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Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
SaleHoo Affiliate Getting Started Guide Hi there!
Welcome to the SaleHoo affiliate program!
If you are an experienced affiliate, you are probably already familiar with much that will be covered in
the guide. However, it is a great refresher or reference guide if you quickly need to check up on some of
the specific details of our program.
If you’re a newbie affiliate, this guide will give you a starting point for promoting SaleHoo. We also have
an extensive collection of training material on our own site which you can see here.
In addition, we highly recommend that you check out Affilorama.com, which is an affiliate marketing
training portal containing over 80 free video lessons on how to make money as an affiliate marketer.
You can sign up for free right here, or go to www.affilorama.com
Remember, if you ever have any questions; just shoot our affiliate manager an email at
So let’s get into it! And best of luck to you in promoting SaleHoo as an affiliate!
Welcome on board!
The SaleHoo Team
How does this whole affiliate thing work? As an affiliate for SaleHoo, you’re basically playing middleman (or woman) or salesperson for our
company. We are the merchant with the product (the SaleHoo Wholesale Directory Membership), and
your job is to go out on the web and promote SaleHoo wherever is appropriate, linking back to SaleHoo
so people will come and buy the product.
But you’re not doing this for warm fuzzies! You want and deserve to get reimbursed for your efforts! An
affiliate program is basically a tracking system that tracks which affiliate is sending what visitors to the
merchant (us!), and then what visitors ultimately buying. You as an affiliate are then paid a commission
of 75% of the joining fee (minus a few fees from the affiliate network) for every single person that you
send our way that buys our product! Pretty good deal, right?
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
So what’s so important about an affiliate link? Your affiliate link, also called a hoplink, is what tells us that you have sent a customer to SaleHoo, and
it’s one of your most valuable possessions! Like anything valuable, you need to look after it! Think of
your affiliate link like your car – every so often you need to check under the hood to make sure
everything is working.
At SaleHoo, we have our website set up so you can send traffic to any page you like just by adding a
small piece of code to the URL. While you can use our hoplink generator on the front page of the
affiliate resources section to create your link, it’s important that you first understand what the pieces of
code mean.
Let’s start with a normal affiliate link to the normal sales page of SaleHoo:
http://www.salehoo.com/secrets/?aff=ENTERID
As you can see, the normal URL to our sales page is the same. But at the end we’ve added a bit – ‘?aff=’
and then the word ENTERID. ENTERID is actually just a placeholder – you have to replace this with your
own Clickbank ID if you want to get credited with the sales. Clickbank.com is our affiliate network, and is
the company that tracks and processes all of our transactions and commissions. To be an affiliate for
SaleHoo, you must sign up for a free account at Clickbank, which if you haven’t done already, click here.
Your Clickbank ID is like your username, and is the code that identifies your links to Clickbank so they
can reimburse your for sales.
The ‘?aff=’ part tells our system to tell Clickbank that this is an affiliate link and the following part of the
URL will be the affiliate ID. What this does is install a cookie, which is a little file that sits on a user’s
computer telling relevant websites important information about where they’ve been before. This means
that when someone goes to buy SaleHoo, Clickbank recognizes that this person was sent to SaleHoo by
you, the affiliate.
Note: This system will work for most pages on SaleHoo.com, with the exception of the homepage. An
affiliate link to the homepage will redirect to the sales page. If you want to link to the homepage, you
have to use the hoplink generator located on the front page of the affiliate section.
Other Sales Pages
At SaleHoo we also have different kinds of sales pages with different focuses. To see the whole range go
to the front page of the affiliate resources section and use the hoplink generator.
Website URL Affiliate Code
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
Say you want to send traffic to our ‘apparel’ sales page:
http://www.salehoo.com/secrets/?aff=ENTERID&type=apparel
As you can see, we have added another part to the end of the URL. This ‘&type=’ part tells the SaleHoo
website that this link will point to a specific landing page, and that the code for this page follows.
Note: If you’re sending traffic to different kinds of pages, you have to make sure you get the page ID
code right. This is why we recommend that you use the hoplink generator on the front page of the
affiliate section.
Tracking IDs
Clickbank, our affiliate network, allows affiliates to track which of their links are being clicked, all under
the same Clickbank ID. This is particularly good if you’re using multiple methods to promote SaleHoo.
Say you have a website, but you also send out a newsletter and post links through Twitter – you can
assign different tracking ID’s to each kind of link so you can see what methods are the most effective.
Here is a link with a tracking code assigned:
http://www.salehoo.com/secrets/?aff=ENTERID&tid=email
As you can see, we have added another piece of code to the end of the URL. This ‘&tid=’ tells the
website to tell Clickbank that this affiliate link should be categorized under the tracking ID ‘Email’. You
could put any tracking code you like here in place of ‘email’. For example you could use ‘website’, for
your website links, ‘paid’ for your PPC traffic, and ‘twitter’ for your Twitter links. These will show up in
your Clickbank account and enable you to see and compare how successful each type of link is.
Note: You will notice when you click on all these links that you won’t see any of this code in the address
bar on your browser. Don’t worry, it’s still there! We just hide it so that your customers don’t have to see
a whole bunch of messy codes – they just see a nice clean webpage address.
Website URL Affiliate Code Page ID
Website URL Affiliate Code Tracking ID
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
How do I check if my Affiliate Link is working? If you’ve followed the above section correctly, or if you’ve used the hoplink generator, then you should
have a correctly formatted affiliate link. However, it’s always a good idea to check and make sure.
You can check you link is working by clicking on it, and then following through like you are going to
purchase the product, clicking on "Click here to join SaleHoo", putting in any name and email
information, and then "Continue to ClickBank Secure Payment Form".
At the bottom of the payment form, it should say [affiliate = ENTERID]. If it doesn't, contact us and we'll
take a look.
If you have a tracking code on your link, it will appear here too as [affiliate=ENTERID.TRACKINGID].
How do I send SaleHoo traffic? Affiliates can send traffic to us a number of ways. These can include:
Having a website
Writing an email newsletter
Writing and distributing articles on article websites
Posting comments on forums with an affiliate link in the signature
Posting links on Twitter (don’t spam though!!)
Using pay per click advertising or PPC
Now some of these methods are more popular and more effective than others. By far and away the
most effective strategy to start out with is building a website. Some of you are probably starting to get
nervous now… “I don’t know anything about making a website!!” It’s ok! Making a website is actually
way easier than you think thanks to heaps of free and paid tools that are available.
While many of our top affiliates use a combination of the tactics I listed above, the one thing they all
have in common is that they all have a website.
Here are some of the advantages to having your own website to promote SaleHoo:
You have complete control over all your content
You’re not relying on someone else’s service to make money – if someone else’s site goes
down, do you want your income to stop too?
You can promote more than one product – I know! We’re actually encouraging you to promote
other products… what are we? Crazy?! Actually, we’ve found that many of our top affiliates
have websites that promote more than one product. People seem to be more interested in
websites that have multiple offerings rather than just promoting one thing. Just make sure
we’re at the top of the list!
You have an asset. Building and maintaining a website is a lot of work – but its effort that you
get back. You see, while writing articles with affiliate links on other sites and posting affiliate
links everywhere possible can get you some sales, you’re actually building someone else’s asset
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
in the process! Writing articles for an article site builds up the article site’s business! Sure, you
might get some sales off it, but wouldn’t it be better if you posted a link back to your own site?
That way, your site will start getting traffic and ranking for keywords in Google and the other
search engines. And the great thing about an asset? You can sell it! If you have a website that is
regularly generating income, you can sell that website to someone else just like you can sell a
business!
Building a website So where do you get started making a website? There are many ways to build a website, but I find the
best way is to build a Wordpress Blog. A blog is a website that allows you to post new content as
regularly as you like, and the latest content will be displayed on your blog’s main page.. Wordpress is
free software that you can upload to your web hosting account which takes care of all the complicated
coding. It allows you to set up a website with little or no knowledge or HTML or coding (although having
some does help!).
While we don’t have room to go into every detail of making a website, here is the gist =:
Get a web hosting account and a domain name:
You can do these separately, but I recommend doing them with the same company. We’ve had
a lot of good experience with Hostgator, which allows you to host as many websites as you like
for just $7.95 a month! When you register your account you can also buy a domain name – this
is your websites address, just like www.salehoo.com. We recommend something related to
what your website is going to be about, for example ‘productsourcingsecrets.com’ is an example
of an appropriate domain name – but this is completely up to you.
Upload Wordpress:
Go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version of Wordpress. You will then need to
upload it using an FTP (file transfer protocol) client. This all sounds complicated, don’t worry,
you can see a free lesson of how to do it here at Affilorama. If you get your hosting from
Hostgator, you don’t have to go through this process – they have a one click install feature for
Wordpress – it doesn’t get easier than that!
Find a theme:
A theme is a file that tells your website how to look – it has information about backgrounds,
colors, fonts, layouts etc. There are tons of free themes for Wordpress available – and you can
install some automatically from your Wordpress management area, while others require that
you download the file and then upload them to Wordpress. There are also paid themes available
– these are usually much higher quality. You can use Google to find tons of themes, paid and
free. Find one you like the look of! It’s usually pretty easy to make small changes to the way
your theme looks.
Write the content:
For many people, this is the hard part. Generally, the best idea is to fill your site with 20 or 30
articles – these are either blog posts or individual pages that contain 600+ words on a specific
topic. The idea is to make each one of these articles relevant to a particular keyword – a
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
keyword or keyphrase being what people type into a search engine to find something. Usually
this article should be about solving a problem, in this case something to do with selling on eBay
or buying wholesale. Then in the post, while giving the reader some information about how they
can solve their problem, you also direct them towards SaleHoo as being another great way to fix
their problem – linking to us through your affiliate link!
Email newsletter:
Another really great way to use your website is as an opportunity to build an email list. One of
the best ways to do this is by offering some kind of email course – e.g. a 6 part course on how to
solve a certain problem; in these emails, you can have affiliate links to SaleHoo. You’ll need an
email auto-responder service to manage your emails and lists, and we highly recommend
Aweber, which you can check out here.
This process is really oversimplified, but it gives you an overview of the best route to successfully
promoting SaleHoo. Again, we really recommend you check out Affilorama for more in-depth lessons on
everything covered here!
Other Ways of Promoting SaleHoo: While we’ve talked about a website as one of the best ways to promote SaleHoo, many of our top
affiliates use other methods as well as a website to increase their sales.
Pay per Click
Pay per click is often one of the first things people try – even before they build a website. There seems
to be a misconception that you can just buy ads on Google or Yahoo, chuck your affiliate link in there
and sit back raking in the cash. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as easy money!
Pay per click is a very effective way of sending highly targeting traffic to a website. But it can also be a
big waste of money if you don’t know what you’re doing! I’ve seen affiliates blast through $500 without
even thinking… then they wonder what went wrong.
The strongest suggestion I can make is that you should try to learn how to make money from free traffic
first – this is building a website, writing articles, optimizing for keywords to get traffic from the search
engines, and then sending people off to SaleHoo via your affiliate link. If you can learn to monetize your
traffic when it’s not costing you anything (except time and effort), then you have a way better chance of
making money off paid traffic.
However, for those who want to dive right in, we’ve created a PPC section in the Affiliate Resources area
which you can log in and take a look at. Remember though, approach PPC slowly if you’ve never done it
before – if you do it carefully you can make tons of sales, if you don’t, you can lose a lot of your hard
earned cash! And neither of us wants that!!
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
Social Media
Social media is the blanket term used for the new breed of web applications that allow people to create
their own content and share it with others. Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all examples of
social media.
With hundreds of millions of people using social media, it’s not surprising that affiliates are interested in
making money from social media. And it’s true, if done properly, you can get tons of traffic to your
website or affiliate link through social media. But you have to be careful, because if you just start
sending out tons of affiliate links over all the social media websites, not only will you not make ANY sales
– you will become what we at SaleHoo and virtually every other web user on the planet hates – a
SPAMMER!!
Here at SaleHoo we hate spam, and have no tolerance for our affiliates using it. If we find an affiliate has
been spamming, either on social media, other websites, or via email, we will contact Clickbank and have
them removed from promoting our product… without warning.
But moving past that little lecture, some of the ways to promote on social media could be:
Creating a Twitter account that posts links to free resources and helpful advice to people
interested in selling on eBay or product sourcing – then every so often posting a link back to
your own site. This is easier if you have a blog and can send traffic to new posts. This is also why
it’s important to have a website that is set up to take visitors and ‘convert’ them by sending
them on to SaleHoo via your affiliate link with an intention to buy.
Record yourself doing a review of SaleHoo, or answering questions related to eBay or product
sourcing on YouTube. Video reviews are really popular and it’s a massively underutilized
strategy. Most affiliates don’t realize how incredibly popular video content is!
Set up a Facebook fan page to do with something like eBay selling or wholesale sourcing – try to
offer lots of links to interesting content and provide a place where people with a common
interest – selling online – can come and meet and chat.
What about PPC Tracking? Many people who use Google or Yahoo paid search advertising like to be able to put their Google
tracking code* on our thank you page so they can track the success of their campaigns. We can do this
for you no problem!
All we need you to do is copy and paste the entire tracking code from either Google Adwords, or Yahoo
Adcenter into a .txt document and attach it to an email to [email protected], and put your
Clickbank Id in the email. We will then get our technical guys to put your tracking code up ASAP!
*If you don’t know what a tracking code is, don’t worry. This is only really for people who use PPC and is
a bit more advanced that most of the stuff we talk about here.
Contact SaleHoo Affiliate Manager at [email protected]
You’re just getting started! This guide is designed to give you just the basics and help give you some ideas of what you could do to
promote SaleHoo. It isn’t the be all and end all of being an affiliate though. In fact the best ideas of how
to promote SaleHoo aren’t ones that we will come up with – you will!
And remember, if you ever have any questions; just
email our affiliate manger at [email protected].
Best of luck to you and your success! It’s great to have
you on board!!
Kind Regards,
The SaleHoo Team The SaleHoo Team in Christchurch, New Zealand
