How to Increase Your Video Course Sales with Affiliate Marketing

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What is a Video Course?

A video course is an audio/visual-based content created to impact knowledge and skill on the audience who's interested in a particular subject. It involves the creator or instructor demonstrating how a task can be done through actionable steps. Then students or users who're interested pay to access it.

A video course is created through online course platforms. It's mostly created as on-demand to allow users to consume it anytime and anywhere. It's designed in stages to ensure that students who learn from it clearly understand what was discussed or demonstrated. In the end, there is always an evaluation process to see if the objective of the course was achieved.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a popular aspect of digital marketing. It's the act of promoting a company's or other people's products. These products can be digital or physical. The aim is to earn a commission for any sale made through affiliate links. It's a mutual partnership that benefits both the product creator and the affiliate marketer.

The affiliate marketer earns a certain percentage from a sale made as a commission while the product creator takes the rest.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

The process is simple and works in 5 steps.

1. 1. Sign up for an affiliate program.
2. 2. Grab your affiliate link for the product you want to promote.
3. 3. Drive quality traffic to the link.
4. 4. You make a sale when someone purchases from your link.
5. 5. Commission is paid to you.

How Do Video Courses and Affiliate Marketing Connect?

You may ask this question if you've never thought of increasing your video course sales through affiliate marketing. As a video course creator, your next target after adding value to your audience is to make money through the sale of your course. This's where the connection between them begins.

You can't make that 6 figure from your course if you're the only one promoting it. It would help if you worked with affiliate marketers in the niche of the video course you created. That's the magic wand 6 figure video course creators have.

6 Steps to Increase Your Video Course Sales with Affiliate Marketing

To increase your video course sales with affiliate marketing, there're steps you need to take. Otherwise, you'll end up not making a cent, thereby agreeing with the misconception that affiliate marketing is dead.

1. Create Quality and Helpful Video Courses

Generally, the rate at which videos are created is becoming high. People engage more with videos. The same is true for video courses in the e-learning industry. Having a quality video is a must if you want to drive more sales with affiliate marketing.

That's what attracts affiliate marketers to you. This's because they know that their target audience wants the best. Therefore, they can't afford to present them with a video course that sucks. The consequences will be them losing the reputation, trust, and authority that they have worked so hard to build over a long period of time. Creating a quality video starts with you identifying the pain point of your audience and coming up with the best content that can solve it.

2. Identify Suitable Affiliate Marketers

Don't be deceived by profiles on different social media handles. Not everyone who claims to be an affiliate marketer does the talk. In affiliate marketing, traffic is key. That's why you need to work with bloggers who run profitable blogs, social media influencers, and YouTubers who command a large volume of traffic, social media followers, and subscribers.

Once you identify many of them, begin to narrow them down to those that best suit your product. This might be a hard job. But the financial reward worths it if you can get it right. Imagine having influencers in your niche, promote your course through various forms of content.

3. Make Your Commission Rate Attractive

One of the main factors affiliate marketers consider before promoting a product is the commission rate. This's their side hustle and what drives them to go the extra mile to convince their audience to purchase their blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts.

Not to talk of some of them that run ads on Bing, Instagram, Google, or Facebook, to drive conversion. They'll recover the amount they spent on ads before calculating their profit. All these calculations are based on the commission rate of the product. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean the commission rate for your video course should look too good to be real. If it looks overly high, affiliate marketers will wonder how you can pay such an amount. Some of them will even think it's a scam. It's ideal for making your commission rate reasonable.

Take a look at the commission rates of some digital products on Clickbank, a popular marketplace for digital products.

4. Provide Them with the Necessary Affiliate Kit

As a course creator, you need to provide your affiliates with an affiliate marketing kit to empower them. An affiliate marketing kit contains all that an affiliate marketer needs to promote the product. Examples are affiliate links, banners of different sizes, email swipes, written reviews, videos, etc. This kit will help them promote the video course effectively.

5. Insisting on Ethical Affiliate Partnership

Sincerity and transparency are the watchwords for you to be successful in affiliate marketing. For affiliate marketers that want to promote your video course, be sure that they've complete and detailed affiliate disclosure either on their YouTube video description or on their blogs.

You can state it in your terms. This informs their audience that such a person can earn a commission if someone purchases any of the affiliate links within the content.

The goal is to ensure that affiliate marketers are open about their business relationship with you. Also, it builds the trust and confidence users have both in the affiliate marketer and the digital product they promote. In addition, it increases the chances of them making purchases through affiliate links.

It would help to emphasize them positioning their affiliate disclosure so their audience can easily see it as they consume content.

An example here is Scott Hall's blog that partners with some brands and displays his affiliate disclosure at the footer of his page alongside his terms of use and privacy policy.

When one clicks on the link, a web page stating his relationship with brands that he promotes their products open.

Another example is from my guide on how to start a blog. You can see an affiliate disclosure at the top of the post.

This level of transparency is expected because people deserve to know that they're not being deceived for monetary gains.

Proper Management of Your Affiliate Program

This challenge you need to think of how to overcome if you're already considering increasing your video course sales through affiliate marketing. Generating affiliate links, tracking, and analyzing them is what you can't handle easily as a course creator. But this shouldn't give you a headache.

You have already done a great job by creating a quality and helpful video course that can solve the problem of your target audience.

Leave the rest to SaaS companies that specialize in managing your affiliate program. Refersion is one of them. It's created to help you manage your promotion network through partnerships with bloggers, YouTubers, and influencers.

You can create custom affiliate pages. It supports tracking by SKU, coupon code, payment of your affiliates, and adequate reporting that gives you an insight of how your affiliates are performing.