106: How to Skyrocket Online Course Sales With No Upfront Investment

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners increase their revenue with digital products and automated sales funnels. In this podcast we go deep into the product and marketing strategies for digital product creators. We cover everything from digital product creation, how to market and sell your digital products, and just as important, how to find your ideal customer. Before we begin our show today, I want to let you know that we are currently taking applications for our Digital Product Accelerator program. This is a high touch program to help you set up your evergreen marketing system so you can enroll students on autopilot. So if you're looking for something more than just a DIY program and something where you can get accountability and mindset support plus marketing consulting, then this program may be perfect for you. You can learn more about the Digital Product Accelerator program by visiting the link in the show notes. Let's jump right in to our show. Are you looking for a way to find more students for your online course for membership without investing money in paid advertising? A well designed affiliate program is one of the best ways to find students without paying money up front. This is an effective and proven way to find students. But for this to work, you need to have a marketing system that will help your affiliates promote your course and get them paid. And you may be asking, what exactly is affiliate marketing and how does it work? So in this podcast episode, I'm going to walk you through how to skyrocket your online course sales with no upfront investment by using affiliates. So let's start in and let's first talk about what is affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing is when Someone in your industry who has an audience that's perfect for your online course or membership promotes your product to their audience for a percentage of the sale. They are essentially putting their stamp of approval on your course or membership and they're promoting it to their audience. This word of mouth marketing is high, highly effective because their audience trusts them. And their support through affiliate marketing says this program or this online course or this membership does what it says and is worth the investment. So when it comes to selling your online course, you're going to need software that will generate a unique link for your course that you will provide your affiliates with. Then your affiliates will use these links in promoting your marketing campaign through. However, they're going to promote it like podcast episodes or blogs or social media posts and email marketing. And the link will be used to track referrals that come from your affiliates. And your affiliates will get paid a commission for for every sell made through their affiliate link. So let's talk about some of the benefits of affiliate marketing to sell your online course. And the first is social proof. So a huge benefit of affiliate marketing is the social proof that comes with an affiliate who has a strong connection with his or her audience and they're putting their stamp of approval on your online course or membership. And I have to say, this is priceless. Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that there are no upfront cost. So compare this to a launch with Facebook or Instagram ads where you're paying a good amount of money up front and you may not be 100% sure that you're going to make a return on that investment. So with affiliates, you only have to pay for leads that turn into paying customers. The other benefit of affiliate marketing is that it is a limited time investment. So you need to spend some time up front finalizing your marketing materials, like your sales page, your promotional emails for your affiliates email, and any promotional graphics that you give them. So in addition, depending on your sales funnel, you may have some other stuff, right, like a webinar, but your entire marketing campaigns can be set up once and then you can reuse it repeatedly for different affiliates. The other benefit of affiliate marketing is that it gives you increased visibility. So when your affiliates share your links, that's going to spread the word about your online course. In addition, this is going to make your sales page and your website SEO friendly. So potential students might be likely to find it via search on Google as your ranking increases. Okay, so those are the pros of affiliate marketing and there's tons of them. Now I want to walk you through an eight step guide to start an affiliate program so you can sell your online course or membership. So step one in the first thing that you need to do when you're going to be setting up an affiliate marketing program is to set your measurable affiliate marketing goals. So every marketing campaign always starts with a goal and right. Ultimately your goal of your campaign is to bring in revenue. But let's go a little bit deeper than that. So would you rather have 100 affiliates promoting your course or membership to bring in like a, you know, $100,000 in revenue or would you have rather have 20 engaged affiliates that could generate the same amount of revenue? And I would say most of us here would say we would love to have 20 strong and engaged affiliates. So there's. Because there's a cost, right, to managing a high number of affiliates. The other thing that you need to think about as you set up your affiliate marketing goals is will this be a one time launch or something that you will evergreen. So for instance, I've done joint JV Live webinars as an affiliate and then turned around and placed it, placed that particular webinar in evergreen format so I could continue to promote as an affiliate. So that was a win win. So you get, you know, affiliate sales from the live type webinar that you did and then you turn it into an evergreen so you can continue to promote and get affiliate revenue from that. So having measurable goals helps you gauge if your affiliate program is successful or not. So some key goals to think about here are your revenue and quality course sales goals and the number of affiliates you need to support these goals. Okay, moving on to step two. Now in step two, you're going to select an affiliate platform. So you're going to make tracking easy. And for many of you, this step might be easy. Right? As most online courses platforms have affiliate programs built into their systems. So to use this feature with your online course platform, you may be required to upgrade your plan. But I would say that this would most likely pay for itself due to the increased affiliate sales you would obtain by adding this feature to your toolbox. So do a little bit of research and, and review the tutorials that are provided by your online course platform to make sure that you understand how to set up your affiliate program. So you're going to understand how your affiliates will sign up, you're going to set their commissions payouts in the system and just make sure you read and do a little research on how the affiliate link works so you can provide this information to, to Your affiliates. Okay, so moving on, step three. The next thing that you need to do is to set your affiliate commission. And this is going to make your program irresistible. Okay? So you're going to determine the percentage commission you're going to offer for your affiliates. And in this step, I want you to study what your competitors offer in terms of affiliate payouts. Because your commission structure is one of the most important decisions you'll make, as it will be one of the key determining factors as to whether or not someone will promote your online course or membership. So you need to choose your ideal commission percentage and whether to pay recurring commissions, or if you're going to have some type of payout threshold when you will pay out on those earned commissions. And keep in mind that a higher commission will push your affiliates to work harder to make a sale to earn the commission. And I will say that I have seen that commission of around 30 to 40% is typical for most online courses and membership. So if you have a membership where your students pay a monthly fee to access your content, you're probably going to want to have a recurring commission for your affiliates. So now that you know the details of your program, including the affiliate commissions, when and how you will pay your affiliates, I want you to make sure you have an affiliate agreement that your new affiliates can sign when they agree to participate in your marketing campaign. And if you need an affiliate agreement in the show notes for this episode, I will have a link for you which is my go to resource for legal contracts. And they have an affiliate agreement that that will be perfect for your new affiliate program. Okay, now moving on to step four. Now in step four, you're going to create your affiliate marketing material because you want to make it easy for your affiliates to promote. So you're going to include email swipe files, you're going to include social media captions, you're going to have promotional images for them, and you're going to have training material. And you're going to pull all of this information together and you're going to put it in a place where it's easy for your affiliates to download, like a Google Drive. Okay, Moving on to step five is when you're going to go out and find your perfect engaged affiliates. Okay. I want you to conduct your research. You're going to need to make sure that they have an audience that would be interested and perfect for your online course or membership. And you can kind of estimate how big their audience may be based on their social media following and the quality of their content. So I Want you to follow them on social media. I want you to subscribe to their email list, really do your research, you know, understand how are they treating their email subscribers and their social media following. Are they constantly, constantly promoting? Are they delivering high quality content to their audience? You know, really understand do they have an engaged audience? But if you find somebody that you think would be a perfect affiliate for your online course or membership, then reach out to them via email or on social media and see if they would be interested and willing to join as an affiliate partner. Now moving on to step six. And on step six, this is when you're going to onboard your new affiliates. So you're going to introduce them to your program, give them all the important information. So you are going to make sure that they have all the support they need from the time they sign up as an affiliate until their last sale with you. So onboarding is a very vital step in recruiting. So be sure that they know how to sign up for their affiliate links, confirm that they've signed your contract, make sure that they have the dates for your promotional campaign on their calendar. And remember how you conduct the onboarding process will significantly impact your program and your marketing campaign success. So if you have a large affiliate team, consider having a private Facebook group for your affiliate so that they can ask questions and get support through your group. Okay, moving on to step seven. Step seven is when you're going to start promoting your affiliate campaign. So when it's time to start promoting your online course, let your affiliates know that it's go time. Right? Remind them where to find their affiliate link and promotional materials. Let them know that you are here to support them if they have questions or need assistance. So this is a step where you will get to see all of your plans come into motion and it is officially the beginning of your affiliate marketing journey to drive more sales for your online course. Now in step eight, you're going to track how your affiliate program is doing and this is the last step. So you're going to track your program's progress. And this can be accomplished through your online course platform, affiliate dashboard or the system that you're using for affiliate management. So track the affiliate who brings in the most sales. Have a leaderboard that shows who has the most sales and clicks. You may even want to consider having prizes for the folks on the leaderboard. And if you're having a problem achieving the goals of your campaign, you may have to modify your commission structure or even reconsider your affiliate partner. So if you have partners who aren't promoting or their audience isn't converting, you may want to exclude them from future campaigns. So once you change your affiliate lineup and redesigned your program, you'll need to go back to step five and onboard any new affiliates that you have hired, and then you're going to move forward to steps six and seven. So just to summarize here, affiliate marketing is an effective marketing strategy with a lower risk since is it is commission based. So many online business owners opt to use affiliate marketing to promote their digital products, which skyrockets their online course sales. If you have any questions whatsoever about affiliate marketing with your online course, feel free to send me a quick email or reach out to me on Instagram @DestinyCop. I'm more than happy to answer any questions that you have. Bye for now.

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