Last week Sparkeo launched a revamped homepage, a brand new player and – drum roll – an affiliate program. This is a feature I have been really waiting for.
I am a firm believer of spreading quality educational content through affiliate systems and it was one key feature I recommended Frederic Aknin to implement in his platform, hence I am particularly excited to see the launch.
The affiliate system is very easy to set up and offers a fair split. As you know the normal commission of Sparkeo is 30% of the revenue. If you opt in for the affiliate system Sparkeo will give the first 10% from their commission, the rest will come from the creators side. Example:
[...] if you sell a video course for $20 and decide to give the affiliate 30% of the sales, the division will be:
You the expert: 50% – $10
The affiliate: 30% – $6
Sparkeo: 20% – $4
Darien Brown recently made a good point in the comments about teachers who don’t want to be marketers and I totally agree on that. Creating content alone is a heavy task and why bother with the distribution of your content if there are thousands of internet marketers out there who are earning a living by selling other people’s content for commission?
Another option I can see are educators who create static content like exercises, texts etc and host it on their own blogs and websites who are now able to add matching video content to it and make an extra income through commission.
But of course, all of that depends on how many educators will create video courses on Sparkeo now, plus I’m missing Sparkeo offer a way to search their library. At the moment I don’t see how someone who might be interested in embedding a Sparkeo course on his website can actually find matching content because once again: educators don’t want to be marketers. Even though Sparkeo has this great affiliate option now, it will basically remain useless as long as there is no portal for people who are interested in embedding those videos.
Sparkeo needs to take the role of the middleman here. The idea of quote
Copy the code and send it to any affiliates you know
makes absolutely no sense. Why should an educator know affiliates? Why should they bother? Even I would not know someone to send the link to and I learned a lot about affiliate marketing in the past three years. This is the work Sparkeo needs to do for the 20% commission and setting up a portal where all available videos are presented by category cannot be that hard to do.
Other changes that came with the affiliate program are a new player which is said to be much faster compared to the previous one. Loading times for videos are very important, especially if you are planning to sell them. At the moment the player is stripped down, meaning all features you knew from the old player are not (yet) implemented in the new version. Obviously, the Sparkeo team would like to have some input on which features are actually needed to make the player as easy as possible.
A note from my side: get rid off the Social Media – sharing overkill. No one shares paid content via social networks. Important is the embed function to spread the affiliate feature all the rest will be done on the website where the video will be embeded or the mailinglist of the affiliate anyway.
What we have is a really good but hidden and thus non accessible affiliate marketing system. A logic next step needed to be setting up a portal similar to YouTube or 5min where people would be able to browse all the available video courses.
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