Kajabi is such an impressive platform. And its affiliate program is just as impressive. There’s no need to keep that a secret. In fact, Kajabi is my favorite overall platform out there and the affiliate program is also one of my favorites. In fact, it’s #3 on my list of the top affiliate programs for 2022.
But, is it an affiliate program you should join? I am a huge fan of Kajabi and think it’s a perfect solution for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. However, on the surface, Kajabi seems expensive which initially can turn people away. So you really need to know your audience to really take advantage of the affiliate program.
We will dive into more detail in this article, so if you’re still curious about what Kajabi can do for you and if it’s a good solution, keep reading!
Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Kajabi so some of the links on this page are affiliate links. However, I do not recommend Kajabi to you because I am an affiliate. I am an affiliate and user of Kajabi because it’s an amazing solution that helps me run my online business. The purpose of this article is to help you decide if it’s the right decision for you. Also, using an affiliate link on this site helps support us and our mission and we are so, extremely grateful for you! If you have any questions about Kajabi, always feel free to reach out. Thanks!
What is Kajabi?
When Kajabi launched in 2009, it was mostly just a platform that allowed you to launch online courses. Today, it’s a platform that lets you do almost everything you need to do to run your online business. And that’s where the real value comes in.
Let’s look at what Kajabi can do:
- Online Courses – Kajabi is amazing at allowing you to quickly and easily create online courses.
- Memberships – Easily create a membership and community.
- Digital Products – Sell other digital products like ebooks & services.
- Email Marketing – You can house all of your email marketing inside of Kajabi, which can save you so much money. And it integrates amazingly well with courses and other features. There’s also a new feature that allows you to create paid newsletters for your premium subscribers.
- Websites – You can build your entire website on Kajabi.
- Landing Pages – You can build as many landing pages and sales pages as you want, replacing the need for something like ClickFunnels or LeadPages.
- Campaigns & Funnels – Create powerful pipelines, funnels, and campaigns within Kajabi.
- Payments – Seamless integration with PayPal & Stripe.
- Analytics – Track all of your key metrics with easy-to-use reporting.
- Mobile app – Easily allow your courses and memberships to become accessible on the Kajabi mobile app.
- Video hosting – This feature saves you a lot of money by hosting your videos on Wistia for free.
- 24/7 support – Support is always invaluable and Kajabi has the best support in the industry.
- Podcast hosting – NEW – Host your podcast right from Kajabi, saving you even more money each month.
- Coaching – NEW – Provide coaching with direct Calendly integration, publish tasks for your clients, and note-taking for both you and the client.
- Did I leave anything out? Wow!
Add all of those features up where many businesses have to use different platforms for each! That’s where people start to realize that the price of Kajabi is actually a really great deal and saves people money each and every month. However, not all businesses will need to utilize all of these features. But the ones that do make the platform perfect for them.
These various features all loaded on one platform mean you don’t have to start hacking together various tools or services. Kajabi makes your business look great without the usual hassle most other platforms would put you through.
The Pros and Cons of Kajabi
Kajabi is great at just about everything it does. The pros are nearly endless.
- Powerful all-in-one solution that makes it easy to set up your online course without having to start patching together various tools.
- 10+ beautiful themes.
- Lots of customization options for the native course player to suit your quirks.
- Tools such as “Community” and “Assessment” help you drive engagement with your students/members.
- Pipeline Builder lets you design and launch powerful sales and marketing funnels.
- Easily design and host your brand website and blog.
- Built-in email marketing tools.
- Dedicated (24X7) customer support team.
- And so, so, so much more that I mentioned above.
However, Kajabi does have two cons that frustrate me quite a bit:
The first con is the inability to create or control the structure of your blog posts.
However, very recently they upgraded the Pages section of the site so there technically is a less-than-ideal workaround for this.
There are two very important reasons why this is an issue:
- A very important SEO strategy is to utilize pillar pages. This allows you to organize your content based on the most important, high-level topics in which you and your business are experts. This is helpful for users to find your content and is helpful to Google to understand your content better and rank your content more easily and accurately. This was previously impossible to do in Kajabi without this new workaround with Pages.
- Previously, if you are wanting to move an existing site to Kajabi, especially from a WordPress site, you couldn’t do it without lots of broken pages. This could seriously damage your SEO and ability to rank.
So, with a recent update, Kajabi does allow you to create a structure to your Pages, so you would be able to create a proper site architecture (or silo or pillar or spoke and wheel – whatever you want to call it). This would technically also allow you to move a WordPress, or other website completely to Kajabi and make sure you’re utilizing the same site URL structure.
However, you have to create everything as Pages, rather than the Blog, which makes it a bit inconvenient. And if you have a large amount of content, it could be quite difficult to keep your content organized. You might need to make sure you keep a Content Calendar / Spreadsheet to keep track of all of your content.
But, at least they listened (I complained about this for a very, very long time)! 🙂 So it is now possible, and that’s a big win. You just shouldn’t use the Blog at all really except for content that you don’t care for ranking in search results.
The alternative could have possibly been to create redirects to your new structure, but that leads me to my next con…
The second can is that you cannot create and control redirects! This is quite standard for any website platform, so it’s puzzling why this is yet to be a feature. Even if you weren’t moving an established website to Kajabi and starting new, there’s plenty of reasons why you might want to delete a page and redirect that old page to a new one. Why isn’t this available?
I used to say that this, combined with the previous inability to have a proper site structure meant that you would have had to look at Kajabi as a platform that you didn’t plan on ranking in Google.
But, thankfully that’s no longer the case. No having redirects is inconvenient, but no longer critical now that you can control your site structure with Pages.
However, even with these two cons and the inconveniences they present, Kajabi is definitely worth investing now more than ever after the update to their Pages and the new added value of the Coaching and Podcast products.
How Does Kajabi Work?
There are multiple sections on the Kajabi platform. You don’t need to use all of them from the get-go, but you should learn how they work and then decide which to use first depending on your immediate needs.
Check out this beginner tutorial from Kajabi:
The Kajabi Affiliate / Partner Program Details
Let’s dive in and explore the Kajabi Affiliate Program and whether you should join.
The first thing to note is that you do have to be a member of Kajabi to be a part of the affiliate program. This does make it a bit of a more difficult decision and I would only advise joining if:
- You know you and your business would benefit from the features of the platform – like courses, memberships, community, funnels, and/or the new coaching feature, and/or
- You already know of a person or two who you could refer to Kajabi
When I joined a few years ago, I was in the latter situation. I had a few clients who I knew would be perfect for Kajabi, so I went ahead and signed up to refer them knowing it would at least cover my costs. I wasn’t ready to set up a business on the platform yet, but it made sense to join to get those monthly, recurring commissions coming in.
That’s why I can’t put Kajabi any higher than #3 on the list because it simply isn’t going to be a good fit for everyone. But if it can benefit you and/or your clients or audience, it’s one of the best affiliate programs there is.
Let’s look at the specifics:
Kajabi pays 30% commissions as long as the referral is a paying customer. This means, if they pay monthly, you get 30% each month. And if they pay yearly, you get 30% of the payment each year.
They also have an amazing support community around the program where they have special deals and events for affiliates, announce new features to affiliates, and do all sorts to help affiliates succeed.
And last, but not least, they do some fun bonuses as you bring in more affiliates… including a car bonus when you’ve referred 50 people. How fun is that!
Here’s a great image that helps show the potential of being a Kajabi affiliate:
They also used to give other cool gifts at each new level, but I don’t know if they do that anymore. I received a fun pair of socks at the Bronze level but never received anything at the Silver level – which I think used to be a mug or tumbler or something. Hopefully, they bring back fun prizes again if they stopped. 🙂
Kajabi Pricing
Depending on your needs and budget, Kajabi offers three pricing tiers. Each of them comes with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited video hosting via Wistia, and a free trial period of 30 days.
- The Basic Plan at $149/month (or $119/month billed annually) allows you to sell 3 products, create 3 pipelines and reach 10,000 contacts.
- The Growth Plan retails for $199 monthly (or $159/month billed annually). A combination of the affiliate marketing program and marketing automation justifies the 25% bump in price. It also allows you to host 10 admin users and build 10 sales pipelines for your products.
- The most expensive plan is the Pro Plan that will set you back $399 monthly (or $319/month billed annually). With the Pro Plan, you can build 3 websites, sell 100 products and build 100 sales pipelines. It also allows you to host 25 administrators.
Kajabi’s pricing is always a common complaint I hear from people. But time after time, it’s clear that you’re going to save money if you utilize all of its features.
And as an affiliate, receiving 30% commissions each month can really add up fast!
What Are the Kajabi Alternatives for Affiliates?
As with every platform, there are quite a number of alternatives. However, none have as many features or potential as Kajabi.
Kajabi vs Teachable
Teachable is one of the most popular online course platforms in the market right now, but it doesn’t offer as many options as Kajabi. It is great if all you need to do is deliver your course content. And its native course player can be quite engaging. One advantage it has over Kajabi is it allows you to create certificates for your students. But, you can still get creative with Kajabi’s amazing email marketing integration and send them a certificate via email when they complete a course.
However, it lacks Kajabi’s email marketing platform, new coaching platform, community-building feature, which is a really important tool for driving student engagement, and more. Its site-building features are also limited, and it completely lacks the ability to build sales funnels, landing pages or create automated email sequences to educate or re-engage students and subscribers.
So even though Teachable has the same commission rate as Kajabi at 30% recurring, I’ve just never been able to recommend it to someone over Kajabi when Kajabi is so much more beneficial to them.
Kajabi vs ClickFunnels
While ClickFunnels can be a decent funnel builder, I am not a fan of it for four reasons:
- I’m not a fan of their online course platform. If you ever bought a course that uses ClickFunnels, you know it’s not very user-friendly and not a great experience overall
- It’s expensive. The basic builder is somewhere around $100/month, while the next level, which they almost force you to need, is somewhere around $250/month. That’s absurd for what you get. Especially considering the $25 price tag of the HBA funnel builder which pretty much does the same thing.
- Tracking is awful. The last year or two, I’ve been doing a lot of work with analytics and tracking data and the worst platform across the internet that I have run into when it comes to tracking where buyers come from is ClickFunnels. For this reason alone I wouldn’t recommend it.
- It just feels bad. I respect Russell Brunson and all the work he’s done, but the amount of things they sell, they way they sell it, and the amount of money people feel like they need to spend to succeed with ClickFunnels just feels a bit scammy.
It also lacks the ability to design and host websites and a blog for your business, no email marketing capabilities, and more.
I don’t even remember the details of the ClickFunnels affiliate program and can’t be bothered to look it up. But I do know they made it much worse than it used to be, upsetting a lot of people… which also feels bad.
There really isn’t a comparison here.
If you are looking for a platform that not only delivers on the marketing end but also delivers your courses beautifully, then Kajabi is the platform you should get.
Kajabi vs Kartra
Kartra, on the surface, is fairly similar to Kajabi. Especially when it comes to customer acquisition and marketing your course. With both platforms, you can create and host membership sites, build marketing automations, and design customized landing pages that drive conversions. They both also have similar affiliate marketing and email marketing functionalities. But, that is where the similarity ends.
Kajabi shoots ahead once you start considering creating an online course or an online community feature on your platform or website. You can also blog using Kajabi, unlike Kartra.
Also, in my experience, Kartra is quite a bit more complicated. And these days, anything that makes my life more complicated, I steer away from.
Kajabi vs Thinkific
Thinkific is quite similar to Teachable and also offers the 30% recurring affiliate commissions. They do a great job of course delivery and site-building and it offers you various course consumption options for your students just like Kajabi. You can also create visually stunning websites and landing pages using Thinkific.
You however won’t be able to set up a blog. You would also struggle with funnel building or email sequence automation using Thinkific. So, like Teachable, I’ve never had a reason where I would want to recommend Thinkific when the benefits of Kajabi are far greater.
Kajabi Review – The Bottomline
By now, if you should be pretty clear on what Kajabi does and how it can help you achieve your online entrepreneurship and business goals as a business and/or affiliate.
While the price may seem out of reach for some, it can quickly pay back its worth – no other online course platform offers all those features at that price. If not this all-in-one platform, you’ll spend a large sum setting up, testing, and integrating these various features together and paying an expensive developer to fix issues that inevitably occur with so many connecting and moving parts.
If you plan to give Kajabi a try, you can sign up for their 30 day free trial and get started with this amazing platform!
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