Host Julie Hood shares in this episode how she is using affiliates (also known as joint venture partners) to launch her course, the 24 Hour Course Creator. This episode shares the tools you need, along with the decisions you need to make and the materials you need to gather. It’s a jam-packed masterclass episode on partnering with others to sell your online course.
Host Julie Hood shares in this episode how she is using affiliates (also known as joint venture partners) to launch her course, the 24 Hour Course Creator.
This episode shares the tools you need, along with the decisions you need to make and the materials you need to gather. It’s a jam-packed masterclass episode on partnering with others to sell your online course.
LINKS MENTIONED
Jump into the FREE 5 day challenge at TopicAndTitleChallenge.com to find your rockstar course idea and name your course!
Get my Sunday night calendar emails when you sign up for my free course – Is My Course Idea Any Good? here.
Tools with affiliate programs built in:
Create Add to Calendar links at Eventable.
Listen to this episode on joint ventures:
E035: Using Joint Ventures to Catapult Your Online Course Business
(Some of these are affiliate links and I earn a commission when you sign up. I only recommend partners I have vetted and tools I personally use.)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Using an affiliate program where you pay others to promote your launch, your freebies and your course can be a really lucrative way to find more students.
Some key decisions you need to make:
COME VISIT!
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Connect with me on Clubhouse for FREE masterclasses at @JulieHood.
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Oh, my it's only 41 days to go. I'm launching the 24 hour course creator daily group coaching program in June. And I thought today you would enjoy a behind the scenes sneak peak at how we're working with our launch partners and our affiliates. So let's jump in and let me share my secrets with You. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast,
helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host, Julie Hood. Alright, to give you some context. We are about five and a half weeks out from my launch. So I'm gathering my amazing affiliates today. And then we're going to be on a zoom call to chat and introduce ourselves to each other. And I wanted to share some of my best practices with you.
So in case your thinking about an affiliate promotion for your course, there might be some ideas here that you could use. So let me start. I want to clarify some of the keywords and the phrases and the terminology that I'm using, because you'll often hear people talk about joint ventures and affiliate marketing. And as a course creator, there's actually two different ways that you can use affiliate marketing.
And I'm only talking about one of them today. So you could have partners who are your affiliates, and the concept is that they promote your course. They share your freebies. They talk about you. And then when someone signs up as a student, you pay them a commission for their promotion of you. The other way to use affiliate marketing is when you promote other people's products,
services, tools, courses, whatever they have going on. And whenever you do that, you earn the commission and the other person gets the student into their course. So both of these situations are often called affiliate marketing, or sometimes you'll hear joint venture marketing. But today I'm just talking about the first situation where you're paying other people to promote your course,
we'll have some more episodes about the other kinds of ways to work together. So I'll also be using the term joint venture partners and affiliates kind of interchangeably throughout this episode. So just so you know, I'm always talking about the same role that these people are playing with you. Okay. So last week I took a look at one of my clients who earns seven figures from their courses,
and they have a really unusual affiliate program. They give commissions for the lifetime of the customer, and we found out that 66% of their revenue could be tracked back to their work with partners. So that's a huge portion of their business. And because of that, and because joint ventures can be so lucrative for you. They are also a big part of my promotion.
And I recommend them for course creators, because it's one of those things where you only pay when it works. So when they get you a student, you pay, it's not like something like Facebook ads where you have to pay it ahead of time to get leads and hope that the then turn into a student you're paying on the backend after someone has signed up.
So by the way, just as a sidebar, be sure to get on my email list, because every Sunday night, I send out a planning email with links to a bunch of upcoming events where you can potentially find partners to work with you. So if you're really serious about using affiliate marketing and joint ventures go to coursecreatorshq.com/40, sign up for my free is your course idea,
any good. And then you get the Sunday night emails too, with the links to the upcoming partner events. Okay? So let's move on and talk about what you need and some of the decisions you need to make as compared to what I have chosen for my promotion. First off, you need an affiliate tracking tool. And basically this is a system that will give every one of your affiliates,
a unique link to promote your freebies to promote your course and all of those links tie back to them so that when somebody orders this affiliate tracking tool that you have, will track the order and assign them a commission on the sale. And then periodically you get a list of the payments that need to be made. So you can pay your affiliates.
The tool also tracks often how many clicks the affiliate is sending you. And it may even track how many people it's sending you that, or how many are signing up to fit depending on how it works. So one of the things you must must must make sure you do is that your affiliate program has to be on the same tool where your students are paying for you.
And that's how the tracking works. Because if you have an affiliate program on one tool, but they pay you on a different tool than the commissions don't get tracked properly, they have to be the same tool. So most of the major course hosting tools like Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, they all have affiliate programs built in, but you might need to pay a little bit more to jump into their affiliate level of their program.
So I've included these tools and the links in the show notes, at coursecreatorshq.com/40. So jump in and you can get the links and I, to give you a sneak peek into what I'm using. So I actually use SamCart because I set it up a while ago and it works well and integrates with the rest of my tools. So I make sure everyone when they order,
they always order through SamCart. So your first decision that you want to make is which tool it is you're going to use for your tracking. The next thing I want you to have is a calendar of your launch. You want to plan when the shopping cart is open, then when it will close along with all the promotions that your affiliates can participate in and when they should be promoting them.
So for the launch of the 24 hour course creator, I am so thrilled to tell you this time, we're going to do a five day challenge. And this is our first challenge. And we're going to do this ahead of the course so that my affiliates are all invited and actually very much encouraged to promote this challenge, because it's going to give my potential students a chance to see what it's like to work with me.
We're going to do some Q and A and coaching involved and they'll get videos from me every day. So it's really a great way for them to know what it's like to work with me. And the goal then on the back end is that they'll sign up for the 24 hour course creator program at the end of the challenge. So the challenge is called the topic and title challenge for a rockstar course.
And we're going to spend about an hour a day or less for five days to help you figure out your topic and your title. So you can go to topicandtitlechallenge.com to get signed up and save your spot. And you won't need that much time to do this. I'm intentionally keeping it short and sweet, but I can't wait to get to work with you and get to talk about what you've got going on.
So for your affiliate program, plan out what it is you want them to promote. Is that a challenge or maybe one of your free lead magnets, keep it simple and lay it out exactly on the calendar for them. So they know when they want to promote and what they're promoting next. Let's talk about affiliate commissions. So typically you should pay your affiliates between 10 and 50% of the sales price of your commissions.
And this is where your pricing can get a little bit tricky and you may need to raise your prices in order to make the launch lucrative to your partners. So if they're going to promote you instead of their own courses, it has to be worth their time and the opportunity cost of not promoting something else. So I pay 30% in my affiliate program that leaves me room to pay the taxes and still have some profit on the back end.
The other piece of this related to commissions, as you want to check with your tax accountant, because whenever you pay an affiliate over a certain amount during the year, you're supposed to send them a 1099 statement. So just check on that. I'm not a CPA anymore. I can't tell you what to do, but make sure you have that in your process,
for the year. The next decision you want to think about is how long someone should be cookied. So let's say someone signs up for your challenge today, and then they get a cookie on their computer so that if they actually purchase from you within the next 30 days or 90 days or whatever you decide, the affiliate earns a commission. So my cookies lasts for 90 days,
Amazon cookies for their affiliates actually only last 24 hours. And then as I mentioned, I have a client who has lifetime commissions. So it really is a business decision on your part. And I recommend at least 90 days to be fair to your partners. Next up, I want you to create swipe for your launch and swipe is actually pre-written emails and subject lines that then your affiliates can modify to promote your freebies,
your course, whatever it is you want them to be promoting. So always, always, always encourage them to customize it so that it's in their voice and it has their stories, but you are providing them some ideas. So they're not sitting down with a blank screen and trying to come up with what to say about you. So put your swipe into a Google doc.
That'll make it really easy to share with them. And then you also want to create a bunch of different social media images along with the captions, so that they're all in different sizes for the different tools. And then they can really easily share your stuff on their social media accounts too. Okay. Lots of stuff in this episode, another term I want you to think to understand and know is what's called the leaderboard and the leaderboard is the ranking of how your different affiliates are performing when they're launching with you.
So who's sending you the most leads. Who's sending you the most sales and some course creators will offer prizes for the top affiliates. So the person who sends them the most leads, I'm actually probably not going to do a lot of that this time, but sometimes it can work really well because that competition between affiliates can get them to send out another email or promote you one more time.
And then typically during the launch, you should be communicating regularly with your affiliates about the status. So create an email list where you're just sending updates to them and get all of this information into the email for them, make it super simple. Because one of the biggest things you need to remember is that your affiliates are very, very busy and often forgetful.
They they'll commit to working with you, and then they'll forget about it and not get it on their calendar. So I'm using a tool called ventable.com and it has a free version to let you create calendar items that people can add to their calendar. So I'm using that to make sure my affiliates get me on their calendar. So they remember that I'm also trying to contact them as much as possible.
So when I'm promoting somebody else, my favorite partners, the ones that I love to promote, really do a good job with these emails that they're sending out that use a very specific subject line. So it jumps out. So for example, all of my emails to my affiliates say JB with Julie in the subject line. So they can find these emails and get back to the swipe,
get back to the calendar. All of that's included in every email. So you start with, what's the very next thing you want your affiliate to do. For example, maybe it's send this email about the challenge this week. Then it also has links to the full calendar, the swipe, and it gives them their login details. So if they need to go check and see what kind of results they're getting,
it's all in that email for them. Finally, I want you to start really, really, really early when you're talking with your partners, my calendar can book up as much as six months ahead of time. So you can't wait till the week before your launch and expect people to jump in and partner with you. They probably have something else already planned.
You needed to be communicating at least a couple months ahead of time so that they can stay in the loop about what's going on. So I hope this episode has kind of helped you see some of the different pieces that are involved in having an affiliate program and to get you thinking about how you could use it. Also, listen, I have another episode about joint ventures that I'll put in the show notes.
So if you want to listen to that, it talks more about finding partners and how to work that and be sure to visit topic and title challenge.com that's topic entitled challenge.com. So you can get in on the free five day challenge with me. I can't wait to talk and connect with you and learn more about your business and the courses that you're creating. So I want to thank you so much for giving me this space in your headphones,
in your earbuds. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing and thank you so much for reviewing. If you got anything useful from this episode, if you could leave us a five-star review, I'd totally appreciate it and be sure and get in to all of the information I mentioned today, whether you want to get the emails about the joint venture opportunities or you want to get in on the challenge so you can get my help in formulating your upcoming course in your upcoming title and topic.
I'm so looking forward to working with everyone, thanks so much for listening. Have a testing week and I will catch you next time.