How to Set Up Your Teachable Affiliate Program

All the way from the United Nations to your average digital creator, the course creation industry booms in pretty much every business niche. It gives any professional a platform and business opportunity to capitalize on their unique skillset and knowledge. 

Maybe you’ve had success with Teachable but crave more signups and revenue. That’s where affiliate marketers come in to offer a lucrative opportunity.

We’ll walk you through Teachable as a platform, how to use it for successful affiliate marketing for your brand, and share how to integrate it with Tapfiliate’s affiliate software for maximal performance.  

Teachable Explained

Teachable is an online course platform that allows you to turn your knowledge into a sellable product. You can use it to create, host, and market a range of courses and educational assets like:

• Self-paced courses
• Mini-courses
• Live courses
• Cohort-based courses
• Free tutorials
• Drip (module) courses
• Coaching sessions

Nowadays, you can even use it to sell digital and physical products through your course as well. 

The platform is also quite intuitive, with easy drag-and-drop items, logical flows of information, and visually accessible buttons for your audience to easily consume your content. Plus, you can create different types of resources for your courses like live Qs and As and sessions, video content, FAQs, meeting URLs, e-books, downloadable workbooks, and more. 

While you can use the platform for courses in any niche, the most popular tend to be coaching, personal development, health, finance, business, and marketing.

As for revenue? It varies. Course creators can set their own course prices for students, though they’ll have to pay a monthly fee for their chosen tier of the Teachable subscription. But there’s no shortage of revenue here. Just in 2021, the number of course creators that brought in six-figure, substantial incomes on Teachable increased by 38%. Seven-figure income earners increased by 48%. 

So, how does all this play into affiliate marketing? 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is a business model that compensates affiliates with a commission for selling a brand’s products or services. In the context of online courses and digital products, the course creator is the brand that awards the commission, and the affiliate is the one who leads the creator to a new prospect or course sale. 

So let’s say you have a Teachable course or two under your product offerings. How do you get more people to sign up? You might have marketed your courses on your personal or business social media platforms, but you can leverage more audiences with an affiliate’s following — especially if that affiliate is a trusted voice in your industry. 

Here’s an example. Say you’re a seasoned architect and you created a course about design presentation templates. An architectural student promotes your course to their following of classmates and scores you two new signups. If the course is $100 and the commission is 10%, you’d pay the affiliate $10 per signup (total $20). Sure, you gave up a little of your revenue. But without that affiliate, you wouldn’t have gotten that sale. 

The most profound benefit of affiliate marketing for selling courses is the additional revenue and lead generation. On top of that, the right affiliates can support your brand authority and customer loyalty through the credibility their audience has in them, and subsequently, your brand. 

Specifically with Teachable, course creators have great flexibility with adjustable commissions, cookie windows, and the ability to share promotional marketing materials to support your affiliates.

Ready to add affiliates to your Teachable course? Keep reading!

How to Set Up an Affiliate Program for Your Teachable Course

Step one is to create appealing landing pages for potential affiliates. Teachable offers a landing page creation feature on its platform, where you can invite students to become affiliates. But what if you have external affiliates not currently enrolled in your course? In that case, you’d need to sign up for Teachable’s Pro Plan. 

Here’s the thing: you can access basic affiliate management functions this way, but imagine you had multiple affiliate programs and a wide roster of affiliates? Wouldn’t it make sense to manage everything from one unified platform? That’s where Tapfiliate’s Teachable integration comes in. 

When you integrateTeachable with Tapfiliate, you can unlock more in-depth affiliate management features. All you need to do is plug in a little code within your Teachable Code Snippets on your page editor, introduce an additional box to invite new affiliates on your purchase page, and test a conversion to make sure everything works smoothly. 

Just check out our video tutorial on how to do that. 

The benefits? Track coupon codes, share creative branded assets with affiliates, reward strong performance with bonuses, offer flexible commissions, and overall streamline your entire affiliate program. 

Choosing a Commission Rate for Your Teachable Course

Teachable’s affiliate commission rates are based on the percentage of revenue generated, running anywhere from 1 to 100%. You can toggle different rates for different affiliates on the Teachable platform within your affiliates’ profiles. Generally, commission rates for digital products range between 5% to 30%; however, some course creators might bend this threshold to either:

• Promote more profitability
• Appeal to higher-quality affiliates

But percentage-based commissions fall short in fair compensation for your top affiliates. What if an affiliate leads you to a customer that purchases multiple course offerings throughout a long relationship with your brand? You can properly reward that affiliate through Tapfiliate’s lifetime commissions, which compensates them for every purchase that comes from that lead. 

Additionally, Tapfiliate offers product-specific commissions where you can pay out higher (or lower) commissions depending on a specific course offering. 

Each affiliate offers unique value to your program, meaning you should consider every factor before setting a commission rate. Consider the affiliate’s following and likelihood of conversions, performance, niche, and marketing channels. Do they have proven strategies for success?

Then, you’ll factor all those details into your industry, competition, and sales goals to come up with a commission rate and structure that works for you. 

Remember to prioritize competitive commission rates. If your competitors reward affiliates more handsomely for leads, you’ll miss out on potential partners. 

Psssst. Check out our guide on how to set commission rates for social media influencer and affiliate partners. 

How You Can Track Sales and Commissions

Keep in mind that Teachable’s affiliate payout options via BackOffice are limited to PayPal. But why limit affiliates with payouts? Tapfiliate’s integration with Trolley enables affiliate payouts via multiple payment processors (like Stripe and PayPal). Plus, we offer accessible, international wire transfers to ensure payment restrictions are never a barrier for your chosen affiliates. 

How to Find and Recruit Affiliates to Promote Your Teachable Course

Your first pool of potentially high-quality affiliate advocates? Start with people who know the value of your course: your students! You can invite past students or customers from other platforms and sources with Tapfiliate’s automated referral program. 

Another way to recruit affiliates? Dive deep into internet buzz within your niche. Which influencers discuss topics and products aligned with your band? These are great voices to recruit to your affiliate program. Outreach should be streamlined and emphasize how a particular candidate can benefit from your program. 

Tapfiliate’s secret sauce for game changing affiliate recruitment? Our MLM Program, which offers incentives to your existing affiliate network to find more affiliates (in this case, sub-affiliates). Your original affiliates will gain commission revenue every time someone they recruited as an affiliate makes a purchase! 

Tips to Keep Your Affiliates Motivated

The best way to motivate an affiliate starts with rewards and compensation. 

If they have the potential to bring you serious conversions, they need to feel incentivized to do so. Tapfiliate offers performance-based milestones and bonuses, as well as flexible commission structures to reward top-performing affiliates. We also offer an in-platform messenger for easy communication and creative asset sharing, triggered announcements, and a user-friendly affiliate dashboard where they can feel organized and aligned with your affiliate program. 

Affiliate engagement can also look like promotions where they can make more commission on a particular product. You might consider sharing resources with affiliates to make their job as seamless as possible, like branded assets that they can easily share as social media posts, as well as strategic guides on increasing sales. 

In short? You’ll motivate your affiliates when you improve the affiliate experience with: 

• Regular communication
• Performance rewards
• Flexible commissions
• Wide range of marketing materials and resources
• A supportive affiliate community 

How to Track the ROI of Your Teachable Affiliate Program

Curious how much your affiliate journey pads your revenue? You can start to track affiliate earnings right on Teachable’s platform, which looks like: 

• Total affiliate sales (how much money you’ve made in sales through each individual affiliate referral link)
• Total affiliate earnings (total earnings earned by all y’our affiliates combined)
• Average affiliate sales (total sales divided by the number of affiliates)

But what if you wanted to go even deeper? Say you wanted to assess individual affiliate performance by region or channel, or product-specific conversions in a certain time period? You’ll need more filtration and segmentation from your reporting, which Teachable just doesn’t offer. 

If you really want to track ROI? You’ll need Tapfiliate’s custom reporting dashboards to toggle custom metadata fields and generate data insights most valuable to your brand’s bottom line. We track clicks and conversions in real-time. View everything in our user-friendly interface, or export raw data into CSV format. 

Start Your Teachable Affiliate Program Today

Teachable is a top course creation platform that gives creators not only a platform to host and create high-quality courses, but also the ability to market those courses right in the platform. 

Pair the Teachable Affiliate Program with Tapfiliate’s real-time affiliate tracking, flexible commissions, automated workflows, and endless tools for affiliate motivation? You’ll have a serious revenue-generating machine of an affiliate program. 

Chrissy Kapralos

Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called No Worries Writing Co. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories. When she isn’t writing about the latest tech and marketing content, you’ll find her traveling, cooking, or watching horror movies.