Finding your people. Expanding your online community. It’s important. And if you’re offering new online courses, looking to fill a workshop or planning a virtual summit, it’s especially important.
Attracting the right group of people for what you have to offer is the aim of affiliate marketing. It’s great for driving leads and sales, and using affiliate marketing to build consumer loyalty and promote customer retention is a smart choice. But it doesn’t stop there. The same affiliate marketing channels that you’re using to grow your customer base can be used to promote your courses, workshops, and more.
In fact, you should be using affiliate program strategies to promote your e-learning offers. In the rapidly-growing field of affiliate marketing, affiliates are trusted voices in the social media sphere. An affiliate is seen as having the experience, expertise, or taste that their audience believes in and aspires to. And while promoting a tangible product is one thing affiliates can do very well, don’t underestimate how much an interested audience wants to learn from, get advice from, and connect with someone in the know.
That’s where you and your affiliates come in. Whatever your field, if you’re offering educational and online community-building opportunities, you want to find the people who will be excited to be a part of them. Affiliate marketing is perfect for that.
Let your current affiliates get the word out
Have a few seats left in a workshop? Want to start filling up a course? Get proactive and put your affiliates to work. Chances are, there are a number of people in each of your existing affiliate audience groups who would like to learn more.
More than ever before, people are going online to find a sense of community, to connect, and to learn. As of April 2021, the Pew Research Center reports that around 70% of Americans use some form of social media to stay connected to the people and things they care about and to learn more about what they’re interested in. Facebook and Instagram are popular among all age groups – from Gen Z to Boomers – and across all income and education levels. Affiliate marketing is built for these platforms. An affiliate who has a strong presence on social media can reach lots of people and encourage them to take action.
With trends showing that the use of social media – the platforms where affiliates do their magic – started out strong among younger users and then grew to include middle-aged and older adults, there’s now no demo you can’t reach online with affiliate ads. Whether you want to get more of the student-aged and new-to-the-workforce demographic into your workshops and summits, or you want to attract lifelong learners, there are affiliate strategies to help you.
Organizing an affiliate campaign for your courses, workshops, and summits across social media platforms is an effective way to generate interest and encourage more people to sign up. And then sign up for the next one, too. And tell their friends. And get people talking. That’s what you want. Social media can create buzz around summits and other events, bring like-minded people together, encourage organic engagement, and widen your audience all at once. It’s a great way to reach interested people each day or every week, since the Pew Research center has found that the reported daily and weekly use for each popular social media site are as follows:
- Instagram – 59% daily/21% weekly
- Facebook — 70% daily/17% weekly
- Twitter – 46% daily/27% weekly
- YouTube – 54% daily/29% weekly
- Snapchat – 59% daily/21% weekly
Leveraging your existing affiliate program can be a great way to get people into your virtual courses, workshops, and summits. If you have an affiliate program audience – tap into it! They always want to learn more. They’re always ready for a good deal, a promo or a special offer.
And people love immediate, engaging content like videos. Wyzowl reports that the average person watches 18 hours of videos online each week, and when those videos include ads – like affiliate ads and promos – 84% of the people surveyed said that watching a video was what convinced them to try out a product or service. When promoting the online learning services that you have to offer, the affiliate network you have can be a good place to start.
If you’re offering webinars – good news! The changes that 2020 brought to many lives have extended to how and where people learn. Wyzowl says:
“Webinars were the video success story of 2020. In 2019, just 46% used webinars – but in 2020, this rose significantly to 62%.”
So, the need for virtual learning and e-courses is out there, and growing. In fact, even before the covid-19 pandemic, e-learning was a rapidly growing field. The pandemic sped things up, and e-learning opportunities are expected to become even more in-demand and grow at a yearly rate of 9.1% through 2026, according to a recent market analysis report. By offering this increasingly popular learning option and marketing it with the right affiliates on the right platforms, you can be looking at a win-win.
Our affiliate software makes managing affiliate videos, messages, promo codes, coupon offers, and other affiliate content and campaign strategies seamless, so you can get started with your affiliates right away.
Recruit new affiliates to promote for you
If you’re branching out with some new course offerings or changing how you’re doing things, some new affiliates may be called for. Finding the right people to speak for you – those who ‘fit’ with your brand and the image and message you want to convey – is key. Getting your promotions to the right audience groups is crucial. And by bringing on seasoned affiliates, you can hit the ground running. Increasing sign-ups and prompting people to join in can be easy when you bring active, hardworking affiliates on board.
According to these recent marketing statistics, there are over 8 million marketers working on Facebook. Instagram keeps growing in popularity, especially among the younger demographics, and is expected to have a reach of over 120 million active users by 2023. Affiliate marketers focus on social media platforms like these because that’s where their audiences are and that’s where affiliate marketing can be most effective.
Finding a good pool of affiliates to recruit from doesn’t have to be an endless search, though. With our affiliate management software, adding new affiliates to your program will be just a few clicks away. Tracking the performance of each new payment and managing payments – from performance-based to by-the-post – will be possible with our complete affiliate tracking software.
Allow affiliates to recruit other affiliates
Affiliates like, follow, and take notice of things like everyone else. Active affiliates are likely to be plugged-in to their own online communities and groups. Take advantage of the natural networking ability that affiliates have and get them to bring on other affiliates.
Let’s say you have one affiliate who performs consistently well. Every post creates an uptick in course enrollment. That affiliate then finds four more affiliates who take the course and want to come onboard as affiliates too. Each of those affiliates has the potential to bring in more course sign-ups too, and will be driven to perform. With a tiered-affiliate program, top affiliates will feel more invested in the success of each campaign and affiliates beneath them will have a goal to strive towards.
Our affiliate software makes managing tiered affiliate programs clear and precise. Payment levels, commissions, performance reports – it’s all here for you.
Manage it all
Getting people interested in your online courses, workshops, and summits means using the affiliates that you already have and bringing on the best new ones, promoting offers across popular social media platforms, and making sure that it’s all coordinated and running as it should. But here’s the secret – the affiliate software. The affiliate program software you use can make all the difference. Managing all the moving parts of your affiliate marketing program can be a crazy juggling act or it can be simple.
- Synchronizing campaign strategies
- Managing affiliate content
- Tracking affiliate performance
- Giving coupon codes
- Simplifying affiliate payment options
and everything else you need to do to have a well-managed affiliate program is possible with the right affiliate program software.
Make it a lot easier
That’s where we come in. At iDevAffiliate, we’ve been providing affiliate marketing solutions for over 20 years. As affiliate marketing evolves, so do we. Whether you want to make better use of the affiliate program you already have or start from the ground up, we can help you. We make getting started with affiliate marketing easy, and we make streamlining existing affiliate programs effortless. Check out our flexible, affordable affiliate tracking software options. Our class-leading software can help you to promote your courses, workshops, summits, and more. Contact us today to learn more.
