fear of
financial loss. Also, it is much cheaper in contrast to the associated costs that
are needed for standard marketing.
The advantages of using affiliate marketing aren’t limited to that. Here is a list of the
most important benefits:
1. It’s a win-win scenario: Τhe vendor and the affiliate partner both
come out as winners from this partnership because they both get a percent-
age of the sale. The partnership is designed in a way to serve both needs -
the needs of the vendor and the needs of the affiliate. What’s great about it
is that all requirements are explained through an agreement that takes into
account both sides and offers the best solution for both.
2. It expands your target audience: Promoting your products to a
niche network that’s bigger than yours is counted as an advantage. Your
audience’s number is never enough compared to your affiliate partners net-
work combined. Affiliate marketing increases your exposure and allows your
brand’s name to get out there in ways that it’s impossible to do so otherwise.
3. It helps to become more professionally independent: With
affiliate marketing, you don’t have to solely rely on selling courses directly
from your online school or the other marketing campaigns you have on the
side. Becoming a merchant and working with affiliates means that you get
to appoint your marketing efforts and expand these outside of your ‘local’
online store. This offers the potential to become known in the higher tiers of
the online market.
4. It helps you increase your search engine results: The more
the affiliate link leading to your site gets shared by your affiliates, the more
publicity and exposure you will get on Google search results. This boosts your
advertising efforts from the targeted marketing plan you have in place for
your online business and brings you one step closer to your next customer.
5. It doesn’t require much experience to start with: It’s easy to
learn how affiliate marketing works. Also, it’s not rocket science in terms of
skills, knowledge, and experience you have to possess. Like any other type of
marketing, it probably requires a lot of trial and error to learn all the tricks
to mastering it. Also, one of the most significant benefits of using an affiliate
program to market your course is that you don’t need a huge pre-launch
following to start selling from day one.
6. It increases your brand’s visibility: Affiliate marketing is an effec-

tive growth hacking method that allows you to expand your school quickly. It
helps you become known as a business to a network that is unknown to you
and reinforces the power of your brand in the industry.
7. It allows you to have more than an ‘advertiser’: As an online
school owner, you can have more than one person promoting your school
and brand. So apart from the inner circles of contacts whom you have al-
ready asked for support, your dedicated advertisers - affiliates, can back you
up significantly in numbers and whenever you need it. This means, for exam-
ple, that you could have 50 people pushing your courses across 50 different
websites at the same time.
These and many other obvious reasons to start an affiliate program as it can
offer huge potential to your online business. However, you need to be aware
that - like every other marketing initiative, it’s something that requires time
and dedication to build and as a vendor, you shouldn’t always expect to get
immediate results on course sales.
Setting up your own affiliate strategy? Ready, Set, Go!

c ha p t e r 3
Creating A
Successful
Affiliate Marketing
Program
Setting Up a Commission
Structure
One of the most talked-about issues that arise in affiliate marketing is the
need to set up your own commission structure as a ‘financial directory’. At
the core of affiliate marketing, the commission rates you set for your affiliates
will determine what you are going to get out of the process in the end, which
means it’s quite remarkable!
Since this is a decision you can’t take within just a minute, you are encouraged
to conduct research on the payment commissions of other affiliate programs
and learn how they work. Your goal here would be to establish a particular el-
ement of flexibility, to engage and satisfy the needs of your affiliates that can
work alongside those of your business. If one commission rate can serve all -
that could be convenient, however possibly not as much effective or ideal, and
this means that you have to be willing to make negotiations with your affiliates.
As essential suggestions coming from us to you on how to structure your

commission rates, we give you the following information:
Study the commission rates set by your competitors:

If you choose to ignore what your competitors are doing, you are voluntary
locking yourself out the competition and the market! Since you want to
avoid that, try to get as much online exposure as possible by exploring what
other businesses are doing and coming up with ways on how to top that.
More specifically, look into how much they are offering and why, and tab
that to use it for the benefit of your business.
Figure out how it works alongside your website’s conver-

sion rate:
The EPC factor (earnings per click) of your page isn’t solely linked to the com-
mission you pay but also to your site’s conversion rate. This means that you first
need to take into account the number of clicks you get on the page and how
this weights out with the total earnings. Hence, how low or high your commis-
sion rates are going to be eventually determined by the number of clicks your
site gets. From there on, you can adjust these to suit your preferences.
Create a commission structure that reflects your key objec-

tives:
It makes sense to want your commission rates to serve your own business
needs first and foremost. As such, you have to think about the possibility
of differentiating your affiliates into groups or certain tiers, e.g., those who
know how to sell the best, to new/promising affiliates, or those who can
bring more ‘value’ to the table. For example, if these can promote and sell
your most high-valued and popular courses, you would naturally reward
them with a higher commission rate and so on.
Talk to your affiliates on a one-to-one level:

In the process of allowing some room for negotiation with your affiliate part-
ners, you can engage with every single one of them individually to make sure
that they are performing at their most potential. So, if there are affiliates
who are making a more significant impact on sales, you can pick them out
and work more closely with them and put specific targets for completion,
e.g., number of sales, leads or clicks.
Offer a temporary increase in the commission rate:

Setting your commission rate is not a ‘set once and forget’ sort of thing. At
least annually, you should review your commission structure to make sure it
still makes sense for both parties. If you have a new course coming out and
want to sell it fast, give your affiliates some motives to go out and about
with further advertisement. Just like we mentioned before, financial flexibility
is critical, and your commission rates should be structured in a way so that
they allow additional margins to offer sales incentives. This should allow you
to get a ‘window of opportunity’ and provide a temporary increase - or per-
haps a few sales bonuses - to your affiliates to reach your revenue targets.
Modify payout periods to your benefit

When should the affiliate take their commission? Immediately or maybe not?
The timing of commission payouts, which determines when your affiliates
are getting paid, is a vital element to consider.
Most product vendors and course sellers will allow for a minimum of 30 days
before they pay affiliates for commissions earned. This time interval is a pro-
vision for refunds. Be sure to mention details in your affiliate agreement and
review it thoroughly in advance.
Any number of things can happen in the 30 days that will cause you not to
earn the money you deserve. For example, someone might file a chargeback,
after they have seen a part of your course. Since this is the case, it may be
wise to evaluate continually when you are paying affiliates for a particular
month’s referrals. We suggest you pay your affiliates in the first two weeks of
the second month following the month that the sale was made. That is, you
pay your affiliates in October for conversions that happened in August.
Provide the Right Education

Being an affiliate marketer isn’t easy. Continually coming up with the content
on their own can take a toll. Be more engaged by providing some content for
them. This help from you will motivate your partners to post more frequently.
Besides, you want to be the leader of creating the type of content your af-
filiates should be aspiring to make. You can also send them any recent re-
views and testimonials you have received. An easy way to keep your affiliates
educated is to have a specific newsletter dedicated solely to your affiliate
network. You can fill this newsletter with content ideas, new courses you’ll be
launching. This doesn’t have to happen every month if you don’t have many.
Give Bonuses and Incentives

Allowing for bonuses and incentives will help your affiliates feel like they are
part of the family. Think about what you can offer that can endear affiliates
to your brand. Think of creative offers you can give to your partners that
can keep them interested. Maybe this concerns free tool access that will
help them create content, open courses from you, or any other material that
might facilitate their work.
Giving affiliate marketing a chance is worth your time and money!

Create Promotional Material

Perhaps we should warn you right from the beginning that to succeed in af-
filiate marketing, you will have to be willing to go the extra mile. Just like any
human relationship requires constant work, support, and understanding to
continue to work and co-exist, you will need to keep working on your plans to
support the mutual goals with your affiliates.
This is particularly important on the first couple of months - which is when

you have to give all your superpowers to it until you have put in place your
marketing campaign, reached out to potential partners and balanced all the
trials/errors you are most likely to be facing with each one.
What’s great about the online course business, is that with affiliate marketing, there
are tons of things you can do. Also, there are many ideas for a course instructor of
any industry to do this trying to come up with unique ways to stand out.
For example, you can do the following:
Create promotional material that fits in your affiliates niche:

Affiliates are more likely to promote any content you give them with one con-
dition - they want it to fit in well with their brand and audience. The product
information you are giving them needs to be unique, up-to-date, and make
use of the kind of design your affiliates expect to see. To ensure that you are
in the right way, ask yourself whether you would share the materials you have
created before sending it to them and expecting others to do so for you.
Also, make sure it’s easy-to-understand, or else your affiliates and their audi-
ence might miss the main point of the advert.
Find a better way to communicate with your affiliates:

Business and especially affiliate marketing is all about relationship building. If
you think Facebook or Viber groups, your community site, blog, or any other
of online communication tool doesn’t work for you, you have to get more in-
ventive. If you haven’t tried conducting webinars yet, this could be the perfect
opportunity for you to try them out.
Publish Your Affiliate Terms & Conditions

It is advised that you create a separate page on your website that describes
your affiliate program terms and conditions in detail. This is a legal document,
and you’d need to seek legal advice, although there are templates around the
web which you can use and adjust to your individual needs.
Again, make sure a legal team reviews your terms since they are a critical element
in any affiliate program. When established, they form a legal agreement between
your business and the affiliates outlining what’s acceptable behavior, what’s not,
what they receive from you, what you expect of them, and other useful rules and
guidelines. There are some basic components you need to include.
First things first, you need to describe your commission plan; what’s the com-
mission rate? When exactly is the commission awarded? Is it per sale after the
end of a 30-day refund period? Are there any restrictions or exceptions? Will
you be using coupons?
Then you need to refer to the way your affiliate system works and when you
will be paying out the commissions earned. For example, how long does your
order keep track of browser cookies? What about your cookie consent and
data privacy policy? What kind of data do you store and where? Also, every
affiliate would be much interested to know when and how they will receive the
commission earned. Will it be a monthly payout via PayPal?
Then, you need to describe how the affiliates should represent your brand.
How they use your logo, your brand name and inform them that they need to
disclose their affiliate relationship with your company. Do you have any par-
ticular landing pages or other promotional material? Are the affiliates allowed
to use paid advertising to promote your products?
Different countries might impose various regulations regarding disclosure re-

quirements. If you operate outside the US, make sure you look at the different
rules you may need to abide by. This is an example of what is required by the
US Federal Trade Commission. The FTC requires that affiliates adequately
disclose the relationship with your company. If they don’t, they or your busi-
ness could get slapped with a hefty fine. The rules apply to any online medium
that an affiliate publishes your link, including web pages, articles, blog posts,
social media posts, videos, webinars, podcasts, ebooks, illustrations, and info-
graphics. Banner ads do not need to be disclosed.
Here are two examples of affiliate terms and conditions to look at:
Our own affiliate program terms

OptinMonster’s affiliate terms
Making use of every online media channel to find contacts can be beneficial for your business!
c ha p t e r 4
How to Set up Your

Affiliate Program in
Your LearnWorlds
School
Why You Should Try Out the

Feature
Imagine 20 or 50 people pushing your courses across dozens or hundreds of
different websites at the same time. Would you then hesitate to expand your
marketing efforts outside of your comfort zone? Probably not. Recruiting an
“army” of affiliates can multiply your marketing efforts and expand your reach
beyond the limits of your existing audience. So, why not become part of a win-
win scenario and establish affiliate partnerships?
Sometimes your audience is not big enough. And we, at LearnWorlds, do everything
to help you promote your products to a broader audience. This is why we have
created an advanced Affiliate Management feature for online instructors!
Our built-in affiliate and commission tracking tool is everything you need to
launch and manage your affiliate program starting today.
With the impressive Affiliate Management functionality, you will be able to

have your own sales team - several hard-working partners who will be promot-
ing your school. LearnWorlds Affiliate Management automatically lists all data
of your affiliates, referred leads and referred customers, and provides real-time
comprehensive performance reports, which you can easily export for further
analysis.
What’s more, you can set a custom commission rate for each of your affiliates,
set the maturation and cookie expiration periods, see the commissions pay-
able and when they are due, and choose the payment method you want. You
can even reject commissions you suspect that do not abide by your terms and
conditions. And this is just the beginning.
There’s a high growth potential when you create an affiliate program for your school,
using LearnWorlds Affiliate Management.
Automated affiliate enrollment, using a simple registration form

Editable affiliate sign up/sign in page with our excellent Pages Builder
Private affiliate dashboard (where members can see their stats and build
referral links)
The fixed commission rate, or custom rate per affiliate
You choose which courses and course bundles you want to add to your
affiliate program
Easily export payments due to be imported to Paypal Mass Payments

(Pay hundreds of affiliates in just two minutes)
Personalized referral link for each affiliate and coupon code tracking
The ability for affiliates to create deep links to school or course pages
And so much more!
LearnWorlds affiliate and commission tracking tool is very intuitive and a

piece of cake to set up. Follow the instructions found in this chapter, and you
will have your affiliate program up & running in no time!
Launch your affiliate program with LearnWorlds Affiliate Management and

start attracting more web traffic, leads, and sales.
Will affiliate marketing work for my business?
Affiliate marketing is a proven way to market any business, including online

schools. No matter what niche you are in, there are potential partners with
audiences that fit your ideal student profile.
Moreover, online education is expanding by more than 10% a year, according

to different studies (see Technavio, for instance). This means that there is a
growing demand for a quality training course of various kinds.
How fast success comes depends on different factors, such as the quality of
the partners you attract. How big is there an audience? How willing are they
to directly promote your school? In any case, you should equip yourself with
patience. Devote as many marketing resources as possible to achieve faster
growth of your affiliate program.
For some companies, the program ramps up by itself; for others, it may require
more effort. In any case, we recommend that you give it at least one year to
bear fruit. Besides, one big influencer or partner can turn around the ROI of
your program.
How to Set Up Affiliate Management for Your

School
LearnWorlds affiliate and commission tracking tool is very intuitive and a
piece of cake to set up. Follow the instructions found in this guide, and you
will have your affiliate program run excellently in no time!
Create
and sell
online
courses
Try
LearnWorlds
now
Launch your affiliate program with LearnWorlds Affiliate Management and

start attracting more web traffic, leads, and sales.
Now, let’s dive into exactly how you can set up your affiliate program within your
LearnWorlds Dashboard.
1. Basic Affiliate Program Settings

First, navigate to the “Marketing tools” tab and choose “Affiliate Set Up”. In
this section, you can set up every detail of your affiliate program. Do you want
to learn how? Let’s get started!
First of all, with a simple on/off button, you enable your affiliate program. Ιt’s
that easy. Make sure you don’t forget to keep the “on” option enabled.
Your affiliate program should be governed by a specific agreement between

you and your affiliate partners. You can prepare a comprehensive understand-
ing by clicking the “Edit page” button.
When you click “Edit page” you will see that we have prepared a complete tem-
plate. Make sure that you have a good read of the Terms and Conditions. Then you
can update some articles of the agreement and your document will be ready! A
huge time-saver, right? Hit the Save button on the top menu to save the changes!
Your terms page URL will be your school URL followed by /pages/affiliate-pro-
gram-terms.
Now, let’s go back to the affiliate program settings. You have three essential things
you need to set:
1. Commission rate
2. Cookie expiration
3. Commission payable after
As you can see in the screenshot above:
The commission rate is the percentage rate of your affiliate commissions,

and it applies to all products added to the program. Commissions range
typically from 10% to 50%. However, it is entirely your choice to make.
Any referral that that signs up before the cookie expiration period will be
associated with the respective affiliate. It is recommended that you set
cookie expiration anywhere between 15 and 60 days.
Α new customer might cancel their purchase after some time and ask for
their money back. Therefore, you need to ensure that your customer stays
before you pay the commission to the affiliate. The commission payable
after” setting has entirely to do with your refund policy.
2. Affiliate Registration Page Settings

Now, let’s talk about another essential part of your affiliate program which
you can manage on the same page: Your affiliate registration page. First of
all, you should know that you can either add your affiliates manually (if they
are already your users) or allow them to register by themselves.
To achieve the latter, you should turn on the “Self-register” button and then
edit the Self-register page.
Again, we have done the heavy lifting for you and prepared a template you can use
as is or customize to your liking. What the potential affiliate who is not a user in your
school will see when they land on the registration page is this.(make sure to change
the “school’s name” in the related area):
Once visitors become affiliates, they have registered to your school (new users for
you!). For them to start an affiliate partnership with you, they have to take one more
step. They have to “Join the affiliate program” by clicking the button that appears
after they register. Only signed up users can become affiliates to your school.
What is the URL of this page? The self-registration and affiliate sign-in page
URL is your school URL followed by /pages/affiliate-registration.
With our powerful Pages Builder, you can modify the registration page the
way you like it. What is the use of this page? This is the page that you will di-
rect potential partners who want to sign up for your affiliate program. Once a
user is logged in as an affiliate and visits that page the system redirects them
to the affiliate dashboard. Of course, this is not the only way that affiliates
can see their dashboard. They can also view it through the relative affiliate
button found in their profiles.
Self-registration isn’t the only option. You can also manually add new affiliates
from the list of your users. This is something that is explained later in this guide.
3. What Affiliates See Once They Are Logged In

When an affiliate registers for your program, they get immediate access to
their side of the affiliate program, the affiliate dashboard. On the dashboard,
they can see how their work is performing at any time. Let’s take a look at
what your affiliates will see on their end.
Back to your Affiliate Program Settings, the affiliate program dashboard. You
can easily set up what your affiliates will be able to see. For example, you can
choose which commissions they can see “All”, the “Approved” or the “Payable
only” ones (for which the maturation period has passed) or the paid ones. We
will talk more about what affiliates see further down this document.
You can also choose if your affiliates will be able to see the people (referrers) that have
registered to the school but not purchased anything yet. When these people buy some-
thing become Customers and they are not considered Leads any more.
All of the above options are available on your affiliate program dashboard,
with all other settings.
4. Set Payment Methods

What’s more, on the first page of the setup, you can also determine the pay-
ment options from which your affiliates will choose the preferred one. Cur-
rently, you can select among PayPal, Bank transfer and Other. If you keep
Other enabled, then your affiliates will be able to fill in a text field with their
preferred way of receiving payouts.
L e a r n W o r l d s Pa r t n e r s C l u b / / A f f i l i a t e G u i d e 38
We are still in your Dashboard settings. Finally, you can choose which courses
and bundles you would like to be available for your affiliate program. Α new
course of yours won’t be available for affiliate marketing if you don’t add it to
this list. So, make sure not to forget it! As you would expect, only paid courses
can be linked with your affiliate program. Free or private courses are not eli-
gible for this.
Congratulations! Now, your affiliate program is all set up. What’s next? How
do you see performance information about the program?
Well, we’ve all covered you up because our affiliate tool informs you in real
time about the progress of your program. After you have set your plan and
your affiliates begin to sell, you can see every detail about it from the separate
pages under the “Affiliate Management” menu. Your options are:
1. Affiliates
2. Rewards/Commissions
3. Payouts
4. Leads
5. Customers
A lot of stuff right? Let’s explain each of those now:
5. Affiliates
From the “Affiliates” menu, you can see a list of all your affiliate users and also man-
ually add new affiliates (self-registration isn’t the only option). This is a handy sec-
tion because here you can see who your affiliates are and essential details, such as:
Their emails
How many customers they have brought
The sales they have made
The commission rate you have agreed with them
The amount of money you owe them
What you have already paid them
If you click on an affiliate user you can see their profile and overall performance
in the program. In particular, you can see details like: Their affiliate ID, payment
method, referred customers, referral link clicks, leads and customers they have
brought, sales, commissions they have generated and when, the due amount and
the payments received. Take a look:
Pretty awesome, right? You can also take two actions for each of your affili-
ates: Update their information or deactivate them.
If you choose to “Edit affiliate” you can make several edits, like:
Change the affiliate’s name

Customize the commission rate
Choose the payment method (paypal, wire or other)
Of course, for your convenience, you can export all the affiliates’ data in a csv
or xls file.
What if I want to add a new affiliate? The only restriction here is that you can
only add people who are already users of your school. So, if you are asked
to add an affiliate manually, make sure they have registered to your school.
What you do next is simple. Click the “Add affiliate” button.
Add a user account in the related section and make all other necessary settings.
6. Commissions
On the next page, “Commissions”, you can see every detail for all commissions
generated from your affiliate program. This section is crucial because you can
directly see what you have paid or must pay for each sale of your products
and also which date the purchase was made. This gives you an excellent over-
view of your program.
Not only this, but you may also accept or reject some commissions according
to your will. You can easily select commissions with a tick box to approve or
reject them. And in the different tabs you can see which ones are accepted,
rejected, are due to be paid and which ones are already paid. You can filter
commissions by product or by date (last seven, thirty or sixty days):
Now you can see why we are so proud of our affiliate tool! And this is not the end
yet...
7. Payments
Now, the “Payments” page takes turns. This section you can see which com-
missions are due payouts, which are completed or which commissions are not
payable yet. You can select payouts with a tickbox to mark them as paid, and
you can filter them via the payment method you have chosen.
Again, you can export data in several file forms. “Paypal export” will allow you
to generate a file to be imported to PayPal for mass payment.
8. Leads
In the “Leads” section, you can see people who have registered to your school
after finding the affiliate link. What an excellent source of a new audience for
your email marketing! This list will help you create a separate group of people
within your email marketing software. And you can send specific emails to this
group of people since you know that they came from affiliate marketers.
You can filter the leads by date and also export data in a csv or xls form.
9. Customers
Finally, in the “Customers” section, you can see people who bought your courses
through your affiliate program, details about them like:
Their email
The affiliate they came from
The day they registered in your course
Again, you can filter customers by date and export data in a csv or xls form.
When you click on a user, you can see information about them and about
their interaction with your courses, like the total time of engagement, when
they registered, when was their last login and much more!
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And you can also manage several options about the user as you can see in
the picture.
10. Dashboard
Lastly, we must mention the first of all tabs the “Dashboard” from which you
can enter every other subcategory, all which we have described till now (Affil-
iates, Commissions, Payouts, Leads, and Customers).
What else would someone ask for? This is all the information someone needs
to have a clear picture of their affiliate program!
B. The Affiliate Dashboard

As we described before, you can let your new affiliates register to your pro-
gram on their own. What you have to do is create and design your own affili-
ate registration page using the premade template.
What is the purpose of this page? Let’s find out what your affiliate partners will see
once they register to your affiliate site. Your affiliates will be able to:
See email of the customers and the leads they have brought (if you allow
them to)
Get their unique affiliate links
See the commissions they have earned
See the payments they received and when
From the “Set your payment method” option they can choose...
Now let’s see the detailed information affiliates can have about their sales:
1. Affiliate Links
From the page “Affiliate link” affiliates get the necessary links for their sites. Let’s
explain each of the options they have:
Your affiliate link
From the “Your affiliate link” affiliates create the affiliate link for your school’s
landing page to use in their website and optionally enter a coupon code.
Create affiliate link with coupon

From the “Create affiliate link with coupon” affiliates can automatically apply
a coupon to the affiliate link. You must provide them with the coupon code.
Generate affiliate link to specific page
From this option affiliates can enter a URL and generate a link to any of the
school’s pages.
Get affiliate link to product

From the “Get affiliate link to product” option, affiliates can generate affiliate
links to specific product pages.
2. Commissions
From the ””Commissions” page, affiliates can see their commissions and details
about their sales. In particular, they can see:
The product they sold

The customer who bought the product
The sale
The commission rate you have promised them
The amount of money they deserve
The date of the purchase
The status of their commission (new, approved, due or paid)
They can also export a file with all detailed information about their commissions.
Finally, your affiliates will be able to see the final payouts you make, and also
export that data to a csv or xls file.
3. Payments
In the “Payouts” section, affiliates can see the total amount they have been
paid, the payment method and details and the day they were paid. Of course,
all that data are exportable.
4. Leads
In the “Leads” page, affiliates can see people who have registered to your
pages and have become leads. They can also export leads.
5. Customers
Finally in the “Customers” page, affiliates can view all the customers they have
brought to you so far. They can also export customers.
Again, affiliates can access all that information described above from their
“Dashboard”. From there they can get a quick overview of the program. Of
course, as we explained earlier, you can choose not to show the customers or
the leads to your affiliates and also you can choose if you want to show the
paid, the approved or the total commissions.
So, that is all that an affiliate will be able to see through your site. What a
great asset for your affiliates also!
We hope you found this guide about Affiliate Management a useful resource
to help you sell even more courses and spread your unique message! If you
have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact the LearnWorlds support team
for more information!
c ha p t e r 5
How to Build and

Grow a Network
of Affiliates for
Your School
How to Build and Grow a Network of

Affiliates for Your School
It surely takes time to build a network of affiliates, but the time and effort are
worth it. That is because an army of affiliates is an invaluable asset for your
business; it’s a continuous stream of incoming web traffic, leads, and sales
without you doing extra sales or marketing related work.
To start building and growing your network of partners and brand ambassa-
dors, you need to keep in mind that what’s important here is finding an audi-
ence that is interested in what you sell and has a relative audience who are
eager to buy your products too.
An important note before you reach out to your audience as potential affiliate
partners is to always show priority to the quality of contacts rather than quan-
tity. By that, we suggest that you don’t need to worry much about the number
of your affiliates, instead make sure that they are qualified to promote your
courses.
The most important qualities you should look for in your affiliates are the following:
A genuine belief in the value that your courses offer.

They should have an audience that would be interested in your courses.
A regular and steady flow of qualified traffic coming into their website.
They have a big email list and social media following.
They demonstrate excitement, enthusiasm, and can show commitment to
your promoting your work.
They are willing to post honest reviews and endorse your courses.
They have a work ethic that is compatible with yours.
Ideally, they would have experience in affiliate marketing or at least a
comimitment to learning quickly.
Ideally, they would actively market your courses in the same way as they
promote their products.
Looking into your professional network, you can easily find people who have
the expertise and are active in your field and want to learn more about the
subject you teach. However, they may not come equipped with the baggage
of the attributes described above. The key here is to leverage your existing
circle effectively to find contacts that would be interested in joining your af-
filiate program. Also, tools like LinkedIn will help you expand your network of
contacts to connect with other entrepreneurs in your field.
When you decide to take this path step by step, it would be ideal to start reach-
ing out to people that are ‘closest’ to you - and in this case, the closest ones
are your students. Your students would make the perfect ambassadors of your
brand out there because they have tried your courses and have seen results out
of them. Your students could be the first affiliates to join your network, help you
generate more income while you will reciprocate through paying them com-
missions.
Communicating with your students regularly is key to making them your affiliates!
Approaching Your First Affiliates: Your

Students
Your students are the best ambassadors for your online business. These are
the people you come in frequent contact with, they know what you do, they
support you all the way, and they know how to navigate through your school,
courses, and materials you are providing them. In simple words, they are per-
fect for the ‘job’!
Through your students, you get to see what works and what doesn’t in the ser-
vices that you offer. Therefore you can change and adjust the way you work
based on their preferences. Likewise, if you are that close to them, it would not
be much of a deal, to ask them to help you out by recommending your work
to others for you.
When you choose to create promotional tools that your affiliates can use,
you practically do part of the work for them. In this way, you make it easier
for your partners to become more familiar with your business and product (in
case they aren’t already) and also to start promoting.
Frequently, creating marketing collateral, like banners or email copy, can

seem like a daunting task. But if you have a library of promotional material in
place, your affiliates will have more information and tools to work with.
If you are unsure of what you can do, here are some suggestions to get your
students in the affiliate mindset and help them prepare to do the promotional
work as affiliates.
Create banners: Create banners to help your affiliates promote your

online school. These banners can be used on their website or anywhere
they think it is suitable for customers to see. Usually, these banners are
coupled with a CTA that has an affiliate link in it and sends visitors over to
your homepage or course catalog.
Use of email signatures: Encourage your affiliates to use email sig-
natures referencing the name of your company and their affiliate link. This
is email marketing inside affiliate marketing, or it can work the other way
around. Contrary to what you might have expected, this method of pro-
moting affiliate links works, as it is practically free advertising with effi-
ciency and recurrence.
Offer ebooks: Provide your affiliates with ebooks packed up with infor-
mation regarding what you do as a course instructor or any other materi-
al you think your affiliates will find useful. Your partners can use these eb-
ooks as a lead magnet to entice their audience to opt-in, or they can-
repurpose the content to create blog posts and add their affiliate link in there.
Email swipes: You can give your affiliates access to several email swipes
proven to convert well. Instead of them having to write email copy from
scratch, the affiliates can use your swipes as a start.
These are just some of the ideas that we recommend you to try out. Many
others may be more or less appropriate to your business needs, depending on
what you set a priority for your business and what you need. Also, you might
want to brainstorm and come up with some possible solutions yourself.
Don’t forget networking with other entrepreneurs can do wonders!

Expanding Your Reach: Active Networking

Another excellent way to reach out to and connect with potential affiliate
partners is to actively look for some relevant community or network outside
your school. Depending on what you teach, you might be able to find active
local communities or online groups that will be full of like-minded profession-
als. Networking offline and online offers a proactive way to meet key people
in your field/industry and make connections.
Also, you’d want to reach out to communities of bloggers or online entrepre-

neurs or even affiliate marketers who are already promoting products similar or
complementary to yours. Online business owners are always looking for prom-
ising and reliable income opportunities and new ways to monetize their blogs,
so reaching out to them is an excellent way to establish new partnerships. Visit
offline events, such as summits or seminars, to network with more professionals.
These are the steps you need to take to network effectively for affiliate purposes:
Step 1: Conduct Research
First, you must search to find people who share the same interests as you who
might be willing to market your product. Start by approaching professionals
who are closer to you in your network. It might help to contact the ones with
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whom you work regularly, and then expand from there to key people or com-
panies in your area of interest.
The way to attract high-quality affiliates who are going to deliver your sales
is reaching out to authorities in your chosen niche. With work, patience, and
time, you can bring long-term traffic to your site. You’re going to spend time
developing ‘relationships’ with anyone in your niche, which has an authorita-
tive presence online. You can do this in many different ways:
(a) Search manually on Google: Go to Google search and type in “[your industry]
and ‘blog’” and see where this leads you. Make sure to use appropriate key-
words to get the results you’d expect.
(b) Explore social media: Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups are the perfect
tools to get you right where your potential partners hang out online. Look for
different communities, join them, and let them know what you are looking
for. Pinterest is a great tool, especially for searching a specific interest or a
field, because of the way it is structured. People create collections and gather
ideas for various niches, and this makes it easy to search for people who are
interested in yours.
(c) Find groups of affiliate marketers: Look for affiliate networks that bring mer-
chants and affiliate partners together. Some good options are listed in this
article from Affilimarketer that you can check out.
Step 2: Send an Email or Two
Once you have found people who are interested in becoming affiliated with
your brand, be sure to get their contact details. In this way, you can send them
an email to introduce yourself and ask them whether they want to become
your affiliate partner along with an explanation of what you can do and offer.
There is always the possibility of sending a cold email, but this isn’t the best
approach to making a connection. A cold email should be avoided and only
used in rare cases. If you manage to write the email in a way so that it consti-
tutes a good value proposition that focuses on the benefits of affiliate part-
ners and what they can get out from your affiliate program, then go for it.
Perhaps the best time to send an email to recruit new affiliates is after the
person has already made a step towards approaching you, e.g., after a trial
subscription, an opt-in or a click-but-no-sale interaction on your site. These
offer more excellent chances to make that connection a success! So, do en-
courage them to wander around your school and check out your work before
asking them to sign up for something they are not sure about yet.
Step 3: Make Your Offer/Propose an Agreement
A generous ‘offer’ of 50 percent or more on promoted products - which are

digital products, can work and usually does the trick with most affiliate part-
ners. Once you partner with someone, you start your affiliate promotion. Keep
in mind that commission rates could be changed and agreed with the other
party at any point, but it might not work particularly well for your business if
your affiliates feel that they are treated unfavorably.
On the offline side of networking, an option for you that is guaranteed to get
you a few more contacts on your list would be networking events. Attending
conferences or summits will enable you to mingle and meet key people in your
industry. This is often encouraged, especially for those who have just started
their online school/business or are wishing to expand their reach.
When you are at a networking event, don’t try asking people to become your
affiliates right away. Prefer to introduce yourself and exchange contact de-
tails. Once you have made the initial contact, you can follow up through email
or LinkedIn message to talk about your affiliate program and ask them if they
want to join. Even if you get a ‘no’, these people will introduce you to a whole
bunch of other professionals so make sure to search them up on LinkedIn!
A recent study from AM Navigator shows that for some industries, it is much
easier to find affiliate partners because entrepreneurs seem to be more active
in them. Amongst the top 20 niches, fashion comes first as the most popular
affiliate category, followed by sports/outdoors, wealth/wellness and beauty,
travel, home and garden, computers, and electronics.
The following chart shows this in more detail:
Fashion is the most popular affiliate category (Image Source: AMNavigator)
If you are in the fashion business, affiliate marketing can work correctly for
you, but this doesn’t mean other industries should abandon this marketing
tactic altogether. On the contrary, since affiliate marketing is one of the types
of marketing that have been discussed lately, it makes sense for online course
instructors and entrepreneurs to start taking advantage of it today.
Think every advertising move carefully as you would do in a chess game!

Beating the Competition

There are many affiliate programs out there, and this means that if you want
to be successful and attract a large enough number of affiliate partners, your
approach to ‘hunting them down’ needs to stand out. Your affiliate program
needs to be in top shape as to satisfy the needs even of the most demanding
and grumpiest affiliates! But you should know this; it’s your responsibility to
make sure you are going to deliver precisely what they expect to get.
So, the question you need to answer is ‘why should an advertiser become in-
terested in endorsing your courses’? Unless you can answer this question, you
won’t be able to attract the best of the best affiliates to your network.
What you are prepared to offer to your affiliates matters a lot not only in
terms of financial gain, which is perhaps the most important but also through-
out the whole spectrum of what you are giving them.
As you know, success is in the details, so here’s how you can do this:
1. Stay focused: The number one problem is that as online entrepreneurs,

we tend to rush to spread out, to share the word, to advertise and sell it all at
once. But this is a huge mistake. A marketing strategy that works is always
focused on a niche market and starts from the very basics. As a general rule
of thumb in affiliate marketing, you should know this: The more niched-down
your product is, the easier it becomes to find people who are interested in
what you are offering whether this is fine arts, music, gym & pilates, garden-
ing, dancing, DIY & knitting, etc.
2. Offer a free course or trial: Your students already know what you are
offering, but others don’t. This means that you ought to give them the chance to
try out what you are offering. For this, you could prepare a course that’s cut-out
made, especially for them or encourage them to start a free trial. Based on the
feedback they will receive, they will get to decide whether they want to proceed
in establishing a partnership with you or not. Either way, this counts as an alter-
native way to reaching out to potential affiliate partners.
3. Give out an ebook: Not every online instructor has written an ebook
or has prepared anything else along those lines. As such, being able to offer
one can only work as an advantage for you and your business. Also, it shows
that you genuinely care about your field of study and that you are an expert
at what you do. The best thing about e-books is that they aren’t challenging
to write and can give out a great deal of information to those who are inter-
ested in signing up.
4. Use an affiliate marketplace: You can discover affiliate partners

through advertising your affiliate efforts on a marketplace like JVZoo, Zaxaa,
PayDotCom, ShareASale, e-Junkie and ClickBank among others, where you
will find people and businesses actively looking for a product or a service to
promote. On these websites, you let affiliates know what your proposal and
the benefits of your program, the commission rates you are prepared to pay,
and the earnings for affiliates are.
When listing your offer, check out application requirements because each
website is different. Also, be honest and present only real data. You don’t
want to disappoint your partners by including false information as this might
show that you are untrustworthy, and this is no good for any business.
There are both pros and cons to this move, but it’s an easy way to get start-
ed with affiliate marketing.
5. Get in front of a camera: Creating videos is another major trend

of today as it’s one of the most effective channels to work with, whether
you are advertising your work or promoting a new product. Getting out and
actively engaging with your audience through video can work perfectly if, of
course, you are prepared to do so.
In videos, people can get to know you better. Also, it’s more direct and au-
thentic. While you are at it, you can say that you run an affiliate program
and looking for affiliate partners. Alternatively, you can find affiliates that
have an active YouTube channel or do podcasts or have a large following on
Instagram and know how to communicate with their audience effectively.
6. Optimize your online presence: Retaining your brand’s online

presence is essential - not only on other sites and social media channels but
most importantly on your site. If you want to boost conversions, make sure
that your site loads quickly and provides sufficient information about the
courses you offer. Also, include short but catchy product descriptions to show
your customers what this is about and use only high-quality and attractive
photos to get the site visitors attention.
7. Broaden your reach: Don’t be afraid to reach out to affiliates that

come from multiple sources - email marketing, product review blogs, or from
other sites that are promising in terms of the number of their following and
their audience engagement.
Finding affiliate partners is not only a matter of luck, good networking or

social media presence but by looking closer into the industries, you can see
that it has much to do with the subject you teach.
Assuming that you already got your list of contacts - it all comes down to this
- approaching your communications (either online or offline) and asking them
if they are willing to promote your courses as an exchange of a commission.
This is usually the step one for online instructors, coaches, and bloggers who
are already established online. If they are not all up for it, don’t be quick
as to shut down the door. Instead, stay in touch with them to explore their
needs before throwing the next offer on the table.
Growing Your Network Organically

Caring for your SEO practice is one of the most important things you can do
to grow your affiliate network. SEO has a vast determining power as to wheth-
er your web pages will rank in Google and thus attract organic search traffic,
and eventually sell more courses and have more affiliate eyes on your prod-
ucts. At its core, every keyword that is relevant to your niche and what you do
has the power to either skyrocket your sales - when it is positioned the right
way, or backfire reducing sales altogether with keywords that aren’t thought
or used correctly.
According to WordStream, keywords are the building blocks of your business.

High-quality keywords are way more valuable than keywords that anybody
can come up with. The main goal here is to find the right search terms that
can be aligned to your business content and offerings along with a decent
search volume.
Whether it’s you or your affiliates who need it, make sure to take time to do
your keyword research and note down some valuable keywords. Tools such
as the Free Keyword Tool and Moz can help you find hundreds of relevant
keywords to use in your affiliate marketing campaigns and on your site. Deter-
mining keywords that work and have a specific intention is extremely valuable
to PPC marketing as it purposefully guides more people into clicking them
and helps to refine particular goals set for the business.
As such, coming up with keywords that are relevant to your target market
requires choosing your vital industry and location to get the most accurate re-
sults. Go for those keywords that can help you bring in a lot of exciting traffic
from your ad clicks. Doing so can potentially help you gain access to the high-
er league of the market and finally get to compete with the big fish out there.
If you think you need more help with your SEO, here some of the tips we can offer:
Practice ongoing, iterative keyword research:

Don’t stop searching for the ideal keywords to use for your affiliate activities
until you are happy with the ones you have got. Depending on the demand,
keywords strength varies, and it’s essential to check keyword performance
regularly. At every stage you are, you need both popular and competitive key-
words as well as thousands of well-targeted and high-intent keywords.
Be clear with your SEO strategy:

When you are working on SEO tracking and keyword performance, make sure
that you are clear on promotional tactics and strategies. You don’t want to end
up cannibalizing your affiliate program with your marketing activities that may
mislead and make things more complicated for you or your affiliate partners.
Also, keep in mind that affiliates drive a lot of their business through search
marketing anyway. If you are both competing on the same keywords, this can
often cause issues. For example, if you don’t want them to bid on your brand
terms, be upfront about this at the very beginning of the program. The best
solution to this is to maintain excellent communication with them throughout
your partnership.
Get to know more about SEO:

Luckily there are hundreds of resources that can help you get to learn more
about SEO works with an online business as these two go hand-in-hand. But,
this is more crucial when you have an online school to maintain. If you are
new to SEO and want more information on it, you can always check our SEO
related articles on the LearnWorlds blog and the web.
More specifically, we suggest that you study the following:
The Importance of SEO & SEM for edupreneurs - The SEO Series Part 1
Optimize Your School and Course SEO with Meta-tags
How to Use Jrox Affiliate Manager Within Your School’s Integrations
The motto for affiliate marketing: One for all, and all for one!
c ha p t e r 6
The Ingredients
of a Successful
Affiliate
Partnership
The Ingredients of a Successful Affili-

ate Partnership
The defining moment that will show that your affiliate network has turned out
to be a success is at the point where it reaches the perfect give-and-take rela-
tionship with your affiliate partners. This kind of relationship involves offering
an excellent product - your course, and at the same time having your affiliates
promoting it for you on multiple channels.
However, affiliate marketing doesn’t stop there since it’s a process that always al-
lows room for improvement. Here are some more useful ideas to try out:
Offering extra informative material: Give out helpful resources

and tools which your affiliates can use to promote your school further and
through a few easy steps. The more information you provide them, the
more will they be able to understand what it is they are selling and come
up with ways to advertise it better. This can be done at the beginning of
the agreement and then send them more course material or information
that you think they will find useful.
Staying prompt: Don’t forget to pay your commission on time and do
what you promised your affiliate partners that you will do. Your affiliate
partners will always expect to be paid for their work on the exact day/
date you promised. It’s part of their job. Paying them on time is a massive
factor for maintaining excellent relationships and empowering their trust
in you.
Being a professional: Relationships matter and more so on the affil-
iate level. Before you are ready to make your offer, familiarize yourself
with every person or company. Learn the background and the story be-
hind every partner and find out what exactly they can offer to your busi-
ness. After connecting with your affiliate partner, have a plan of commu-
nicating with them frequently at the beginning of your relationship and
then at least once a month to check if it all works as it should and if they
are happy with what you are offering and vice versa.
Gathering reviews: Once you manage to establish your affiliate net-
work, you can start collecting reviews on it and its performance. Searching
for reviews or testimonials is a common practice for a business who are
willing to become your affiliate partners. What you need to do is ask your
existent affiliate partners to share their own opinion and experience and
on a review site that you have created especially for this reason. Having
the ability to present reviews is an essential step towards your marketing
funnel as it gradually brings potential partners closer to you.
Introducing contests: Introducing different quizzes and contests to
your affiliates isn’t a bad idea at all. Sometimes you need to bring in some
incentives to the ‘round table of affiliates’. The quest of winning a prize or
doing something for the desire to get the reward is a motive that your
affiliates will gladly take in and appreciate. Keep things exciting and let
your creativity run wild to maintain the engagement between you and
your affiliates.
Asking others for feedback: There is always room for improvement

even for those who are well-established in their industry. So why not for
you? Asking for feedback is one of the best ways to hear what you don’t
want to hear or you are only missing it out and can’t figure out why things
are ‘getting any better’. If you wish to new affiliates to come to you, but
first you need to ensure that you are in good terms with the ones you
already got. So make you regularly check with them to see if you are on
the same page.
Using coupon sites: It might not seem ideal to offer coupons, but it
can work well since they manage to capture the attention of a customer
who is interested in big offers. Direct your affiliates and customers to cou-
pon sites such as Groupon or Offers.com to help get more traffic on your
website and increase conversions. Be wary of choosing only a few
high-quality sites that work after checking the coupons codes they offer.
Engaging with key influencers: It’s easier to recognize a signifi-
cant influencer in the niche instead of choosing to follow someone who
has just started. Working with a popular blogger or a famous social figure
who is dedicated and authentic with their audience have more chances of
bringing you a targeted amount of people to your site to buy from you. To
choose an influencer to work with, you first need to look at their reach,
engagement, their audience demographic, their following, and alignment
with your brand’s value and niche.
Conclusion
You might feel that affiliate marketing is not for you as a course creator but,
as you get to know more about it, you will find out that affiliate marketing is
an excellent way to expand your brand reach and grow your school. In this
course, we have outlined the fantastic benefits of building a network of affili-
ates that will boost your course sales. We have shown you how you can create
and set up your affiliate program, and how you can walk the extra mile and
find creative ways to engage more affiliate partners.
Starting something new can, indeed, be daunting. However, it’s essential to

bear in mind that recruiting one or two excellent and hard-working affiliate
partners can be a tipping point in your business. Not to mention that growing
your network of affiliates to dozens of partners can create a reliable source of
recurring passive income for your online school - and all of that with practi-
cally zero maintenance cost.
With paid advertising costs increasing and staff expenses being too high for a
startup, it makes sense to look for alternative methods to expand your reach
to new audiences and improve your online sales. Affiliate marketing is the way
to go to attract free, targeted traffic to your online school.
Affiliate marketing is not for everyone, but for those who are willing to leave
their prejudices aside and learn how to capitalize on affiliate marketing and on-
line marketing. Using all of these online tactics can be super beneficial and fi-
nancially rewarding. Research has shown that the benefits are more significant
if you choose to invest in trust, excellent service, and authenticity as an attempt
to do what’s best for your audience and after the revenue that comes with it.
Surely, affiliate marketing is an excellent way to make more money as it helps

you create multiple streams of passive income. In essence, it can be your most
cost-efficient marketing channel. However, your contract’s guidelines need to
be appropriately managed.
The question is, are you up for it?
If this is a yes, we are ready to guide you through the process and help you
with any inquiry you have regarding affiliate marketing and how you can work
with your affiliates. Besides, we are just an email or chat message away!
Best of luck!
How to Thrive in
AFFILIATE marketing
The Ultimate Guide
for Online Schools
Try
LearnWorlds
now
The best platform to create, market

and sell online courses
www.learnworlds.com
LearnWorlds (CY) Ltd

Gladstonos 120 Foloune Building 2nd Floor, B1 3032
Limassol Cyprus

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B. The Affiliate Dashboard 50

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic and a business arrangement be-

Affiliate marketing is a low-friction-to-market opportunity because affiliate

In this respect, affiliate marketing is regarded to be a unique form of market-

81 percent of brands and 84 percent of publishers use affiliate marketing.

Looking at these figures, we can’t deny the dominance of affiliate marketing

The Affiliate Marketing Relationship

A) Vendor: The vendor is usually a company or a business owner who

This three-party business relationship is shown in the graph below:

The three parties involved in affiliate marketing

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

An affiliate link would look like this http://www.yourdomain.com/?aff=id.

How to Determine a Fair Affiliate Commission

recruit more affiliates found in the communities of entrepreneurs, bloggers,

How to Set the Price

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is considered to be one of the best marketing programs

For a well-rounded approach to understanding affiliate marketing in terms of

These basic types of affiliates are the following:

1) Unattached affiliate marketing: This is the type of affiliate mar-

crucial places on the third-party website through advertising networks and

6. It increases your brand’s visibility: Affiliate marketing is an effec-

Setting up your own affiliate strategy? Ready, Set, Go!

As essential suggestions coming from us to you on how to structure your

Study the commission rates set by your competitors:

Figure out how it works alongside your website’s conver-

Create a commission structure that reflects your key objec-

Talk to your affiliates on a one-to-one level:

Offer a temporary increase in the commission rate:

Modify payout periods to your benefit

Provide the Right Education

Give Bonuses and Incentives

Giving affiliate marketing a chance is worth your time and money!

Create Promotional Material

This is particularly important on the first couple of months - which is when

For example, you can do the following:

Create promotional material that fits in your affiliates niche:

Find a better way to communicate with your affiliates:

Publish Your Affiliate Terms & Conditions

Different countries might impose various regulations regarding disclosure re-

Our own affiliate program terms

How to Set up Your

Why You Should Try Out the

With the impressive Affiliate Management functionality, you will be able to

Automated affiliate enrollment, using a simple registration form

Easily export payments due to be imported to Paypal Mass Payments

LearnWorlds affiliate and commission tracking tool is very intuitive and a

Launch your affiliate program with LearnWorlds Affiliate Management and

Will affiliate marketing work for my business?

Affiliate marketing is a proven way to market any business, including online

Moreover, online education is expanding by more than 10% a year, according

How to Set Up Affiliate Management for Your

Launch your affiliate program with LearnWorlds Affiliate Management and

1. Basic Affiliate Program Settings

Your affiliate program should be governed by a specific agreement between

As you can see in the screenshot above:

The commission rate is the percentage rate of your affiliate commissions,