Udemy Affiliate Program Review (2021): Is It Worth It?

Udemy is a very popular platform for learning.

Here, creators can sell courses that they have crafted on a subject matter and make money on the video content that they create.

So, now the question arises on whether the Udemy affiliate program is truly worth your time and effort.

The Udemy affiliate program is absolutely worth it because the products on this learning platform are quite relevant in the market. It increases your chances of selling the products, and there is also a high payout of 20% commission on each course purchased through your affiliate link.

In this article, we will look at the various aspects of the Udemy affiliate program, including the following:

How to join the Udemy affiliate program
How to make money using this affiliate program
The pros and cons of the Udemy affiliate program

Keep on reading to learn how to use Udemy affiliate marketing to generate more income out of your blog or website.

What Is the Udemy Affiliate Program?

Udemy was founded by Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar, and Gagan Biyani almost ten years ago now in 2010.

The company has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, and offers over 150,000 courses on various subject matters. There are over 55,000 instructors. The courses are available in 50 different languages as well.

Udemy affiliate program is an affiliate marketing program that allows you to promote their courses by using affiliate links. You can sell their courses by embedding affiliate links to your website or blog’s content and earn a commission every time a user converts to a customer.

The affiliate program is very lucrative for a couple of reasons:

Udemy shares content related to learning and skill development on its site. This is particularly helpful from a sales perspective. The market is inundated with individuals who are looking to upskill themselves. Providing them access to courses that they will find beneficial will increase their chances of purchasing the course and, in turn, help you earn a commission.

The majority of these courses are moderately priced. Pricing is key to ensure that the courses can reach a larger demographic. Having decently priced courses also increases the chances of sales.

Udemy also offers discounts in certain cases so that students can afford the courses therein as well. Being more affordable through discounts makes it more appealing to students who have limited resources to pay for courses. As an affiliate marketer, this increases your audience and helps you generate more traffic to Udemy’s site.

Another interesting thing about the Udemy platform is that unlike other platforms where a monthly or yearly subscription is required, one can pay for each course individually on Udemy. This is great for buyers who do not need access to all courses and can control the costs by selecting the courses on a need basis.
Udemy also provides coupon codes and makes many other promotional materials to make it easier and more sustainable for the site visitors to make a purchase.

If you have a website or a blog that specializes in promoting online learning courses, then the Udemy affiliate program is just the right thing for you.

Nevertheless, if you have a webpage that is not particularly about promoting digital learning, you can still consider the Udemy affiliate program by linking a course on this platform to the products that you are selling on the website.

For instance, if you are promoting physical cooking products and utensils on your website, you can still embed an Udemy affiliate link that takes the user to a cooking class available on Udemy.

This way, your content will continue to remain relevant to your chosen domain, and it will also help with generating more business from your site

Here is a quick video explaining what the Udemy affiliate program is about:

Joining the Udemy Affiliate Program

You can join the Udemy affiliate program by visiting this page. By clicking the “Join Now” button, you will be redirected to a form.

All you will have to do is fill out this form with basic information related to your business type, contact information, and preferred payment threshold.

There is a membership agreement that you are required to sign. This membership agreement will also require you to sign a few declarations, such as those that affirm that you are 18 years old or older.

You also need to declare that you have read and accepted the membership agreement’s terms and conditions and any other ancillary agreement that they may allude to.

Once you fill out the form and submit it, it is then reviewed. This process can take three to four days before the review is complete, and based on the information you have provided, you will be notified of whether you have been accepted as an affiliate.

The process is quite straightforward, and there is no fee that you need to pay to be considered for this role.

Udemy Affiliate Program: Tracking

Tracking is vital for any affiliate program as that ensures that the sale is traced back to the affiliate who helped promote the site. This is how affiliates earn their commission every time a site visitor chooses to convert and join a course on Udemy.

Without the tracking feature, the entire affiliate program will have difficulty in functioning seamlessly. This is because the lack of a tracking software will be an impediment in knowing how the customers landed up on the website.

With a proper tracking solution, any visitor who lands up on Udemy’s site from your web page, and converts to a customer can be tracked down to you so that you qualify from the commission that is due to you.

The tracking is done with the help of cookies. These cookies help associate the sales with the particular affiliate who enabled the sales by driving the traffic to Udemy’s site.

Udemy allows the cookies to last for seven days. This means that any traffic that flows into Udemy’s site using your affiliate link and purchases a course from Udemy within seven days after visiting Udemy’s site using your affiliate link will qualify you to earn a commission on that sale.

For example, if someone clicked on the Udemy affiliate link on your website on December 1 and joined a course on December 5, then you will be qualified to earn a commission out of that sale.

You will still earn a commission even though it happened a few days after the visitor went to Udemy’s site after clicking on your link.

Udemy’s Commission Rates

Udemy pays a commission of 20% of the sales made. In comparison to most other affiliate programs available, this is a very generous cut. Of course, the affiliate rate depends on the specific value of the course that the buyer purchases, but at 20%, it will bring in a great commission amount.

One might argue that Udemy also provides a lot of discounts, rebates, and coupon codes, which bring down the sale value of the learning contents. However, if one were to look at it more objectively, these promotions will only make it easier for you, as a marketer, to make more sales.

Whatever amount is reduced by adding in the discounts and coupon codes will soon be redeemed due to the high sales you will be making as an affiliate. Added to the fact that Udemy is quite well-known makes the likelihood of a visitor making a purchase very high.

At the end, when all the sales are counted for, you will find that the promotions actually helped you more than what you might have achieved without them. It is a very strategic move that helps to make the decision for potential buyers and converts them to actual customers.

Payment Threshold at Udemy Affiliate Program

The Udemy affiliate program has a payment threshold of $50. This means that, as an affiliate, you need to have earned $50 in commission fees before you can qualify for a payment.

Payments are usually made using PayPal, which makes it easy for you to function from anywhere in the world. The payment for each purchase is a single payment, and Udemy does not give a recurring commission on any re-purchase of the same product by the same individual even if the individual may have first come across Udemy’s courses through your site.

How to Make Money Using the Udemy Affiliate Program

The way the Udemy affiliate program is designed is more like an in-house marketing program that Udemy has cultivated.

This program allows individuals who are the promoters to market the learning content available on Udemy’s site in exchange for a commission.

There is a great value that affiliate marketing brings to online learning platforms like Udemy. It is not just the content that helps generate revenue for the content creators, but the affiliate marketing ensures that there is a broader reach of the products to the masses.

To do this more effectively, you must understand certain key things about affiliate marketing for Udemy that will help you make more money:

Use Social Media Effectively

The audience today is scattered across various social media. As an affiliate marketer, it will be your advantage to be able to reach out to the audience from the entire spectrum of social media so that your audience base is widened and more people know about what is on offer on Udemy through your channel or website.

Microblogging is also quite common, and you can use a good catchphrase or a succinct message to get the idea across regarding the Udemy products you are campaigning for. It is essential that you understand the medium you are employing to spread the information to use it more effectively.

For instance, if you are using a vlog to drive more traffic to Udemy, you can have a moderately long vlog describing the various advantages of learning a new course through Udemy.

The same thing, when done through microblogging social media accounts, such as Instagram or Twitter, it will require you to be more succinct and use a phrase that is catchy and impactful.

You can also embed a link in the bio section of your social media along with some context so that more people can access the site easily.

Build a Website for Your Followers

This is just an extension of the previous point and builds up on the requirement of maximizing your social media presence. For instance, you are present on one social media platform, say YouTube, and do not have a website, it is highly recommended to opt for creating one.

This way, you will be able to provide a landing page for your audience to convert to customers. More about the importance of a landing page will be discussed in one of this article’s subsequent headings.

When you submit your form expressing your interest to be an affiliate for Udemy, they will check whether you have a substantial amount of traffic inflow to your website.

As a rule of thumb, it is recommended to have at least 5,000 visitors per month. Even better if the number is more than that.

This will help Udemy decide whether their affiliate link will have more visibility if it is placed in your blog or website and whether it will generate more sales.

The key to retaining the traffic on your website is to be consistent in writing quality content for your site so that you will be able to monetize the blog by earning revenue through referrals.

In fact, you can jump over to a Udemy course to learn how to build high-quality affiliate websites.

Maximize Your Niche

If you already have a blog or website that is up and running, you need to understand what draws your audience to your website. Suddenly digressing from your niche to sell learning courses that are not relevant to the content that you put out on your blog may not yield very favorable results.

Rather maximize your blog’s content to ensure that you can reach your audience with more content related to the topics that they are used to reading on your blog. For instance, if you blog about gardening, then it does not make sense to refer a personal finance course to your audience.

Due to the variety of courses available on Udemy, you can find any course relatable to your topic. Referring to the example above, you can continue to produce content for gardening and also embed a link for a course on gardening that is easily available on Udemy.

Over time, you can branch out to other content and courses that are somewhat related to gardening, such as landscaping, décor, etc., so that the addition of new content is not abrupt, and your audience still finds value in your content.

This way, you will be promoting something relevant for your content and will not put out your audience as the affiliate links will sit just right in the context of your content. It will also increase your sales as your audience will begin to explore the newer content and may want to learn more about it by subscribing to a course on Udemy.

Have a Great Landing Page on Your Website

Having a great landing page is the cornerstone of online affiliate marketing. An ideal landing page’s job is to ensure that the visitor to the site finds the information on that page to be relevant and useful and thus ends up clicking on the link provided there.

A great landing page will convince your audience to click on the affiliate link and visit Udemy’s site. There are various ways to increase the number of conversions by using the landing page properly. Here are a few ways you could do it too:

You can create a landing page that is targeted to a very specific audience. For instance, if your blog deals with cooking, and you would want to sell vegetarian cooking classes on Udemy, then you could craft a landing page that has content about vegetarian cooking.

You will have to optimize the webpage for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that users can easily find it when they put in the key search words. The fact that the visitors are using particular keywords indicates that they are already interested in what you have to offer and are more likely to click the affiliate link.

There is a technique that is being popularly used across the board now. Try giving away an ebook or a guide for free and collect personal information such as name and email address in return. This way, you can use the email addresses for remarketing to the visitors with more Udemy affiliate links.

Use a compelling image on your landing page to have an impact on your reader and get them hooked to the page easily. This will ensure that they would want to explore more about the content now that they are interested in what you have to say about the subject matter. As they explore the webpage to learn more about the topic, the probability of them clicking the link will also increase.

Promote Courses That Are Not Highly Discounted

While Udemy’s commission percentage is high at 20%, the fact that most of the courses are discounted or sold at a nominal price of $10 or thereabouts almost all through the year makes it quite difficult to earn huge commissions per sale.

In order to make more money and make it fast, you can choose a niche that is a little more expensive or one that is not so heavily discounted. For instance, if you could sell a $200 course instead of a $10 course, then the commission you will earn off of it would be equivalent to selling 20 of the $10 courses.

Before you start using the affiliate links for the high-end courses, you need to be certain that the course sits well with the content you are sharing and that it does not seem to be so overpriced that the reader may not be interested in spending that much amount.

You can know whether the price is exorbitant or not by asking yourself if you will be interested in paying the said amount for the course.

Build a Relationship With Your Audience

In order to make your readers trust your recommendations, it is key to build a strong relationship based on trust with your audience.

Trust will ensure that your audience returns to your site repeatedly whenever they need more information on the subject matter that you specialize in. They are also likely to subscribe to your channels and other social media accounts so that if you have any new information to share, they get a notification about it.

Once trust is established, any recommendations you may make, including Udemy courses, are more likely to be considered by your audience. There are many ways to build trust with your audience. Here are some great ways to do so:

Be consistent in creating content. By creating content regularly, you will not only be increasing your knowledge on the subject matter, but you will also give your readers and audience something to return to.

One of the quickest ways to build trust is by sharing personal anecdotes in your blog posts, video blogs, or other social media pages. This makes you more relatable to your audience. They will see someone who is just like them on the other side of the screen, perhaps someone who has gone through similar life scenarios as them, and so their tendency to trust you and your content will increase as well.

Write to show authority over the subject matter. It is only natural that the more you research on a topic and write about it, the more authority you will have over the subject. This has a domino effect. As the more authority you will garner over a subject matter, the more likely it will be that the audience will reach out to you for more information, and the more likely they are to click on the links you recommend.

Consider taking a Udemy course yourself to get an understanding of what the course contains to help your audience understand what is in store for them if they choose the same course. While this may prove to be a bit expensive if you plan on doing so for every course you recommend, using this technique for a couple of courses will help establish trust.

If you can, consider interviewing the Udemy instructor of that particular course that you are recommending. It will be the best thing for your audience to listen to them from the horse’s mouth and help them make a fully informed decision before they sign up for the course. It will also help establish trust, and they might even share the interview links with the author, thereby creating more sales for you.

Be innovative when creating content. If your niche is in gardening, there are likely many other websites that deal with the same subject. So, you will need to think of ways to bring traffic to your site, and that cannot be done by repeating the same things in the same manner in which it has been said before. Rather you will have to find your own voice, whether it is a distinct style or humor that will allow you to get more visitors.

Learn From Experience

Experience, in the end, is the best teacher. To know what works and what does not, it is sometimes best to understand things from hindsight. Understanding the nuances that go into marketing requires a thorough knowledge of how things are changing in the market as it often does, and how it will impact your sales.

This can only happen through experience and is a skill that can only be cultivated over time.

Learning tools are great to have a basic understanding of how affiliate marketing will help generate more income for you, but each affiliate program is different, so is Udemy.

Each of Udemy’s courses caters to different subject matters. A lot of which marketing campaigns will be most successful for you will depend on what unique strategies you employ to convert more visitors to customers.

To be truly successful as an affiliate marketer for Udemy, you will need to get on the ground and see for yourself what works best for your unique set up, and this can only happen with experience.

Check Out A Complete List Of My Favorite Affiliate Programs

Conclusion

This platform allows you to promote its courses regardless of what your niche could be. For instance, if you are using your blog to promote products on home décor, you could still go ahead and add an affiliate link on interior décor courses on Udemy to your blog.

Udemy gives you the freedom to promote any course that you would like from its vast database of courses.

There is the added advantage that the platform is so well-known, which is great news for you as an affiliate, as it makes the conversion of site visitors to actual customers all the easier.