Adding an affiliate program to your LearnDash e-learning site is a great way to market your products and increase sales. Affiliates take on the task of promoting your courses and referring customers to you. When a referral decides to purchase your course, the affiliate earns a small percentage of the sale in return.
An easy way to set up and run an affiliate program on your site is to use Affiliate WP. The plugin provides you with all the necessary tools to manage the entire process from adding a new affiliate to managing commissions.
In this post, we’ll look into how to use Affiliate WP to set up your own affiliate program on your LearnDash site.
Today, affiliate programs play a huge part in many small and big businesses ’ marketing strategies. Amazon Associates, ClickBank, Siteground, and eBay are just a few examples of businesses running affiliate programs. E-learning marketplace sites like Coursera, Skillshare, and Udemy also allow affiliates to earn commissions. Even LearnDash itself runs an affiliate program for their LMS.
What are the benefits of using an affiliate program to sell courses?
- Once you set up the framework, the upfront costs are low. Your affiliates will only be paid once they’ve closed a sale for you.
- Your courses will be seen and known by an exponentially larger audience since each affiliate will share your courses within their own networks.
- When determining whether your course is valuable, potential students are more likely to trust the opinion of a fellow student or a person they know. If an affiliate vouches for your product, their audience will be more likely to make the purchase.
- Large e-learning sites with several independent courses can incentivize instructors with commissions by allowing them to act as affiliates.
- Allowing existing students to earn a commission from referrals will motivate them to share information and testimonials about your course.
How to create an affiliate program with Affiliate WP and LearnDash?
Currently, setting up a LearnDash affiliate program with Affiliate WP requires the WooCommerce plugin as a shopping cart and the LearnDash WooCommerce integration.
With the LearnDash Woocommerce Integration, you can create WooCommerce products for each of your LearnDash Courses. Once you have done that you can install Affiliate WP and enable the WooCommerce integration from the Settings Page (in the integrations tab).
This process might seem a little bit long, but WooNinjas is looking to launch an integration between Affiliate WP and LearnDash in the future to make setting up your affiliate program more simple. The add-on will allow you to create an affiliate program to promote LearnDash courses. Affiliates will be able to earn commissions or access premium content when their referred visitors enroll in the promoted courses.
Currently, the process using WooCommerce, LearnDash, Affiliate WP, and the LearnDash WooCommerce integration is as follows:
- Start by installing all necessary plugins.
- With the LearnDash WooCommerce Integration, create a new product for each of your LearnDash courses.
- Go to the Affiliate WP settings page from the dashboard and click on the Integrations tab. Enable the WooCommerce integration here. (With our new integration you will be able to select LearnDash directly from this page, bypassing the need to use WooCommerce as a shopping cart).
- From the Affiliate WP settings page, you can also set a referral rate your affiliates will earn from each sale. This can be calculated as a percentage of the sale or assigned as a flat rate. The referral rate set here will apply to all affiliates, but if you want to set different referral rates for a specific affiliate you can do so by navigating to the affiliates section, selecting an affiliate, and modifying the rate directly from their edit page.
- Affiliate WP will automatically generate an “Affiliate Area” page where affiliates will be able to log into their accounts and view their referrals, affiliate links, earnings, and statistics. Affiliates can copy their affiliate link here and share them on any platform. When a user uses the link and makes a purchase through it, referral records will be automatically generated.
- You can also give each of your affiliates exclusive coupon codes. These are created from the Coupons section of the Marketing Menu. Any time coupon code is redeemed by a new student, and the purchase is completed, the connected affiliate will be paid.
To add affiliates to your LearnDash site you need to follow these instructions:
Manually Add Affiliates
- To manually add an affiliate, first create a user account for that person on your WordPress site.
- Then navigate to the Affiliates section on the Affiliate WP menu and click on Add New.
- Select the WordPress user you’d like to add on the form and complete additional details.
- If you’d like to send your new affiliate a welcome email you can enable the option at the bottom of the page.
Allow Affiliates To Register Themselves
- Another option is to allow users to register themselves as affiliates. To do this go the Settings page and click on the Misc. tab.
- Enable the “Should affiliates be able to register accounts for themselves?” option.
- Enable the “require approval” option if you wish to vet and approve affiliates.
- The registration form will appear in the “affiliate area” page.
Conclusion
We hope this post was helpful. Please share your comments, feedback, and questions in the comment section below.
