Online Gardening School Affiliate Program

Welcome to my affiliates page! I’m excited to have you on board as an affiliate for the Online Gardening School. Before we get into the details of the affiliate program let’s talk quickly about the school.

The courses for the Online Gardening School were originally produced to be sold on Udemy.com., which is a great online learning platform. I have over 1700 students on Udemy and I will continue to use Udemy to sell my existing courses and future courses. But Udemy has a big limitation when it comes to affiliates (there is no affiliate program). So administering my affiliate program was very bulky. Also when I send someone from my own site (www.ourstoneyacres.com) to Udemy I loose all contact with that student and I can’t control what courses they are offered. I thought that could be a bit confusing for students and doesn’t offer my best branding options.

So I introduced the Online Gardening School in early 2017 to give my blog readers (and yours) a more enjoyable experience when shopping for my courses. The Online Gardening School is hosted using the Teachable platform which offers me a lot more flexibility.

Online Gardening School Courses

I currently have 5 courses that I actively sell on the Online Gardening School:

Year Round Gardening

This is my flag ship course and is also my best seller. It is 5.5 hours long and normal retail price is $69. Learn more about the course content by following this link.

Seed Starting Simplified

This one is kind of my baby! It was my first online course and is always a top seller. It was launched in January of 2015 and as of early 2017 it has over 850 students between the two platforms. Learn more about the content here.

Vegetable Gardening Basics

This course was published in December of 2015 and has been a very popular course. It is currently 2.5 hours long and I will be adding roughly an additional hour of content some time in 2017. Learn more about this course here.

PVC Drip Irrigation

This is the little course that never quits!! This course is a very consistent seller and sales of this course often leads to students purchasing other courses. It is currently 1.5 hours long and I have another 20 minutes of content that will be filmed and added to the course in the first quarter of 2017. This course seems to be more “evergreen” than any of my other courses and sells well all year long. It’s lower price also helps gets folks interested. It retails for $20 but I often sell it for only $10. Learn about the course here.

Growing Tomato Heaven

This course was first published in late May of 2016. A production problem delayed publishing until it was a little too late in the year for big sales. Despite that it still has nearly 100 students. I’m looking forward to big sales in spring 2017!! This course is the first of many courses I have planned that will be focused on only one crop! Look for more courses like this one in 2017 and beyond. Learn about the course here.

5 Garden Crops for your Food Storage

This is a short 45 minute course that I do not actively sell right now. It is used as a free course for anyone that signs up for my email list on my website. This course is not available for affiliate sales at this time but may be in the future if I decide to expand the content!

Well there you have it! As any creator, I of course have many other gardening courses “in the works”. My goal is to publish maybe as many as 4 new courses in 2017. Possibly one each quarter, I will keep you updated. New courses offer a unique selling opportunity to my affiliates. A lot of buzz and excitement can be generated in the first few weeks. So I will keep you in the loop!

The Online Gardening School Affiliate Program

Let’s give you the 30,000 foot overview first:

Affiliates receive 40% commission on any sales.
The Cookie associated with your affiliate link will stay on your readers computer for 365 days. This means any cross sales that happen will be credited to you account as well.
Teachable handles the payments! This is nice for me. Teachable tracks the sales associated with your affiliate account and makes a payment directly to your paypal account the first of each month.
I am willing to work with you to help us both be successful. We can run specials associated with your site or a post you might be promoting related to one of my course topics.
I can provide any needed artwork. You can see samples below (in fact if they work for your current promotion feel free to use them).
If you are planning on promoting a particular video via a review of the course, I am happy to give you a free log in for that course so you can watch it first.
You have the backing of a growing site. My blog Our Stoney Acres currently has around 100,000 page views per month with a surge in the summer time (gardening season) to over 250,000 page views. I also have very strong presence on Pinterest with 11,000 followers and a decent Facebook following. These traffic sources (especially Pinterest) can be leveraged to help drive traffic to your posts about my video courses!

A few things to keep in mind:

I have a 30 day money back guarantee on all my courses. So we have to wait 30 days before I can pay out affiliates. So you will receive your affiliate fees on the first of the month following the completion of the 30 day period. (Example: You have a sale on February 17th. You would be paid for that sale on April 1st.) But you should also know that in 2 years time I have only had 1 returned sale.
If we are running some kind of special price you must have a coupon code that also includes your affiliate code. I have to create that code so don’t try to just send folks to the school using only your affiliate link.
I reserve the right to review all posts and artwork related to my courses and approve the content. I need to keep my branding consistent.

How to Sign up

The sign up process for affiliates is very simple.

Just go to this link and enroll as a student on the Online Gardening School. (no need to buy or register for a course, just sign up as a student).
Once you have signed up please send me an email at: rick@ourstoneyacres.com
Put “Affiliate Application” in the subject line.
In the body of the email please introduce yourself and include a link to your website.
I would also like a bit of information about your site and social media platforms. So please give me an estimate of your page views for the last 30 days, and a list of the social media channels you use along with your follower counts and a rough estimate of how many email subscribers you have.

I don’t have any “minimum page views” or anything like that. I just want to get a feel for your site so that we can put together a sales plan!

Once I receive this email I will review the information and get back to you within 7 business days (usually much sooner). I will send you an affiliate agreement that will need to be signed and returned to me and then we can get started!!

You will also need to log back on to The Online Gardening School and add your payment information. Currently the ONLY payment option you can use is paypal. If you are not comfortable using paypal to receive payments then please do not sign up as an affiliate.

We can then communicate via email about how you feel your audience would best respond to my courses! You will get a personal touch with me, I’m not some giant corporation. I’m a small home run business and you will be dealing directly with me, the company owner!!