If you are interested in the e-learning space, Udemy provides an excellent opportunity to make additional income promoting courses created by experts in any niche.
For anyone just getting his feet wet in the affiliate program, this review will help you see the program’s opportunities and downsides.
Udemy Affiliate Program
Types of products: Training and Courseware Marketplace
Where to join: Udemy Affiliate Page
Commission structure: 15%
Cookie length: 7 Days
Payment Methods: Paypal, ACH
Come to think of it, one of the most important assets that any of us have is our knowledge. The knowledge industry is one of the oldest.
From the ancients coming up with philosophy, sociology, mathematics, and alchemy, the learning boat keeps sailing to modern-day institutional education.
In the digital world, learning has become so much easier. A simple Google search can be the beginning of a new career and a new life.
Udemy is a digital academy that allows thousands of people to share their skills and knowledge with others. It is an evergreen platform that has changed lives and continues to be of significant impact.
About Udemy
Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar, and Gagan Biyani founded the company in May 2010. They knew the opportunities that learning brought and aimed to help people change their narrative; by offering a platform where anyone worldwide can access education at an affordable cost.
Eren, having never been fond of classrooms, knew that many others, like him, would find great value on the platform.
One powerful secret that he understood was that talented individuals are found everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, that is not true for opportunities. Geographical scope, language, and several other unavoidable barriers often limit us.
The internet serves as a tool to bypass some of these barriers. Udemy provides a platform that enables people to access courses and videos in over 65 different languages effortlessly. They have over 50,000 instructors and over 130,000 courses.
With over 400 million course enrollments, Udemy is the largest market for anyone looking to learn something new.
The instructors are not your typical teachers. They are masters of their craft and are looking to share what they have gained along the way with others looking to go through the same path.
It’s FREE for course creators
It is 100% free to sign up and create courses using Udemy. Now you are wondering how they earn money; simple, they take 50% of organic sales that your course makes.
If you market your courses using your channels, then Udemy lets you keep 94% of all the money your course earns. And if you use Udemy’s paid user acquisition channels, you keep 25% of all earnings.
Their pricing model makes it easier for creators to come up with courses. And if you have no marketing budget, they help you get sales and still earn from your course.
Go to our affiliate programs page for more program reviews.
Applying To Be A Udemy Affiliate
Udemy works with affiliates to help people gain access to the right courses. With many niches to choose from, affiliates have the option of selecting a niche that interests them and promoting these courses on their sites, earning them handsome commissions.
One significant positive aspect of their affiliate program is that it is evergreen. That means that people are always interested in gaining the right knowledge to catapult them to the next phase of life.
Here’s how to get started as an affiliate:
1. Sign up
To promote Udemy courses, you are first required to sign up for the program. Rakuten Advertising runs its affiliate program.
Hence, once you click the ‘join now’ button on their affiliate’s page, you will be redirected to Rakuten Linkshare sign-up page. You can also sign up on sites such as Flex Offers and Impact.
It takes them 2-3 business days to review your application and get back to you. Once you are approved, you are free to promote any course in any field on your channels.
2. Get your unique affiliate link
They will provide you with custom affiliate links and preferred banners to add to your content and promote the courses.
They also give you tools that help you sell their lessons more efficiently and track your earnings as you go.
3. Promote and earn
You can earn a sustainable income as an affiliate. The more you promote, the more you are likely to make from Udemy.
What goes on your website is entirely up to you. If you like the gardening niche, then, by all means, you can promote gardening courses to your audience and earn from them.
They have deep-linking opportunities. That means you can promote a specific course and direct people to a particular page rather than their homepage.
Besides, they have a 7-day cookie duration, which is a significant drawback to the company since most affiliates’ networks allow up to a 30-day cookie period.
It was previously 30 days. But when the affiliate program moved to Rakuten Advertising, that was no longer the case.
Udemy Affiliate Commission Rates
The company is the most lucrative e-learning academy today. Most courses range between $19.99 and $199.99.
Affiliates earn up to 15% commission on all sales – they have since lowered it to that. Gone are the days when the rates were 50% per sale.
Let’s do the math and see the earning possibilities.
If you promote a single course worth $100 and get 20 signs up, you will make $300. If you want to make at least $1,000 per month from that particular course, you need to bring in at least 70 customers.
However, the benefits are once you’re approved to be an affiliate, you gain access to exclusive content, coupon codes to purchase other courses, and discounts.
They pay via Visa, PayPal, direct bank transfer, and checks.
Affiliate Tools and Support
Tools and Creatives for affiliates
As mentioned earlier, Udemy gives its affiliates tools and creatives to help them in their promotions.
A simple and easy affiliate dashboard
You will not be starting and growing blindly. Rakuten Linkshare has a simple and easy-to-use affiliate dashboard that keeps track of your progress.
You will quickly know how many people bought courses using your links and see how much you have earned from your promotions in real-time.
Banners of varying sizes
As an affiliate, you have access to banners with an embedded affiliate link. You can use them on your site, blog, or send it to your subscribers. There are different categories of banners, such as promotional banners to promote specific courses with discounts.
Deep linking
If you want your referral to go to a specific page within the site, you just need a deep link. Such that someone can go directly to a landing page and not to a homepage where he can get confused and end up eithe