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If you are going to get serious about Internet Marketing you need to speak the language of Internet Marketers. You may want to bookmark this page to enable you to come back and review the list from time to time.

Important Definitions in Affiliate Marketing

A

Above the Fold - Once a web page has loaded, the part that is visible is said to be 'above the fold'. 

Ad Blocking – Method of blocking website advertisements in image formats

AdWords – Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising program.

Affiliate – An individual, web site owner or company that markets and promote products or services for a merchant for a commission rate for referring clicks, leads, or sales.

Affiliate Agreement – Terms that governs the relationship between a merchant and an affiliate.

Affiliate Link – Usually a piece of HTML code place on an affiliate website letting the merchant know that an transaction or visitor has been sent to the website

Affiliate Marketing – A revenue sharing arrangement between online merchants and distributors (affiliates) in which the affiliate earns a commission for producing a sale, lead or click for the merchant’s site.

Affiliate Network – A third party providing services to affiliate merchants and affiliates, including tracking technology, reporting tools, and payment processing.

Affiliate Program – Any arrangement through which a merchant pays a commission to an affiliate for generating clicks, leads, or sales from links located on the affiliate’s site. Also know as associate, partner, referral, and revenue sharing programs.

Affiliate Program Directory – Information about a collection of affiliate programs. Directories include information about commission rate, number of affiliates, and commission structure.

Affiliate Program Manager – The person responsible for administering an affiliate program. Duties should 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 image or text link that identifies a visitor as having arrived from a specific affiliate site.

Animated GIF – Graphic image in GIF98a format with a movement effect applied.

Associate – Synonym for ‘affiliate’

Auto–Approve – Term used during the application process where all applicants are automatically approved for an affiliate program.

Auto Responder – Software or online application that sends replies automatically, without human intervention. For example, if you had a page of marketing information, you could ask prospects to send email to “info@yourname.com,” the address of your auto responder. The auto responder will automatically email

the person your information document. Many auto responders will, at the same time, send an email to you, listing the requester’s address tool for conducting online commerce.

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Banner Ad – A graphic image used for advertising in various sizes. One of the most popular forma of website advertisement.

Blog – Acronym for ‘web log’, a blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The act of updating a blog is referred to as ‘blogging’ and those who keep blogs are known as ‘bloggers’.

Browser – A program that allows you to access and read hypertext documents on the World Wide Web.

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CJ – Commission Junction. An Affiliate Network

Click Fraud – Click fraud, also called pay – per – click fraud, is the practice of artificially generating traffic to advertisers’ sites either manually or through the use of automated clicking programs (called hitbots). The advertiser pays for this traffic, which has no potential for generating revenue; however, the scammer receives a percentage of the (PPC) pay–per–click fees paid by the advertiser.

Click Fraud Detection/Monitoring – Service that provides independent monitoring of clicks from your PPC campaigns. If you notice fraudulent activity, Google or Yahoo!/Overture may provide a refund.

Click Through – When a user clicks on a link and arrives at a Web site.

Click Through Rate/Ratio (CTR) – Percentage of visitors who click through to a merchant’s Web site. Also used to identify how often a visitor makes a sale or order after clicking through.

Clickbank – Popular online billing and marketing service for the development of affiliate programs, and the largest distributor of digital information products on the Internet. One of the easiest affiliate marketing programs to use.

Cloaking – Hiding of page content or affiliate linking code.

Commission – Also known as a bounty or referral fee, the income an affiliate is paid for generating a sale, lead or click–through to a merchant’s web site.

Co–branding – Where affiliates are able include their own logo and/or colours on the merchant’s site.

Contextual Link – Placement of affiliate links within related text.

Conversion – When one of your visitors makes a purchase on the merchant’s site… i.e. converts from ‘visitor’ to ‘buyer’.

Conversion Rate (CR) – The percentage of visits to your site that convert to a sale. I.e. If 1 person in every hundred visitors

to your site makes a purchase; your conversion rate is 1:100 or 1 percent.

Cookie – A cookie is a piece of information sent by a Web Server to a Web Browser that the Browser software is expected

to save and to send back to the Server whenever the browser makes additional requests from the Server. You may set your

browser to either accept or not accept cookies. Cookies can contain user preferences, login or registration information,

and/or “shopping cart” information. When a cookie has been saved to a visitor’s computer, the browser sends a request to a

Server; the Server uses the information to return customized information. Cookies are stored as text files on the visitor’s

computer to keep track of information relevant to merchant website.

Cost Per Acquisition/Action (CPA): The amount you pay to acquire a customer.

Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount you pay when a surfer clicks on one of your listings.

Cost Per Lead (CPL) – The amount you pay to acquire a lead

Cost Per Order (CPO) – The amount you pay to process and delivery an order

Cost Per Thousand (CPM): The amount you pay per 1,000 impressions of a banner or button.

Creative – The promotional tools advertisers use to draw in users. Examples are text links, towers, buttons, badges, email copy, pop – ups, etc.

Cross Linking – Linking a group of domains, usually your own, to each other for the purpose of increasing its popularity with search engines. Excessive cross – linking may lead to your site being penalized by Google or Yahoo!

Contextual Link – Integration of affiliate link within related text. Commonly used in articles and email newsletters

Conversion Rate/Ratio – Percentage of clicks that result in a commissionable sale or lead

Customer Bounty – Commission amount paid to affiliate for every new client or customer that they direct to merchant

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Disclaimer – A disclaimer states the terms under which the site or work may be used and gives information relating to what the   copyright owner believes to be a breach of his/her/their copyright. In some cases you may wish to permit certain activities, in others you may wish to withhold all rights, or require the user to apply for a license to carry out certain actions.

Domain Name – The unique name that identifies an Internet site that is linked to a specific IP address. URLs to identify particular Web pages. Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top-level domain (TLD) it belongs to. There are only a limited number of such domains.

For example:

.com – Commercial business

.org – Organizations (non profit)

.net – Network organizations

.us - United States

Because the Internet is based on IP addresses, not domain names, every Web server require a Domain Name System (DNS) server to translate domain names into IP addresses.

Doorway Page – Also known as bridge pages, jump page, bridge page, gateway page, entry pages, portals or portal pages, these pages are used to improve search engine placement. A Web page designed specifically for the purpose of gaining high placement in a search engine’s rankings. An SEO technique, the doorway is meant to capture the attention of a search engine’s spider by containing keywords and phrases that the spider will pick up on. Often the doorway page contains hidden text in order to load the page with occurrences of a specific keyword or phrase. Doorways typically are programmed with a fast meta refresh or a redirect that brings the user to the page that the Web site actually wants the user to visit, or the doorway will have a way for the user to manually click through to the next site. Caution: some search engines will drop a site entirely if the existence of doorway/gateway pages is detected. Read what Google has to say about doorway pages here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters

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E-mail – Electronic mail, a message sent from one e-mail account to another e-mail account through the Internet. An email address has three components: the identifying name of the account, such as “tombrown”, the “@” symbol stands for “at”and then the domain name.

E-mail Link – An affiliate link to a merchant site contained in an email newsletter or signature file.

E-mail Marketing – Promotion of products and service with email.

Email Signature – Also called a “signature file”, this is a brief message embedded at the end of every email that a person sends.

Endorsement Letter – Also known as a “product review”, an endorsement is a promotional statement outlining features and benefits for a particular product or service.

EPC – Term used by the Commission Junction affiliate network, this is your ‘average earnings per 100 clicks’. This number is calculated by taking commissions earned divided by the total number of clicks times 100.

Exclusivity – A merchant that that stipulates ‘exclusivity’ in their affiliate agreement usually prohibits the affiliate from promoting competing products on their site.

Ezine –The short term for an Electronic Magazine, a web site that is modelled after a print magazine. Some ezines are simply electronic versions of existing print magazines, whereas others exist only in their digital format. Most ezines are advertiser –supported but a few charge a subscription.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Lists common questions and answers about the products and services offered on a website.

FFA – Free for all links, also referred to as “link farms”. A bulletin board style listing of website links organized into categories.

Forum – Online community, where visitors read and post topics on common interests.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) – A method or protocol for exchanging files over the Internet. FTP works in the same way as HTTP for transferring Web pages from a server to a user’s browser and SMTP for transferring electronic mail across the Internet in that, like these technologies, FTP uses the Internet’s TCP/IP protocols to enable data transfer.

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Google Adsense – A Pay Per Click affiliate program that uses contextual and graphic image ads that are linked to targeted page content.

Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) – An image file format, suitable for simple files. A JPEG is the preferred format for storing   photographs.

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Hit – A hit is a single request from for a single item on a web server. To load a page with 5 graphics would count as 6 ‘hits’, 1 for the page plus 1 for each of the graphics. Hits therefore are not a very good measurement of traffic to a website.

Home Page – Your primary website page, also called the “index” or “landing” page. This is the first page anyone would see on your web site.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) – The most common “language” used to create documents (web pages) to be displayed on the Internet.

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Impression – An advertising metric that indicates how many times an advertising link is displayed.

In – house – Term used to describe a Merchant who provides the services required to manage their own affiliate program.

Internet Service Provider (ISP) – The Company that provides the capability for you to connect your computer to the Internet.

IP Address – A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 155.252.345.1. Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address.

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JavaScript – A programming language developed by Sun Microsystems designed for writing programs that 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 typically formed to undertake a particular business transaction or project rather than one intended to continue indefinitely.

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Keyword – The search term that a user may enter at a search engine. For example, someone who wants to find a site that sells printer paper might enter ‘printer paper’ at a search engine.

Keyword Density – The ratio between the keyword being searched for and the total number of words that appear on your web page. If your keyword only occurs, say, once, in a page that has twenty thousand words, then it has a density of 0.005 percent.

Keyword Selector Tool – Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) during a given month.

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Lifetime Commissions – An affiliate program that pays a commission on EVERY product or service that the customer buys from the merchant, once you’ve sent the referral, i.e. the customer is yours ‘for life’.

Lifetime Value – The total amount of money that a customer could possibly spend with a particular company during his or her lifetime.

Link Popularity – The total number of qualified Web sites linking to your Web site.

LS – LinkShare, is an Affiliate Network

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Mailing List – A Mailing List is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as “the mailing list”, or simply “the list”.

Manual Approval – Affiliate applicants are manually approved, usually by affiliate manager, for the affiliate program.

Merchant – Also known as an advertiser. The business or online vendor of products or services that offers an affiliate program.

Meta Tags – Information placed in the header of an HTML page, which is not visible to site visitors.

Multilevel Marketing (MLM) – Selling products by using independent distributors and allowing these distributors to build and manage their own sales force by recruiting, motivating, supplying, and training others to sell products. The distributors’ compensation includes their own sales and a percentage of the sales of their sales group also called a “down line.”

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Newsgroup – A newsgroup is a discussion that takes place online, devoted to a particular topic. The discussion takes the form of electronic messages called “postings” that anyone with a newsreader (standard with most browsers) can post or read.

Newbie – A person who is inexperienced in a particular endeavour.

Niche Marketing – Refers to the technique of focusing on a narrowly defined target market segment.

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Opt-in – Consent given to receive information by e-mail such as newsletter or ezines.

Opt-out– Withdrawal or cancellation of the consent given to receive information by e-mail.

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Paid Inclusion (PI) – Guaranteed listing is a search engine for a fee

Parasite – A system or affiliate that overwrites other affiliate cookies to steal their commissions.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – One of the first affiliate marketing compensation where an affiliate receives a commission for each click (visitor) they refer to a merchant’s web site.

Pay Per Lead (PPL) – An affiliate program in which an affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant web site. Examples include completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials.

Pay Per Sale (PPS) – Programs in which the affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant’s web site.

Payment Threshold – Minimum amount of commission earned before payment is made.

Pop Under Ad – Advertisement displayed in a new browser window behind or underneath the current browser window

Pop Up Ad – Advertisement displayed in a new browser window

PDF  - Portable Document Format– 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.

Profit – The amount of money you earn from your sales. For example, if you sell 10 videos at $47.00 each, and each costs $10 to produce and ship, your profit would be $37.00 per video or $370.00 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. I.e. MSN.com is a portal site.

Privacy Policy – A privacy policy establishes how a company collects and uses information about its customers’ accounts and transactions.

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Raw Visitor – The term used for every time a page is viewed.

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. Examples of affiliate programs that may pay recurring commissions are online dating services and web hosting services.

Referring URL – The website address where the visitor came from to reach your site.

Residual Earnings – Programs that pay affiliates for each sale a shopper from their sites makes at the merchant’s site for everypurchase made by the customer.

Return on Investment (ROI) – Return on Investment. Percentage of income earned vs. total investment.

Revenue – Total income for your sales. For example, if you sell 50 eBooks at $37.00 each, your revenue would be $1,850.00.

ROAS – Return on Ads Spent. Percentage of income versus expenses generated by advertising.

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SAS – Share-A-Sale, An Affiliate Network

Scum-ware – Software that contains additional ‘features’ for the purpose of displaying advertisements. This software will modifyweb pages from their original content to put ads on the user’s computer screen. Examples of scum-ware propagators included:Gator, Ezula, Surf+ and Imesh.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – 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 Results Page (SERP) – The position or listing a search engine returns in response to a search query.

Search Term Suggestion Tool – Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture during a given

month.

SPAM – The term that is used to describe unsolicited commercial e-mail. Also “junk” e-mail to equate it with the paper junk mail that comes through the US Mail. In response to the overwhelming number of complaints about unsolicited e-mail, the CAN-SPAM Act was passed in 2003 which sets specific guidelines for commercial mailers. For a complete description of the rules, regulations and penalties related to the sending of e-mail for marketing purposes, see the website of the Federal Trade Commission at http://www.ftc.gov

Spyware – A program hidden within free downloaded software that transmits user information via the Internet to advertisers, also known as “adware”.

Super Affiliate – Term used to describe an affiliate earning over $10,000 a month. These are the top 1 or 2% of affiliates that generate approximately 90% of any affiliate programs earnings.

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Targeted Marketing – The process of distinguishing the different groups that make up a market, and developing appropriate products and marketing mixes for each target market involved.

T&C – Terms and Conditions.

Text Link – A link not accompanied by a graphical image.

Third Party Tracking Software – Software located on a server other than your own, that tracks and records visits to your Web

site.

TOS – Terms of Service or Affiliate Agreement.

Tracking Method – The system an affiliate program uses to track sales, leads or clicks from an embedded referral link. Some

programs use cookies for the same purpose.

Tracking URL – A web site URL, http://www.mywebsite.com, with your special code attached to it, i.e. http://www.mywebsite.com/?myAffiilateID. Visitors arriving at the side are tracked back to you through your special code.

Two -tier – A compensation plan structure where affiliates earn commissions on their conversions as well as conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.

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Unique Visitor – A term used to describe the process of tracking the amount of traffic on a web site; it refers to a person who visits a web site more than once within a specified period of time. The software program tracks and counts the visitor traffic to your web site are designed to distinguish between visitors who only visit the site once and unique visitors who return to the site.

Different from a raw visitor or page views, which are measured by the number of files that are requested from a site, unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses, which are like online fingerprints, and unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site. There are some ISPs that use Dynamic Host Configuration

Protocol, such as AOL and cable modem providers, which use different IP’s for every file requested, making one visitor look like  many. In this case, a single IP address does not indicate a unique visitor.

Upload – Transferring a file from your computer to another computer or server.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – The address of a site on the World Wide Web. Here’s an example URL:

http://www.thisismysite.com/reviews/index.html. The “http” stands for “hypertext transfer protocol”; “://” indicates the beginning of the address; “www.thisismysite.com” is the domain name; “/reviews” is the directory; and “index.html” is the name of the HTML file.

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Viral Marketing – A concept where an advertising message propagates itself through a variety of contacts and emails.

Virus – A computer virus is defined as a set of commands, created intentionally, that 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’ in order to get a computer virus.

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Web Host – A business that provide storage, connectivity, and services necessary to serve website pages and files.

Web Site – A specific location (site) on the World Wide Web. Each Web site contains a home or “index” page, which is the first

document users see when they enter the site. The site might also contain additional documents and files. Each site is owned

and managed by an individual, company or organization.

World Wide Web (WWW or web) – A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots. Not all Internet servers are part of theWorld Wide Web. There are several applications called Web browsers that make it easy to access the World Wide Web; Two of the most popular being Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The World Wide Web is NOT synonymous with the Internet.

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Yahoo – Considered by many to be the most comprehensive and popular of all search index databases on the Internet.

 

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