Skool just did something that a lot of community owners have been begging for since the platform launched. They turned on native affiliate support. Not a workaround. Not a hack. An actual built-in affiliate system that handles the tracking, the accounting, and the commission payouts for you.
I spotted this about three hours after Sam Ovens and Alex Hormozi pushed it live. I pulled up my community back office, went straight to settings, and there it was. I want to walk you through exactly how it works, what the gotchas are, and what I think it means for anyone who runs a paid community on Skool.
## What You’ll Walk Out With
– A clear picture of what the Skool affiliate feature actually does (and what it does not do)
– The one setting that will get you in trouble if you miss it when inviting affiliates
– What happens to existing members when you flip the switch
– How Alston went from 865 free members to a paid community and what that means for the affiliate opportunity
– A simple decision framework for whether you should turn affiliates on right now
– The honest drawbacks of members-only affiliate programs
– Honest answers to the questions most community owners are asking
– [Not sure if Skool affiliates are the right income stream for you? Take the free Finder quiz at https://finder.platformproof.com and find out which online business model fits your actual situation.]
## Why the Old Workaround Was Not Enough
Before this update, Skool did not have native affiliate support. If you wanted members to earn a commission for referring new people to your community, you had to build a workaround. For some builders, that meant a third-party tool like Rewardful or an affiliate network layered on top of Skool’s checkout. For others, it meant manually tracking referrals in a spreadsheet, checking who came in from whom, and issuing payouts by hand.
I had figured out a workaround a while back. I even shared it. People kept asking about it. Honestly, 99% of the notifications I got inside my own Skool community were people asking how to either become an affiliate for my course or set up affiliates for their own. That tells you something. Demand for this feature was not quiet. It was relentless.
The workaround became too heavy to manage cleanly at any kind of scale. When you have hundreds of members, manually tracking who referred who and making sure payouts match up is a real job. It takes time away from the actual course content and community building that makes the product worth referring in the first place.
That is what makes this update significant. Not the concept of affiliates on Skool (people have been doing versions of that for a while), but the fact that the admin burden is now lifted.
## How the Skool Affiliate Feature Actually Works
Here is what I saw when I went into my community back office right after the feature went live.
You go to Settings, scroll down, and you will find an Affiliates section. You flip it on. That is the setup on your end.
Once you turn it on, members inside your community get access to a promote button. They click it, copy their unique referral link, and start sharing it. If someone clicks their link and signs up for the community, that member earns a commission on the sale.
Skool handles the accounting on the back end. They track the referrals, they calculate the commissions based on the percentage you set, and they take the heavy lifting out of your hands. You set the pricing. You set the commission rate. Skool does the rest.
One thing I want to be clear about because it was not fully spelled out in the announcement video: only people who are already inside your community can be affiliates. You cannot go out and recruit external promoters who have never seen your product and hand them an affiliate link. The model is built around members who have experienced the community firsthand and want to share it.
That is actually a meaningful distinction. A member-only affiliate model means everyone promoting your community has paid for it or participated in it. They are not promoting something they have never touched. That tends to produce better referrals, lower refund rates, and more honest word-of-mouth.
## The One Setting That Will Catch You Off Guard
This is the part I want you to pay close attention to.
Inside the affiliates settings, there is also an option to invite people to be affiliates. You can manually send invites out. This sounds great. You want to bring in specific people, maybe a content creator you know or a former student who keeps referring people to you organically. You invite them through the affiliate panel.
Here is what happens: if you invite someone to be an affiliate via that invite function, they bypass the payment requirement and get free access to your community.
Let me say that again because it matters. If you use the invite feature inside the affiliate settings, the person you invite does not have to pay. They get inside for free.
If your community is $29 a month, and you have 10 people you want to invite as affiliates, and you send invites through that affiliate panel, those 10 people get in at $0. That is $290 a month in revenue you are not collecting.
Now maybe you are fine with that. Some creators are happy to give affiliate partners free access as part of the deal. But if you are not expecting it, this can be a nasty surprise. I wanted to flag it early because the announcement video glossed over it and I think a lot of community owners are going to hit this without realizing what happened.
If you want to add affiliates without giving them free access, they need to join as paying members first. Then they can use the promote button from inside the community.
## From 865 Free Members to a Paid Community
I want to give you some real context here because it is relevant to the affiliate opportunity.
My Skool community had 865 members when I was running it as a free community. I converted it to a paid community at $29 a month right around the time this affiliate feature launched. That is a meaningful transition. Free-to-paid is not a small thing. There are people in your community who joined because it cost nothing. Some of them will stay when you add a price. Some will not.
One of the questions I had that the announcement did not fully address: what happens to the 865 members who were in the free version? Do they automatically qualify to be affiliates once I flip the switch?
I am operating under the assumption that yes, existing members get access to the promote button once affiliates are enabled. But that was not explicitly confirmed in the video I watched, and I think it is worth verifying for your own community before you assume 865 people are now out there sharing affiliate links on your behalf.
The community includes live coaching calls twice a month, updated workshops, and additional resources I am building out. If you are an existing member and you see value in the coaching and course content, the affiliate program gives you a way to earn on top of what you are already getting.
## Should You Turn On Skool Affiliates? A Simple Decision Framework
Not every community owner should flip this switch immediately. Here is a short framework for thinking through it.
**Turn it on if:**
You have a paid community with members who are already vocal about the results they are getting. If people are already tagging you, posting testimonials, or sending friends your way without any incentive, a commission structure is going to accelerate what is already happening. You are just adding a financial reason to keep doing what they do naturally.
You have enough active members to create real momentum. One or two affiliates promoting your community is not going to change your growth trajectory. But if you have a few hundred engaged members and even 10% of them start sharing links, that creates a referral flywheel that compounds over time.
You are ready to handle the volume. More referrals means more new members joining, more onboarding, more questions, more community moderation. If your community is already stretched, adding a surge of new members without preparing for it is going to hurt the experience for everyone.
**Wait if:**
Your community is brand new or has fewer than 50 paying members. Affiliate programs work on volume. If you have 30 members and you turn on affiliates, you might get a handful of shares and nothing else. Focus on making your existing members so happy that referrals happen without any incentive first.
Your content and community structure are still being built out. A member who refers someone into a half-finished product is setting you up for refunds and chargebacks. Build the product first, then open the referral door.
Your pricing is not settled. If you are still experimenting with what to charge, turning on affiliates locks you into a commission structure at a price point that may change. Sort out your pricing before you build an affiliate layer on top of it.
## The Honest Drawbacks of a Members-Only Affiliate Model
The members-only requirement is smart for quality control, but it creates a ceiling on your growth that a traditional open affiliate program does not have.
With an open affiliate program, you can recruit YouTubers, bloggers, newsletter writers, and podcasters who have large audiences but have never touched your product. You give them access to review it, they create content about it, and you get exposure to audiences you never could have reached through your own channels.
With Skool’s current setup, those outside promoters have to become paying members first. That is a real barrier. A YouTuber with 100,000 subscribers is not necessarily going to pay $29 a month to join your community before deciding if they want to promote it. You would need to either comp them in (which means using that invite feature and giving them free access, with all the considerations that come with it) or convince them to buy before they have any relationship with your content.
That is not a dealbreaker. But it is a real constraint worth naming. The affiliate pool you are working with is your existing paid membership base, not the open internet.
The other drawback is one that applies to any affiliate program: you are giving up a percentage of every referred sale. If your community is $29 a month and you offer a 30% commission, every referred member costs you about $8.70 a month. Over a year, that is $104.40 per member you brought in through the affiliate program. That needs to be less than what you would spend to acquire that member through paid ads or your own content output for affiliates to be the better option.
For most community owners at the early to mid stage of growth, affiliates will absolutely be the better option. But it is worth running the math.
> Not sure which online business model makes sense for your actual situation right now? Skip the guesswork. Take the free Finder quiz at [https://finder.platformproof.com](https://finder.platformproof.com) and get a clear answer based on where you are, not where someone else is.
## Turning On Affiliates: Step by Step
Here is the process I walked through inside my own community back office:
1. Log into your Skool account and go to your community.
2. Click on the Settings tab in your community back office.
3. Scroll down until you see the Affiliates section.
4. Toggle affiliates on.
5. Set your commission percentage.
6. Decide whether you want to use the invite feature (and remember the free access implication if you do).
7. Announce it to your existing members so they know the promote button is live.
Step 7 is one a lot of people skip and then wonder why nobody is using the feature. Your members are not going to go digging through settings to find the promote button. You need to tell them it is there. Post it in your community feed. Put it in your welcome message. Mention it on your next live coaching call.
## Find Your X
The Skool affiliate feature is one piece of a bigger question: what is the right online income model for where you are right now?
Community-building, affiliates, courses, content, coaching, freelancing. They all work. They do not all work for the same person at the same time. The gap between someone who builds something that earns real money and someone who spins their wheels for three years is usually not effort. It is fit.
Take the free Finder quiz at [https://finder.platformproof.com](https://finder.platformproof.com). It is built around one question: what does your actual situation look like right now? Your skills, your time, your starting budget, your goals. The quiz matches you to the model that fits those inputs. No upsell. No pitch. Just a clear answer.
## Frequently Asked Questions
### Can anyone become a Skool affiliate or only paying members?
Based on the current feature rollout, only people who are already members inside your community can access the promote button and earn affiliate commissions. External promoters would need to join as paying members first unless you invite them through the affiliate settings panel, which gives them free access.
### What happens if I already had a workaround affiliate setup before this feature launched?
If you were using a third-party tool or manual tracking system to handle affiliates, you will need to decide whether to migrate to Skool’s native system or run both in parallel during a transition. Skool’s native system is simpler to manage, but if you have existing affiliates in another platform who are already earning and tracking, switching mid-stream can create confusion. Communicate the change clearly before cutting over.
### Does Skool take a cut of affiliate commissions?
The announcement video I watched did not spell out Skool’s specific fee structure on affiliate payouts. Skool already charges a platform fee on community memberships. Whether they take an additional percentage on affiliate-referred sales or whether the commission comes entirely out of your revenue is something worth confirming directly in your Skool dashboard or with their support team before setting your commission rate.
### What percentage commission should I offer?
The right commission depends on your margin and what it would cost you to acquire that member another way. A 20% to 30% commission on a monthly subscription is a common starting range. If your community is priced at $29 a month and you offer 25%, each referred member costs you about $7.25 a month in commission. If your content-based customer acquisition cost is higher than that, affiliates are a good deal. If it is lower, you may want to offer a smaller percentage.
### If I had 865 free members and I convert to paid, do those members automatically get the affiliate promote button?
Alston raised this question in the video and did not have a definitive answer yet. The assumption is that existing members in a community with affiliates enabled will have access to the promote button, but the free-to-paid conversion adds a wrinkle. If your free members are grandfathered in without paying, it is worth checking whether they have the same access as paying members or a different view inside the community.
### Can I turn off affiliates after I turn them on?
Yes. The toggle is in your settings and you can turn it off. What happens to pending commissions or in-progress referrals when you do that is worth understanding before you flip it off mid-cycle. Do not turn off affiliates right before a payout date without making sure your members who earned commissions still get paid.
### Is the members-only affiliate model better or worse than an open affiliate program?
It is different. Members-only means your affiliates have real experience with your product, which typically produces more honest referrals and fewer buyer’s remorse situations for new members. Open affiliate programs let you recruit big audiences that have never seen your product, which can drive faster short-term volume but also higher refund rates if the promotion is not a good fit. For community-based products where trust and engagement matter, members-only tends to produce better long-term outcomes.
### Where can I find Alston’s community to join and potentially promote it?
You can find the community on Skool directly, or send Alston a message on Skool and he will send you a direct invite. The community is currently priced at $29 a month and includes live coaching two times per month plus updated workshops. He mentioned in the video that the price is set to go up, so the $29 rate is a discounted early entry.
## Read Next
If you are thinking about affiliate marketing as a broader income stream and not just a Skool-specific tactic, this post covers the best niches for beginners who are starting from zero: [7 Best Affiliate Niches for Complete Beginners (Evergreen Picks)](https://alstongodbolt.com/best-affiliate-niches-for-beginners/)
## Sources
– Skool affiliate feature announcement video: https://youtu.be/xfGG2BbtQDs
– Skool platform (Sam Ovens, Alex Hormozi): https://skool.com
– Platform Proof Finder quiz: https://finder.platformproof.com
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*Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.*