Udemy is one of the world’s largest eLearning platforms. The website and app play host to thousands of lessons, students, and teachers.
It boasts of having 150,000 courses taught in well over 65 languages to more than 50 million students.
Udemy has students from all over the world learning a variety of classes; business, SEO, marketing, web development, and many more.
Because Udemy has such a broad range of courses, this presents an opportunity for affiliate marketers in the online learning niche.
The Udemy affiliate program is willing to pay commissions to affiliate marketers who bring in new students. But, there are loads of eLearning affiliate programs. Can Udemy be the best amongst them?
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about the Udemy affiliate program.
Udemy Affiliate Program: What’s it About?
Learning is an essential part of life. Luckily, we don’t have to sit in classrooms anymore and learn whatever is taught. Now, we have choices.
You can choose what you’ll, when and where to learn, how you’re going to learn, how long you’ll learn, and how much. Courses like the ones taken on Udemy present an opportunity to add to our overall knowledge.
The Udemy affiliate program allows eLearning content creators to earn some money by recommending some of Udemy’s courses and trading to their audiences.
Courses sell remarkably well online, and you could make the Udemy affiliate program a source of passive income.
The program is available on various affiliate networks such as Rakuten Linkshare, VigLink, and Flex Offers. Each of these networks handles its Udemy affiliate program differently.
However, each of them has excellent reporting and analytical features. They also have lots of promotional material for Udemy.
Udemy does have a lot of sales and promotional events, which further increases conversion rates. If you can make full use of such circumstances, you can make a fair bit off of Udemy.
Udemy’s Products.
Udemy has hundreds of thousands of courses, but they’re divided into 13 categories:
- Finance & Accounting
- Development
- Design
- Lifestyle
- Marketing
- IT & Software
- Business
- Personal Development
- Teaching & Academics
- Photography
- Music
- Office Productivity
- Health & Fitness.
Each of these thirteen categories has many sub-categories under them, and there are millions of students in each one. However, for the sake of profit, here are the most popular course categories available on Udemy.
- Entrepreneurship
- Web development
- Finance
- Game development
- Graphic design
- IT Certification
- Personnel transformation
- Data & Analytics
- Digital marketing; and
- Mobile apps.
The courses above can turn the most profit for affiliate marketers. However, is the commission rate worth it?
Commissions
A few years ago, the Udemy affiliate program could offer a 40% or 50% commission to affiliate members. However, that percentage slowly dwindled to where it is today.
For the job of promoting courses to their audience, the Udemy affiliate program pays a 15% commission to affiliates.
It also offers a 7-day cookie policy. If someone clicks your link and doesn’t buy, there’s no worry. That person can come back with a different device or through other means.
But because his IP address has been marked, you’ll get your cut.
However, that cut may be minimal. The average price for courses on Udemy is $10. 15% of $10 is just $1.5, which is an almost insignificant amount of money.
To make more money on Udemy, you’ll have to drive a huge amount of web traffic.
The payment threshold is $50. To make up to $50 at $1.5 per student, you’ll need at least 34 people to buy a course before you can cash out. To some, this is not a huge number of conversions, but for new affiliate marketers, it may be tough.
How to Join The Udemy Affiliate Program
It’s easy to join the Udemy affiliate program. There are no strict rules and regulations regarding memberships. You don’t need a website to join the affiliate program.
What you do need, though, is an account on VigLink, Rakuten, Linkshare, Flex Offers, or Awin. But all the above platforms require you to have a website to create an account.
Once you get an account on one of these platforms, you can search for the Udemy affiliate program. Once you see it, you can fill in the application form and submit it. And that’s it.
You just need to wait a little while for your confirmation message. Once you get that, you can start seeing information about your status in the Udemy affiliate program through your chosen platform.
There are many ways of promoting Udemy, but the company doesn’t let you do it alone.
Tools and Support
Udemy affiliate program offers tools and services to help you better market their courses and services. They run a lot of promotional campaigns, sales events, and advertisements, so there’s a huge amount of banners available.
Though they’re not customizable, you can still put them up on your website as an attractive link. Deep linking is also available.
There’s also an affiliate support personnel available. If you have any questions, complaints, or requests, they’re your go-to guys. However, the information on the affiliate’s website hasn’t Been updated in years.
There’s a severe lack of information on it, which is why many members of the Udemy affiliate program don’t know the opportunities available to them.
Tips to Promote Udemy
1. Pick a niche
Yes, Udemy has many courses. However, it’s better to specialize in one specific category or sub-category, rather than picking up many courses. Nobody trusts a Jack-of-All-Trades.
Interest in a lot of different things can show a lack of focus.
2. Share personal experiences
To do this, you might need to buy a Udemy course and experience it for yourself. If you haven’t already, we mean. Sharing your personal experience can make your users trust you far more than any reviews.
3. Course reviews
Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t review any courses at all. You should. If you find that your opinion is trusted by your audience, that’s all the more reason why you should be reviewing (and linking) courses.
4. Optimize your keywords
Look for low-competition, high-volume keywords to use in your content.
5. Optimize your website landing page (if you have one)
Make sure your landing page is attractive and conversion-worthy.
Pros and Cons of the Udemy affiliate program
Pros
- Established brand
- High conversation rates
- Dedicated support
- Promotional tools
Cons
- Low commission rate
- Short cookie duration
- The affiliate information page has not been updated in a long time.
Alternative eLearning Affiliate Programs
Udemy is not the only fish in the sea. There are many other alternative eLearning affiliate programs available. Here are a few:
1. Coursera affiliate program: With this program, you can earn as much as 45% in commissions. The baseline is 20% and considering individuals can buy degree programs of up to $15,000; it seems pretty fair to us.
2. Skillshare affiliate program: Affiliates get a $10 commission for every new sign-up even if the sign-up is a free trial which makes it one of the best pay-per-lead affiliate programs. There’s also a 30-day cookie duration.
3. Lynda affiliate program: The Lynda affiliate program is also the LinkedIn Learning affiliate program. Your commission can be 35% whenever your audience member buys a new course or a $40 per month subscription.
Or you can just use a network like Linkshare to an affiliate program.
Conclusion
Udemy’s affiliate program is great as a passive and not too profitable source of income. It’ll require a lot of constant effort to grow this affiliate program into a substantial income.
However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be promoted. But, we don’t recommend placing it as a top priority in your online education affiliate programs.
