Affiliate Glossary

Common terms and acronyms used on this site and forums

This section is added to help beginners, sometimes to experienced affiliates too, to better understand words, terms, phrases, abbreviations, acronyms, whatever, used to describe some phrase what are too long for writting again and again. Or we are too lazy? Also, some "trendy" marketers are often using phrases from some popular marketing courses, probably thinking that using them, they are looking more "savvy"? Those phrases will be covered too.

Search engines

SE
Used instead of "search engine"

Natural traffic
Or "organic", traffic from search engines,
free traffic.

PPC search engine
Pay Per Click search engine, where webmasters are bidding to get
better position. More you pay for visitor's click, your site
is higher positioned. Example is Overture.

SEO
Search engine optimization

SERP or SERPS
Search engine result page, panel, listing, results when searching,
also called natural or organic listing

anchor text
Often used in SEO articles or forums, it is link title,
underlined clickable text on web page. Link "TITLE"
is attribute of link (anchor) tag. "Anchor text"
is probably used to avoid confusion.

SE spider
Search engine spider or crawler is search engine software, indexing web site pages

BL or b/l
Backlinks, links from other sites to yours, link back - two-way linking, reciprocal

outbound links
One-way links from other sites

inbound links
Linking inside of site. Link from one page to some other page on the same web site

incoming and outgoing links
Links from other sites (incoming) and link to the other site (outgoing)

Black Hat
Describes methods or tactics used from spammers to get
better position on search engines. Opposite - "White hat"
Other "hat colors" are between these two :-).

Web page cloaking
Well known "black hat" tactic, showing one page to visitor and an other (keyword rich or stolen from other site) to search engine spiders. Also known as "IP delivery" Some commercial sites (and private forums) are still using this method to let search engine spider to index content, but, when visitor visits their site using link listed on search engine, he is blocked from indexed content and subscription form is presented (different content). This is definitive cloaking and free advertising for paying membership.
Web page cloaking = cheating visitors = web site banned from search engines. No exceptions. No excuses.

search engine SPAM
No, it is not acronym of "Sites Positioned Above Mine" :-)
Search engine spam is content you don't want to see on search
engine result pages. Automatically generated pages with no value for
visitor. It has nothing with e-mail SPAM.

301 redirect
Server response code when page or domain is moved permanently on an other place. Often used to redirect old domain name to new, or to redirect link what can be followed by search engine spiders.

302 redirect
Difference from 301 is that 302 means moved "temporary". Default response code for redirection scripts. Protect your redirection scripts from SE spiders (use disallow in robots.txt) to avoid hijacking websites (well known 302 bug, where other website is listed under url of your redirection script)

Affiliate programs

Affiliate program
Affiliate program involves merchant and affiliate, where
merchant pays to affiliate portion of product sale price.
Affiliate is promoting products from merchant, sending buyers
to merchant site. Visitor is tracked and if he buys, affiliate
gets commission.

Affiliate networks
Affiliate network is company, connecting affiliates and merchants.
It is the shortest way to find suitable product to promote, just
looking at merchants and products listed there. Membership is free.

CPA Networks
Same as above, Affiliate network, but CPA is often used these days.
CPA means Cost Per Action (below), includes Pay per Lead and
Pay per Sale

Affiliate ID
Number or nick used in your affiliate links, provided from
affiliate network.

Affiliate link
Ordinary link on web page, contains additional codes (affiliate ID, LinkID) used to tracking sales.

Landing page
Landing page is web page (on merchant site) where visitor is redirected after he clicks on affiliate link.

Lead
Lead is, not only in affiliate programs, collected info of
interested visitor, used from merchant for, say, selling..

CPA, PPL
Pays per Lead - When visitor signups for some
membership, leaving his info, using affiliate link, it is
Lead or Action, merchant pays fixed commission to affiliate.
Better explained on what is CPA?

PPS
Pays per sale is when visitor buys something, in this case,
commission is percent of sale price.

CTR
Click-through rate. Ratio between ad displays and clicks on that ad.

CPC, PPC
Cost per Click, Pays per click. For affiliates, that is how
much merchant pays to you when visitor clicks on affiliate link.

Conversion rate
Is the ratio between clicks and number of leads/sales,
for example 100 clicks, 5 sales, CR is 5%

EPC
Earned per click. Ratio between earned commission and number
of clicks can show if that product is worth to promote.

NOTE: All these statistics stuff is explained better,
with examples and averages, in product statistic

Internet marketing

IM
Shortly, it is "Internet Marketing"

niche
"niche" is simply area of interest. For
example, gardening is niche, watering is niche too.

profitable niche
If you have site about gardening and you can earn good income selling tools, seeds, whatever, that is "profitable" niche. Just example.

List building
Getting subscribers to mailing list, in most cases,
offering some "free" report, ebook..
(subscription is required to get that report)

Opt-in
When visitor subscribes to some newsletter, e-zine...
Double opt-in, visitor must confirm his subscription,
i.e. must respond to first email to confirm subscription.

NameSqueeze page
Purpose of that page is only to get more subscribers to
mailing list. Contains mail (subscription) form. Sometimes
used (from merchants) instead of normal landing page.

Split testing
Normal testing for products, redirecting traffic to different
landing pages to test effect of that sales page.

pre-selling
"Warming" visitor to that point that he simply
must have that product. Seriously, presenting product
to visitor, and sending him to the sales page.

up-selling
Grabbing visitor's email and bothering him with another products

ROI
Return of investment. If you are promoting merchants, for example, using Google AdWords, this is important :-).

Outsourcing
Out-sourcing is shortly, when some other is doing your work. Writers, programmers, Web-designers, etc...