Glossary of Terms
Internet business has its own language. Following are the definitions and explanations of the meaning of the terms, which most commonly used in the Internet that may help you to better understand Affiliate Marketing and Internet in general.
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0-9
2 -Tier Program: This commission structure pays you commission on each sale (or lead or click-through) you refer, and a commission on each sale referred by any affiliates you have referred to the program.
For example: If Jon comes to your site, clicks on your link, this link will lead him goes to your merchant’s site and purchases, then you earn a first tier commission.
Let’s say Jenny comes to your site, clicks on your link and goes to your merchant’s site and signs up for the Affiliate Program. When Harry goes to Jenny’s site, clicks on the merchant’s link, goes to the merchant’s site and purchases, Jenny earns a first tier commission (because she referred the sale) and you earn a second tier commission (because you referred Jenny).
You’ll need to check with your merchant directly to see if they offer a two-tier program or not. You can do it by checking your administration screen and looking for a “Second Tier Commissions” stat or by contacting your merchant.
A
Affiliate: Is a person or a company that assists the merchant in marketing products and services in return for a commission based on performance, also known as associate or partner.
Affiliate Agreement: Terms that govern the relationship between a merchant and an affiliate.
Affiliate Marketing: Revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model, also known as associate marketing.
Learn More about Affiliate Marketing …
Affiliate Network: A value-added facilitator that provides services that included aggregation for affiliate merchants and affiliates. Affiliate networks offer tracking technology, reporting tools, payment processing, and access to a large base of affiliates. Affiliate networks offer such services as one-click application to new merchants, reporting tools, and payment aggregation to affiliates, also know as associate network.
Affiliate Program Directory: A categorized listing of affiliate programs. Also know as affiliate program directory, associate program directory.
Affiliate Program Manager: The person responsible for administering an affiliate program. His or her duties include maintaining regular contact with affiliates, program marketing and responding to queries about the program.
Affiliate Solution Provider: Company that provides the software and services to administer an affiliate program.
Affiliate URL or Link: Special code in a graphic or text link that identifies a visitor as having arrived from a specific affiliate site.
AUTO-RESPONDER: A simply an email program that runs on a computer server connected full-time to the Internet. It gives you an email address that automatically replies to any incoming message by returning the text of a particular file of your choosing. This information is delivered anywhere in the world, to any Internet user with email, within seconds, 24 hours a day/7 days a week.
You can include your auto-responder address on business cards, letterhead, flyers, classified advertising, your email signature line, and anywhere else you can think of! There are hundreds of places on the web that offer auto-responder for small fees, and many that offer free service. Perform a search on any major search engine for “auto-responder” or “free auto-responder.”
Learn More about Auto responder …
B
Banner Ad: A graphical web advertising unit, typically a large headline or title extending across the full page width often measuring 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels tall.
Banner exchange: Network where participating sites display banner ads in exchange for credits which are converted into ads to be displayed on other sites.
Blind Ad: Is an ad, either sent via email or posted on a classified ad site that is enticing enough to get the recipient to request more information, but gives NO company name, trademark, or URL that points to the company you’re advertising.
Blog: Acronym for ‘web log’, basically it is an online journal. A blog could be set up to at no cost at all; it can be used for just for fun, or for business reasons. The act of updating a blog is referred to as ‘blogging’ and those who keep blogs are known as ‘bloggers’.
Visit MBA Blog …
Browser: A software program that allows you to view the World Wide Web (provided you have an Internet connection), and view the contents of Web sites. A comprehensive site for information on browsers is located at http://www.browserwatch.com
Back links: Links that point to a web site.
Back-end Offers: Products/services you offer to existing customers, example, to people who have already bought a first product from you.
Backbone: A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network.
Bandwidth: The rate at which you can send or receive information through your connection to the Internet.
BBS (Bulletin Board System): Areas within the Internet where you can post messages and announcements.
BPS (Bits per Second): Refers to the data-transfer speed allowed by the network or your connection to the network.
C
Classified Ad: In most ways, online classified ads are similar to newspaper classifieds. The biggest difference is that many online classifieds are free to post an ad. Paid ads are inexpensive and tend to draw more valid prospects. Classified ads may contain your company URL, your own URL and a mention of the company name as they are a form of passive advertising. This means that someone actually must come to your ad and request more information from you.
Creative Ad: An outline of what message should be conveyed, to whom and with what tone. This provides the guiding principles for copywriters and art directors who are assigned to develop the advertisement. Within the context of that assignment, any ad that is then created should conform to that strategy.
Click-Through: Is the action that takes place when a visitor clicks on a banner or a link on your site that drives him to go to your merchant’s or another site.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM): You pay a fixed sum for displaying your banner to 1000 visitors. The M stands for the Roman numeral = thousand.
Cost per Click (CPC): You pay only for the visitors you get.
Click-through rate (CTR): Percentage of visitors who click through to a merchant’s web site. It calculated as number of people who click on the ad divided by times ad is displayed. Example: 1000 people clicks on an ad that has been displayed 100,000 times: 1000/100,000 x 100= 1%.
Cloaking: Hiding of page content or affiliate linking code to boost their search engine ranking. It involves delivering one page to a Search Engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. Most search engines will penalize sites that use cloaking.
Conversion Rate (CR): Percentage of visitors that actually buy the product. Example, If 1 person in every hundred visitors to your site makes a purchase, and then your conversion rate is 1:100 or 1 percent.
Copywriting: Process of writing text especially for a web page. Effective web copywriting can improve a sites position within the search engine results of a given keyword phrase.
Clickbank: A popular online billing and marketing service for the development of affiliate programs and the largest distributor of digital information products on the Internet, known for its ease-of-use.
Visit Clickbank
Crawler: Automated program that follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines to fill and update their database, also know as search engine spider, robot or bot.
Cookie: A “cookie” is a small piece of information which a web server can store temporarily with a web browser and store in your hard disk. This is useful for having the browser remember some specific information, which the web server can later retrieve.
Some types of uses for cookies include remembering IDs and passwords, tracking where users go within a website, storing and recalling items you add in an online shopping cart.
Tracking where users go within the Internet is probably the most controversial issue about cookies. That cookies help advertisers build a profile about their target audience, not a secret way for web servers to find out who you are or what you have in your hard drive. You may set your browser to either accept or not accept cookies.
Co-branding: Where affiliates are able to include their own logo and/or colors on the merchant’s site to promote brand together.
Cost per Inquiry (CPI): The cost of getting one person to inquire about your product or service. This is a standard used in direct response advertising.
Creative: The promotional tools used by advertisers, such as the art directors and/or copywriters in an ad agency, to draw in users. Example: text links, towers, buttons, badges, email copy, pop-ups and etc.
Cyberspace: The total range of information available through computer networks. A term coined by author William Gibson.
D
Directory: Web guide organized by categories containing web sites that have been reviewed and compiled by editors. Example: Yahoo, Go Guide, Joeant, LookSmart, Zeal, etc.
Doorway Page or Mirror Page: Is a one-page website that is specifically set up to introduce your main web site. The sole purpose of doorway pages is to get higher rankings with one or more search engines through using keyword and keyword-rich content. Some search engines will drop a site entirely if the existence of doorway / mirror pages is detected.
Direct Mail: Marketing communications delivered directly to a prospective purchaser via the Postal Service or a private delivery company.
Direct Marketing: Sending a promotional message directly to consumers, rather than via a mass medium. Such as direct mail and telemarketing.
Direct Response: Promotions that permit or request consumers to directly respond to the advertiser by mail, by telephone, by e-mail, or some other means of communication. Some practitioners use this as a synonym for direct marketing.
Domain Name: The unique name that identifies an Internet site.
DNS: Means “Domain Name Server”. When someone types in your Domain Name in their browser window, a request is sent to YOUR Domain Name Server, then YOUR Domain Name Server, displays YOUR website.
Think of a DNS as a “Post Office” in a box. The requests come in, are sorted, then sent out, just like letters and parcels at a Post Office.
The Internet works through servers - computers that are always online for the world to access. Your personal computer can access the Internet, but the Internet (generally) cannot access your computer. In order to make your website available to the world, you must first request server space, or “webspace”.
Domain: A domain is YOUR address on the internet. This is a Unique name that belongs only to you. It is as unique as is your home address, phone number, or Social Security number. No one else has this Domain name, except you.
Your domain is where you live on the internet, so to speak. All your webpages, with associated graphics and documents are placed on your domain so people can visit YOUR website.
E
Ebook Marketing: The use of ebooks to promote your web site / product / service.
Email Ads: ads that are placed in emails.
E-mail: Electronic mail, a messages sent between computers with an Internet address.
Endorsement Letter: Also known as a “product review”, an endorsement is a promotional statement outlining features and benefits for a particular product or service.
Entry Page: The web page that you direct traffic to. In most cases, visitors coming from your site will “enter” merchant’s site at this page.
eZine: Short for ‘electronic magazine’.
Email Signature (Sig File): A brief message embedded at the end of every email that a person sends with his /her name, email address, contact information and website address.
F
FFA Page (Free for All): Is a forum where people can post links to their sites by using a site submitter that is provided by the host. It can be used in several ways. One is to place a link to your own web site on other people’s FFA page, with a catchy phrase that will make yours stand out from the rest of the links on the page. Another way is to get your own free FFA page from one of the hundreds of places on the Web offering them. It is a very powerful way of advertising because there is no limit to the number of links that can be posted to your FFA page. Caution: search engines try to ban FFA from their index.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP): The code that allows users to transfer files from one computer to another over phone lines. You transfer pages to your web site using FTP.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Canned answers to questions everyone asks. Generally it posted for to avoid having to answer the same question repeatedly.
Forum: An online community where visitors may read and post topics of common interest.
Freeware: Software which can be used without any payment, generally downloaded from the Net.
G
Google Adsense: Text and image ads that are precisely targeted to page content that the webmaster can earn a percentage of the price per click paid by the advertiser.
Google Adwords: One of the most effective types of advertising available online these days. It’s almost the same as “Pay per Click†(PPC) advertising program. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad! Your ad will show up when keywords you have chosen are searched for.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): A visual image file.
Gopher: A menu-based method of searching for information on the Internet.
H
Hit: A measure of web site traffic; each time a page on a site is requested.
Home page: The first screen you see when you enter a web site.
Hidden Text: Using the same color characters on the same color background. Your site can be penalized or banned from the search engine’s index for using this technique.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): The programming language used by the World Wide Web. Just as PostScript allows users to produce desktop publishing documents with various fonts and graphics, HTML allows users to create documents for the Web. It is the most common language used to design web pages.
Learn More about HTML …
Hyperlink: An object (text or graphic) containing a link to a web page. When you click on a hyperlinked object, you are automatically connected with another web page. It might be another page on the same site, or it might be a page on a different web site.
HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol): The standard for moving hypertext files across the Internet.
I
Internet Marketing: Any action taken to market a web site or company online. This includes web site optimization, search engine submission, pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis and so forth.
Impression: An impression occurs when a page containing your Affiliate code that loaded on your site or in your HTML email messages. Impressions are also called page views.
Internet Service Provider (ISP): A company that provides users with Internet access. For example, AOL (American Online) is a service provider - when you join, you get access to AOL services, access to the Internet, and (if you join at a certain rate) space on their server for a small web site. There are also companies that provide direct access to the Internet and allow you to set up larger web sites.
IP Address: A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 166.336.547.9. Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC): A computerized way for people to congregate and chat together.
J
Junk: Unprofessional slang term referring to sending a message to multiple newsgroups, mailing lists, or individuals that didn’t ask for it, popularly known as spam.
Javascript: A programming / scripting language for web pages developed by Sun Microsystems for writing programs, which can be safely downloaded to your computer through the Internet and immediately run without fear of viruses or other harm to your computer or files. Java requires a browser compatible with Java. Using small Java programs, Web pages can include animations, calculators, and other features.
Joint Venture (JV): A general partnership formed to undertake a particular business transaction or project rather than one intended to continue indefinitely.
K
Keyword: The search term that users use to search in search engines. For example, someone who wants to find a site that sells dog food might enter ‘dog food’ in a search engine.
Keyword Density: The ratio between the keyword being searched for and the total number of words appears on your web page. If your keyword only occurs, let’s say once, in a page that has twenty thousand words, then it has the density of 0.005 percent.
L
LAN (Local Area Network): What you get when you link all the computers at a single location.
Link Popularity: Number of links that point to a site. Some search engines consider that a site with many inbound links is more popular.
Lifetime Commissions: Affiliate programs that pay a commission on EVERY product or service that customer buys from the merchant, example, the customer is yours ‘for life’ once you’ve sent the referral.
Lifetime Value: The total amount that customer will spend with a particular company during his or her lifetime.
Link: A link is a hyperlink (http://www.yourdomain.com) or an image or text that contains a hyperlink. A link is placed on one site and when clicked on, it leads the visitor to another site / page. In the Affiliate Marketing industry, you, the Affiliate, place links on your site that points to the merchant’s site.
M
Mailing List: A list of e-mail addresses of people interested in the same subject. When a list subscriber sends a message, it goes to everyone on the list. You can reply to the messages, send new messages, or just lurk, reading the messages without participating.
Meta Tags: HTML code designed to give search engine robots instructions. There are many tags available, the most known tags are the “title”,” keyword” and “description” tags.
Merchant: A person or a company that markets their products and services on the web. Your merchant is the person/company whose program you joined.
Merchant-Affiliate Relationship: In the Merchant-Affiliate relationship, the Affiliate acts as an independent “salesperson” who promotes the merchants products and services. The merchant tracks the incoming visitors to determine which Affiliate sent them the sale - if any.
Multi-Level Marketing (MLM): Also known as Network Marketing, MLM involves the sale of products through a group of independent distributors who buy wholesale, sell retail and sponsor other people to do the same.
Mime (Multiple Internet Mail Extensions): Things you can include with e-mail, sent over the Internet, such as audio, visual images or text messages.
Modem: A device that connects your computer to other computers via phone line.
N
Newsletter: Email sent out to a group of subscribers with relevant information on a topic.
Newsgroup / Usenet: Public discussion areas. It’s free and open to anyone with an Internet connection. Usually focused on surprisingly specific topics, newsgroups are where the curious, opinionated, or info-starved go to read and post messages (thoughts, hopes, dreams, rants, raves, advice, info, and everything else). It’s possible to get at newsgroups through a browser.
Newbie: Someone who is new to the Internet.
Niche Marketing: Focused and target able a special or small market segment.
O
Optimization: Skill of adding elements to a web site so that search engines will rank it higher for a particular set of keywords.
P
Pay-Per-Click Search Engines: Search engines where businesses can bid for which placement they want. Web site owners pay the search engines every time someone clicks on the link of the search engine.
Popularity: Web site popularity is determined by the number of links that point to a site. Some search engines consider that a site that has many inbound links is more popular.
Pay-Per-Lead (PPL): An affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant’s website in an affiliate program. Such as join in completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials.
Pay-Per-Sale (PPS): The affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant’s website.
Profit: The amount of money you earn from your sales. For example, if you sell 10 ebooks at $47.00 each, and each costs $10 to produce and ship, your profit would be $37.00 per video or $370.00 in total.
Plug-in: A small piece of software that adds features to a larger piece of software.
Portal: A term used to describe a Web site that is intended to be used as a main “point of entry” to the Web, example, MSN.com is a portal site.
Privacy Policy: It establishes how a company collects and uses information about its customers’ accounts and transactions.
POP (Point of Presence): An Internet access node of an Internet service provider, in other words, the number your modem rings to get on-line.
POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3): A type of e-mail system which stores messages on your service provider’s machine and downloads them automatically when you are on-line.
Portable Document Format (PDF): It’s a distribution format developed by Adobe Corporation to allow electronic information to be transferred between various types of computers. The software that allows this transfer is called Acrobat.
Q
Query: Word or phrase submitted to a search engine or directory to locate pages on the web.
R
Referrering URL: The URL of the page that a visitor came from.
Real Simple Syndication (RSS): An XML-based format for syndicated content.
Learn More about Real Simple Syndication (RSS)
Reciprocal Linking:The process of exchanging links with other websites to increase search engine popularity.
Recurring Commissions: Earn commissions both on the initial sale and subsequent purchases of the same product or service.
Residual Earnings: Programs that pay affiliates for each sale they made from merchant’s sites over the life of the customer.
Return on Investment (ROI): This is the amount derived from subtracting your net revenues from your total costs.
Revenue: Total income for your sales. For example, if you sell 40 ebooks at $27.00 each, your revenue would be $1028.00.
Robot: Automated program that follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines to fill and update their database.
S
Search Engine: Tools to help you locate what you’re looking for. Search engines breakdown into two categories - directories and indexes. Directories, such as Yahoo are good at identifying general information. They group web sites together under similar categories, such as Internet tutorials, English universities and Paris museums. The results of your search will be a list of web sites related to the subject you are searching for.
But let’s say you want more specific information, such as articles about home-based businesses. Web indexes are the way to go, because they search all the contents of a web site. Indexes use software programs called spiders or robots that scour the Internet, analyzing millions of web pages and newsgroup postings, indexing all of the words.
Safe Email: Lists are also known as opt-in lists, which means that people have signed up to send and receive email to and from all the other people on the list. There are many good ones available. All you need to do is perform a search for “safe lists” or “opt-in lists” on any major search engine. But no matter how safe a list is reputed to be, you should only send a blind or teaser ad to the members to protecting the company name.
Search Engine Advertising: Program that enables companies to place their web sites in whatever position they choose based on bidding for the position.
Search Engine Optimizer (SEO): Search engine expert that can help you optimize your web page to get a high ranking.
Search Engine Optimization: The process of choosing keywords and keyword phrases relevant to your site or page on your site, and placing those keywords within pages so that the site ranks well when those keywords are searched upon.
Search Engine Placement: Program that enables companies to place their web sites in whatever position they choose, based on bidding for the position.
Spam: Unsolicited email. Spam is email sent to people that hasn’t asked to hear from you. The term of spam is also used by search engines to describe sites that try to fool the search engines to get a higher ranking by using methods that the search engines disapprove of, for example keyword stuffing.
Spider: Automated program that follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines to fill and update their database.
Submission: The act of submitting a web page to a search engine or web site to a directory.
Spyware: Also known as “Adware”, it is a program that hidden within free downloaded software that transmits user information via the Internet to advertisers.
Super Affiliates: The top 1 or 2% of affiliates that generate approximately 90% of any affiliate programs earnings.
Server: The software that people with a home page need in order to let you look at their stuff, or the computer on which it is held.
Shareware: Software which can be used for free for a trial period, after which a small payment is expected. It generally can be downloaded from the Net.
Site: Short for Web Site, a page or group of pages containing text and graphics that can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection.
T
Traffic: number of visitors to your site, usually measured over a time period.
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): The communications protocol that connects your computer to the Internet.
Targeted Marketing: The process of distinguishing the different groups that make up a market, and developing appropriate products and marketing mixes strategy for each target market that involved.
Tracking and Management Solution: In order to track the incoming Affiliate-referred traffic to their sites, merchants need to purchase or create software to Track and manage their Affiliates and their activities.
Text Link: A link accompanied by words.
Third Party Tracking Software: Software located on a server other than your own, that tracks and records the statistics of visitors to your Web site.
Temporary Internet Files or Cache: A cache (pronounced like cash), temporarily stores the information on a page in your computer, when you first request a page from the server, the browser checks to see if the page has been previously cached in your computer. Cache helps display pages faster than the network can download.
Two-Tier Program: This commission structure pays you commission on each sale (or lead or click-through) you refer, and a commission on each sale referred by any affiliates you have referred to the program.
U
Unique Visitor: A unique individual visitor to your web site, which probably the best indicator for your site traffic.
Upload: Transferring a file from your computer to another computer.
Universal Resource Locator (URL): Also known as an address, this is the string of characters you type into your browsers to reach a certain website. Example, http://www.articles.bizbizlink.com is the URL for your web site. It is pronounced by saying the letters U-R-L instead of “abl”.
V
Viral Marketing: A marketing technique that induces websites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users.
Virus: A computer virus is defined as a set of commands, created intentionally, which will do some level of damage to a computer. A computer virus does not float around in cyberspace, but is always attached to something. That ’something’ could be a text file (MSWord document), an email, a photo, a music clip or a video clip. Your computer must receive one of these ‘carriers’ and then can get a computer virus.
W
World Wide Web (WWW, or Web): The web is a part of the Internet that allows users to view documents containing text, graphics and hyperlinked objects.
Web Host: A business that providing storage, connectivity and services to serve websites’ pages and files. In the other words, Web Hosts are companies that provide space on a Server they own for use by their clients.
Like Kiosk is a Web Host. Kiosk provides space on their Servers so you can upload your webpages, graphics, audio, video, and text documents to your Domain, so other people can access them via the Internet.
A Server looks the same as your CPU (Central Processing Unit) or “Tower”, as it’s often called. It can have one hard drive (like the “C” drive on your CPU), or several and can “Serve” multiple Domains.
Find a Web Host Here …
Web Site: A website is an organization’s or individual’s presence on the World Wide Web. It is a collection of Web pages, which are documents coded in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) that are linked to each other and very often to pages on other Web sites.
A Web site is hosted on a server by its owner or at an ISP. It may share space on the server with other Web sites, reside on a server dedicated to that Web site only, or be on multiple dedicated servers. To qualify as a Web site, the Web server must be available on the Internet 24 hours a day.
Web Page: It is an HTML/(X)HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) document accessible generally via HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol).
All publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. The pages of a website will be accessed from a common root URL (Universal ResourceLocator) called the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server.
Web Marketing: Any action taken to market a web site or company online including web site optimization, search engine submission, pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.
