What’s the Kajabi Affiliate Program?
The Kajabi affiliate program is a feature that will enable other people to help you promote your online courses and get paid for it!
This feature is currently only available on the Growth and Pro plan.
You can see Kajabi's pricing plan on their website.
You will have the ability to turn it on and access the Affiliate dashboard when you can manage your affiliates, see some statistics on how they’re doing, and share links to promote.
At its very core, an affiliate program is fairly simple:
Your affiliate partners use their affiliate links to promote your online courses, and if someone buys through it, they will receive an affiliate commission.
How does the Kajabi Affiliate Program work?
The Kajabi affiliate program compares fairly well to other online course platforms and is easy enough to manage. Let’s break it down:
(You may want to take a look at our full Kajabi review before!)
Kajabi Affiliate Sign up
To get started with your Kajabi affiliate program, you’ll have to either manually add people to it or simply ask them to register themselves with the provided link.
They’ll then login in a separate place than for your courses.
Once they sign up, you will see them appear in your Kajabi affiliate admin dashboard
The process is fairly simple both for you and your affiliate and the interface should be intuitive enough that you don’t have to baby step your affiliates through it.
Kajabi Affiliate Commission
As mentioned before, the way any affiliate program works is that your affiliates will get a commission on the sales they help you make.
The Kajabi affiliate program only allows for a percentage of the sale (and not for a fixed amount), which may be limiting for you depending on your offers.
You can set a commission at the general level or for each specific Offers you have in Kajabi.
This flexibility here is very useful to have as you may need to keep an eye on your margin and offer different commissions for different courses or during special promotions.
As a side note, the standard affiliate commission for online courses usually ranges between 20% and 50%.
If that’s not enough, you can also set a different commission for a specific affiliate by going directly into their profile.
So far the Kajabi affiliate system is pretty flexible!
Kajabi Affiliate Links & Cookie
Now, the way you then enable your affiliate to promote your courses is by adding “shared links” to their dashboard.
This can be a link to a landing page, a checkout or any URL you decide, even if this isn’t a page hosted on your Kajabi account!
This link will then automatically be transformed to incorporate the affiliate’s unique ID and this final URL is what they will see in their dashboard.
Usually, the more touch points and options you offer your affiliates to send people to, the better.
Something to understand too is that this doesn’t have to be a one-touch sale.
For example if you’re running a webinar campaign and want your affiliate to send people to register to it and get a commission if the user ends up buying, this can work too!
As long as the affiliate is using one of the links you’ve shared with their unique ID, the affiliate cookie will be dropped on that end user.
Once the user is “cookied” and if a purchase is made within the referral commission window you've set up (30, 60 or 90 days), Kajabi will know to attribute the sale to the affiliate.
Kajabi Affiliate Coupon Codes
If you don't want to just rely on cookies and also wants to give an extra discount for people buying your courses through an affiliate, you can also setup special coupons!
The way this works is that you will create a Coupon which the Kajabi system will then make unique for each affiliate and enable tracking for:
This is a great way to give more incentive for your affiliate as well as making tracking more accurate in some situations.
Indeed if a users switches device, uses incognito windows or clear their browser, this can impact tracking with cookies...
Kajabi Affiliate Payout
This may be a limitation for some users, although it’s fairly standard for most affiliate programs, but the affiliate commission payout is manual.
It means that although you can use the Kajabi affiliate dashboard to track clicks, impressions and sales, the actual payment will not be automatic and you will need to do this yourself.
Although it is a drawback, this should be manageable, even if you are dealing with large volumes of sales.
You can easily export all data from the affiliate dashboard and then do a Paypal mass payment to settle the affiliates balance all at once.
This also gives you some flexibility on refund windows and other possible misattribution.
Affiliates are prompted to enter their PayPal email when signing up, which you can then easily find in their profile.
Kajabi Affiliate Communication & Management
Since Kajabi also has an integrated email marketing system, you’ll also be able to communicate with your affiliates.
That being said, you won’t really be able to filter them out easily in your People tab and will have to use the Announcements inside your Kajabi affiliate dashboard.
This can work great to send out some simple updates on your future campaigns etc. but if you really are running big affiliate campaigns, this may be limiting for communication.
Additionally however, you could create a separate Community product or invite these affiliates to a Facebook group in order to create a real conversation.
But we would have appreciated a few more tools and automations in the Kajabi affiliate system in order to make this easier!
FAQ: What Can You Do With The Kajabi Affiliate Program?
As for most tools in an all-in-one platform like Kajabi, the affiliate program is working very well but not great.
And some users decide to use external cart systems, like Thrivecart, for more affiliate programs…
That being said, most people will be just fine with the native Kajabi affiliate program, but may have several questions.
Let’s address the most common ones!
How long is the cookie lifetime?
The cookie lifetime, or referral conversion window is 30, 60 or 90 days.
This is something you can adjust for what makes the most sense with your programs!
Is it a first or last touch attribution model?
It’s a last touch attribution model.
This means that if a user initially clicks through Affiliate 1’s link but then later on click’s on Affiliate’s 2 link and purchases, the attribution and commission will go to Affiliate 2.
Can you do a tier 2 affiliate program?
No.
This means that if your affiliate wanted to recruit other affiliates, they wouldn’t get a Tier 2 commission on these sales.
Can you upload email swipes, social media posts and other affiliate assets for them to use?
Weirdly, not easily.
At least not in a static place in your affiliate’s dashboard so they can easily access it.
You can use Announcements to manually send an email to all of your affiliates in which you can share your campaigns assets or simply have a standalone page where all of these are downloadables.
Can you give your affiliates a special discount or offer?
Yes!
In your Affiliate settings, you'll be able to setup an Affiliate Coupon Code, which will then be personalized (read: unique) for each affiliate.
Can your affiliate easily offer additional bonuses to incentivize purchase through their link?
The Kajabi affiliate system doesn’t allow for your affiliates to easily do this, but it’s still possible!
But this would have to be very manual and a combined effort with you as the product owner.
The main reason why this isn’t very accessible is because your affiliates don’t have access to the details (beyond just the name) of the people that purchase through their affiliate links.
Therefore they would hardly be able to deliver on these special bonuses.
Can I have my affiliates sign an agreement before promoting my products?
The Kajabi affiliate sign up form does not allow you to add terms and services, or agreement to sign before signing up.
However you could simply add a mention to it in one of the fields, or have them do that before sending them to this sign up form.
Again, a bit of a workaround but possible!
