15+ TOP Education Affiliate Programs — Best Education Affiliate Networks of 2024 for Online Money Making 

When it comes to affiliate marketing, the question every marketer and webmaster wants to find an answer to is what niche is profitable. Or, in other words, what products should you promote to earn the desired amount?  Gaming, dating, crypto, and dating niches are rightly seen as lucrative but they are also very competitive. But there is one more profitable niche that is often neglected — education.

According to Yahoo!Finance, the global e-learning market is expected to reach $457.8 billion by 2026. This estimation doesn’t include offline education, where sums are skyrocketing. The good thing is that there is no need to be an educator to benefit from this industry. Every business needs clients, and education is not an exception. To get more customers, educational institutions open affiliate programs and pay affiliates for driving new customers.

There are multiple programs meant for preschoolers, students, postgraduates, and even career changers. As an affiliate marketer, you do not invest in the development of physical products; you just use your knowledge and available resources to generate traffic to existing education affiliate programs.  So, today we discuss the education niche: specifics of the education niche, different types of affiliate programs in the niche, traffic sources, commissions & payouts, and, of course, case studies.  

Education Affiliate Offers: Types

Actually, you might have heard or even used some educational platforms. We will just remind you of some names, such as Udemy, Babbel, Coursera, StudyBay, FluentU, Lingualeo, etc.

Despite sharing the niche, education affiliate programs vary significantly and can be divided into three main types:

• Languages. As the name suggests, these are programs related to linguistic projects, such as language courses, online language lessons, and language schools.
• Self-development. This is a huge sub-niche that includes all kinds of personal growth and development projects, professional courses, and online training.
• Essay. Programs of this type offer assistance with classic academic projects from school essays to dissertations (for example, term papers, qualifying papers, and all kinds of essays).
• Academic programs. Various programs are provided by official educational institutions (online schools, Master’s Degree programs, and many other postgraduate courses and classes for higher professional education).

Education Affiliate Offers: Targeted Audience

The good news is that almost everyone could be included in a targeted audience for educational programs. Thus, it is important to segregate people into separate audiences for different educational offers. Obviously, you promote essay writing service to younger people (18-25), while some highly-specialized professional training or online MBA programs to other age categories with additional settings (for example, those who have higher education in the specific field, or fresh university graduates).

It comes as no surprise that the main audience for expensive, high-quality educational programs from well-reputed institutions is made up of adults of the age 25+ with a stable income.

   Education Affiliate Offers: Commissions&Payouts

Well, this might be the most interesting part for you as an affiliate. Naturally, the profit depends on the specific affiliate program, GEO, and the required action.

Based on available traffic sources, you can choose and promote inexpensive language or professional training courses, or higher-priced online MBA degrees programs from reputable universities.

Affiliate commission also varies significantly and depends on the required action. Usually, affiliates receive a percentage from the sale, aka revenue share. For instance, you promote an essay writing service with the price of $10 per page. On average, the complete paper costs from $100 to $140. As a rule, the average client orders from 5 to 7 papers. In this case, affiliates are paid 20% of each order. Some affiliate programs offer lifelong cookies, so you will receive commissions from all orders made by your referral.

Some affiliate programs pay $100-$150 per referring new student. Usually, high commission rates are associated with expensive professional courses, like data science, cloud computing, or financial risk management certificates.

Most affiliate programs pay from $2 to $5 per lead and 10-50% per sale (the average rate in the niche is 15-30%). Quite often companies work with different affiliate networks that offer different commission rates. For example, the commission rate for promoting Coursera offers via Rakuten is from 10% up to 45% (the rate depends on the traffic volume and conversions), while the same offer via Skimlinks pays affiliates 10% per sale.  

Education Affiliate Offers: Traffic Sources

Again, the variety of educational programs is tremendous. So, you can choose an affiliate offer based on available traffic (if you run an educational YouTube channel or have a website or blog in the education niche) or you adjust traffic sources (including paid ads) for a specific profitable offer. The second variant requires more knowledge and experience in digital marketing because of initial investments into paid advertising.  

In fact, almost all existing traffic sources can do well (there are no legal restrictions like in gambling or dating niches), including niche sites with search engine traffic, YouTube, social media platforms, teaser ads, etc.  

SEO and niche websites

Search traffic is rightfully considered the highest-quality traffic. A simple worldwide search via Google Trends for “MBA online degree programs” delivers the following results:

We realize that MBA degree programs are not the most popular in the education niche; however, every user is a potential customer, so we check for regional segregations:

Again, online MBA programs are quite expensive, so you deal with high stakes in terms of commissions. Sure, you have to carry out detailed keyword research before applying SEO techniques to your niche site. Keep in mind that people who search for educational programs will be picky when it comes to content. Thus, make sure you provide top-quality content.

Consider the idea of cooperating with reputable content websites — sometimes they drive quality traffic to integrated niche sites.

Another option is paid search traffic. We searched for the same query in Google:

As you can see, BerlinSBI and Stanford — these two educational institutions do not need an introduction and are known and recognized globally — promote their programs via paid search. The paid search might seem a bit complicated to beginners, but experienced webmasters and marketers are well aware of PPC ads’ power.

Below you will find Case study 2 which describes how a webmaster has changed the almost abandoned education niche site and sold it for $11 500.

   Social Media (Facebook & Instagram)

Social media traffic both free and paid if used correctly might be a gold mine. Besides, Facebook offers multiple targeting parameters to hit the required category of people. If you promote essay writing service, you target younger students aged 18-23; if you promote higher education programs, you select an older audience and add more parameters, for example, college graduates 25+.

Precise targeting (GEOs and demographic characteristics) seasoned with proper creatives and thorough testing might pay off lavishly.

Below is another approach to creatives for the Master’s Degree program:   

Important: Essay writing services are considered grey business; thus, promotion of these services is not very welcome on Facebook. However, you can still find your way to deliver ads to the Facebook audience.  Below you can see the example of the the affiliate marketing campaign for one of the services:

Additionally, you can promote affiliate offers in Facebook groups or via education-dedicated pages with targeted audiences. Case study 1 (at the end of the article) tells about using Facebook Ads for the promotion of an educational application.  

YouTube

At present, when we need information we search on Google or YouTube. The video platform is the second largest search engine. If you do well with videos, you can open a dedicated YouTube channel and post videos. Video materials can be in the form of various program explanations, reviews, or comparisons.

In any case, you need to do keyword research and use keywords in video titles and descriptions so interested people would find your videos. Affiliate links you add to descriptions.

Note: you need to make an affiliate disclosure. In other words, you have to inform people that when they purchase the advertised products, you will earn a commission. A disclosure can be in the form of a statement or even a hashtag (#ads or #advertising).    

Other Traffic Sources

Email marketing, teaser traffic, push notifications, and pop-ups might also be useful. Actually, most education affiliate programs do not set traffic source restrictions. You can be an active forum member or proficient with push notifications. In most cases, the success of your campaign depends on the creatives you use and text descriptions.    

Education Affiliate Networks

Affiliate marketing requires expertise and skills that not every educational institution has in-house. Yes, some larger institutions run their in-house affiliate programs and do not join any networks. Other businesses and institutions join affiliate networks and delegate them the headache of direct communication with publishers so that they can focus on improving their services and products.

Additionally, affiliate networks help publishers to find a suitable offer in a shorter time — no need to search all over the net for a good affiliate in-house program, you can find all active offers in the education niche in a couple of clicks on a single platform. Many reputable affiliate networks work with the education niche, for example, Rakuten, Awin, Sovrn, Impact, FlexOffers, ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, and some other well-known platforms.

So, if you are registered on one of the large networks, you can search the platform for education affiliate offers to promote.  

Note: Another important feature of the education niche is its seasonality. Most educational institutions enroll students at specific times (fall and spring); essay writing services are in high demand in April-May and November-December. Thus, analyze academic plans for colleges in targeted countries to plan your ad campaigns.

Many specialized networks or programs provide affiliates with detailed information and analytics on offers: GEO specifics, popular academic fields, traffic sources, and promo materials.  

Case study 1. Mindvalley: Increasing Education App Installs with Facebook Ads

Mindvalley is a global learning and personal development company with headquarters in the US, Estonia, and Malaysia. Mindvalley offers in-house courses for personal growth, productivity, wellbeing, mindfulness, etc. The platform is well-known and has tons of visitors; however, the company has decided to promote its own revamped application and turned its attention to the social media giant, Facebook. Actually, Facebook shares this case study as one of the most successful app install campaigns.

Actually, this is the test campaign that ran in February and March 2021. Many businesses in the education niche run affiliate programs to promote their services and applications offering attractive commissions to publishers for generating targeted traffic. Mindvalley has proven that Facebook still remains one of the mainstream traffic sources in the niche of education.

So, to increase app installs and keep the costs low, Mindvalley used Facebook Automated App Ads that allow up to 50 different images and videos with up to five ad text variations. The good thing is that they were able to use dynamic creative optimization to test every combination automatically.

Mindvalley used a series of 25 photo ads featuring platforms courses, workshops, and activities. The best-performing ads were used across Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network. Optimized for the app installs objective, the campaign targeted a broad audience in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

   As a result of the test campaign, Mindvalley received:

• 58x higher conversion rate (via Automated App Ads)
• 35% increase in app installs
• 26% lower cost per install

Zaid Saad, the Advertising Specialist at Mindvalley, noted that they "have seen a satisfactory increase in conversion lift and app installs while keeping the acquisition costs low.  With a large number of creative assets to work with, we were able to ensure that the highest-performing ads were seen by a global audience."

Facebook has again proved to be a great traffic source when it comes to the education niche.

Case study 2. From $15/month to $390/month and to the $11 500 website sale price

The case study is dated 2018, but it represents a bright example of how niche sites in the education niche can perform as a source of income. James, the former owner of the site, revealed a step-by-step procedure he applied to revive a site that he purchased for only $400 and turned into an active real platform that could be further monetized in the future.

Most webmasters working in the education niche do not publish their income reports and reveal the income they receive from education affiliate programs. Quite reasonable. The education niche is known for its high commissions, so no one needs more competitors in this lucrative business field.  We are thankful to James for opening up some secrets. Let’s dive into the details.

Back in 2016, James was searching for a website to purchase when he found an education niche site on Flippa.com that was on sale for only $400. Leaping ahead, James sold this website for $11 500 after 36 months.

He shared the stats right before selling the site (February 2018):  

As you can see, the site was 2 years old with organic traffic. As a monetization strategy, James used Google AdSense and Quinstreet.

When he purchased the site he asked for the details and figured out that the monthly income was only $15 and the former owner decided to sell it because he had no time and too many sites to maintain. Another important detail that James learned was about the content: articles were written by a freelancer who created the content for $5 per 1 000 word articles. After checking all the details, such as the last 12 months unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, most visited pages, GEOs, and mobile vs. desktop traffic, James has got a clear idea of what he should do.

Over the 18 months he owned the website, James implemented the following strategy:

• Find low-competition long-tail keywords
• Build a freelance writing team
• Add Quinstreet education lead generation
• Optimize for page speed and mobile-friendliness
• Google AdSense A/B split testing.

Based on his previous experience, James knew very well that "focusing content around low-competition long-tail keywords has been shown to be extremely profitable".  This, he immediately used a Keyword Research tool (Long Tail Pro) to discover the easiest keywords we could go after.  

Initially, he used the following criteria to find keywords:

• Word count of 4 or more
• KC score of less than 40
• Traffic volume of any amount
• Keyword contains the word "Best"

After preparing high-quality content for the list of discovered keywords, he simplified the keyword search by removing the need to contain the word "Best". This way he got all customer-intent keywords; they target “How to”, “What is”, and other types of articles. James made a list of 50+ keywords. The implemented approach helped to increase the overall authority of the website.    

Next, he hired freelance native English-speaking writers willing to create 1 000+ word articles for $10-$15 per article and post articles directly to WordPress.

Then, he got busy adding more monetization via Quinstreet. As James said, “programs like Quinstreet provide publishers with access to lead generation tools”.  He described the process:

• Visitors come to the website
• They fill out the form to find an education degree
• They are shown various education institutions
• They click, and we get paid!
• They fill out the education institution’s form, and we get paid even more!

This method increased the site revenue by $100 to $200 per month. James also noted that the site might be monetized further via several affiliate programs in the education niche. However, he intended to revive the site and prepare it for sale. The only other monetization method he used was Google AdSense.

For that, he ran A/B split testing to determine how many advertisements he should place on the website and what size of ads (small or large blocks, link units, or skyscrapers) to use. He decided to run a test with AmpedSense, a plugin that allows creating numerous Ad Recipes, which can be seen as specific split tests.

Next, he got busy optimizing for page speed and mobile-friendliness. He used the WP Super Cache plugin for page speed optimization and the Compress JPEG & PNG Images plugin to optimize all JPEG and PNG images automatically. As for mobile-friendliness, he recommends going with a highly-efficient mobile-friendly by default theme.

As for maintenance, 2 articles were added every month (1 article every 2 weeks). No other monetization methods were implemented but he saw "that the website was experiencing consistent growth month over month. That was a good sign to sell the website!" James sold the site for $11 500 on the same platform where he had bought it initially, Flippa.

Conclusion

Oftentimes we do not see money-making opportunities in some industries. However, if you pause and think, the education niche has unlimited potential in terms of income: people studied, study, and will study. Whether an alphabet for preschoolers in the form of interactive videos or higher-level professional education, there are educational programs for everyone.

Universities, colleges, online schools, online courses, and educational app developers need more clients to enroll in their education programs or download educational applications. You can become an intermediary who helps education institutions find their students and helps students find the required courses. It feels great. It feels even greater when you see your bank account topped with commissions earned on education affiliate programs.