Affiliate / Internet Marketing Terminology

Learning the Terminology

When you are brand new to affiliate marketing, it can be rather confusing to learn all of the terminology that exists for affiliate marketing.  I have provided you with a list to help you to know more of the vocabulary surrounding the business of internet marketing. So below I have provided in alphabetical order what some of the terminology means.

A

About Me page Page on your website telling something about you, not necessarily about your business. This can be your story of how you got to where you are, for example.

Account Settings When you sign up to be a member of a new program, you will have an area called your account settings that contains you name, picture of yourself, email preferences, personal information and anything else the program has collected from you. You can update your account settings and should regularly check to make sure everything is up-to-date.

Adware: Also known as “spyware”.  It is a program hidden within free downloaded software that will transmit user information via the web to advertisers.

Adwords: This is Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising system.  You will pay to get top rankings in Google.

Affiliate You will hear this word many times. This is a person who earns revenue from promoting other people’s products on their website. You are learning to become an affiliate which means you will be learning how to become a successful internet marketer with any company you create an affiliate partnership with.

Affiliate Marketing A type of business venture whereby you sign up with particular companies offering to promote their products in exchange for a commission from the sale.

Amazon An online ecommerce website that sells numerous products.  Amazon is one of the most popular and easy to use affiliate companies, but the commissions are low, ranging from 4% to 6%.  You can make more money through Amazon by selling your own stuff through them.  Learn more about Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).

AutoSave To automatically save a file as you are working on. Most computer programs automatically save your file every three to seven minutes.

Avatar An icon or digital image of one’s self used in an online platform.  I have an avatar of my picture for instance, but some people use a cartoon image such as the one below:

B

Backlinks – Back links are links on other websites that link back to your website. This can be effective for increasing your SEO. However, there are do’s and don’t involved. As long as your backlink is high quality, relevant, and provided with good editorial judgement, that is fine. However, when a backlink is irrelevant, spammy and low-quality, Google will penalized you for it.

Backup The ability to save and store your site content and all relevant data.

Banners  These are images of different sizes that are available for your use to promote different products within the affiliate partnerships you belong to.

Bing A search engine similar to Google but not as well known.

Blog  This term can also be used to refer to an entire website you own and have control over. When the term was first introduced many people referred to it is a “web blog” and later was shortened to blog.

Blogroll This is a page on your website that has a series of posts that you have written, threaded down the page. It typically will be the landing page of your website unless you have created a static page.

Bounce This can have many different meanings when it comes to computers. If you send an email message to someone whom does not have a valid email address, that message automatically returns (bounces back) to you. If someone visits your website and they leave almost immediately, they bounce off your website.

Browser: On the internet, this is a program which allows you to access and view webpages. Examples of browsers are Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. and many others.

C

Carousel These are rotating / sliding images or banners.

Clicks The verb form refers to when you or one of your users mouses over a link or a hyperlinked image and pushes the button on their computer mouse. Used as a noun, it refers to how many times someone pushed their mouse on your link. You will hear words like raw clicks and unique clicks.

Click-Through This refers to when you click on a link and arrives at a website.

Comment This what you enter into the text box in response to what somebody said in a discussion or it can refer to an appropriate remark left in the text area of someone’s website.

Commissions Money you earn when you receive make a sale through your affiliate link.

Community A group of like-minded individuals helping each other to reach certain goals.

Conversions Within WA, these are referred to people who visited your site and clicked on the link to join and signed up as a result of your successful promotion of a product you are promoting.

Cross-linking: When you link a group of one or more websites together, usually ones that you own, so to get better exposure. The problem is if there is excessive cross-linking you might be penalized by Google.

CSS Cascading Style Sheets is code within your website that dictates your consistent format, font, image size, color and the overall look and feel throughout your website. It is embedded within the HTML. (Hypertext Markup Language).

D

Dashboard This is often referred to as your (WordPress) Dashboard. This is the user-interface you see when you first log into your WordPress site.

Description This is often referred to as your (profile) description. This is the text you entered telling the community about yourself and what brought you to that community.

Domain Used interchangeably for website or URL.

Download The process of receiving data from the internet to your computer.

E

Entrepreneur Refers to what a person who is in business for himself – an innovative business owner.  This can be either an online or brick-and-mortar business.

Edit Make changes to content you create

Embed To paste a line or two of code into the HTML of a website.  Used mostly when referring to pasting short lines of code so that videos or images can be posted on your website.

Emoticon Refers to text that signifies emotions. For example, you will see 🙂 many times which means their message was meant in good humor or that they are happy about something.

Encoding To convert content into code, such as when used in reference to your WordPress site, you might see your text be encoded to HTML.

F

Facebook– Social Media Site where many people might promote their niche sites and communicate online with friends.

Favicon Also referred to Site Icon by many WordPress themes. It is the small custom icon that shows up on your browser tab.

File A file is a single collection of content and data you have stored on your computer. You might be asked to upload a file to your WordPress site.

Flaming The act of posting offensive and rude messages within an internet platform.

Freeware Freeware is software that can be used, downloaded and distributed without any upfront payment. It is free software, hence, the term freeware.

Followers People whom you have in your network. Followers are tracking your moves within the internet.

Frozen No, I am not talking about the Disney movie. This is when the system is unresponsive.

G

Google The major search engine in which you will become extremely familiar with if not already.

Google Chrome – Google’s browser.  It is like Internet Explore, Firefox or Safari,

Google Slapped This refers to when you do something that is against Google policies, such as spamming, and Google penalizes you for it.

Graphics Images that appear on your computer screen

Graphic User Interface A interface filled with imagery and clickable icons that are linked to other areas internally within the interface.

Gravatar Profile picture attached to your email, which appears next to your comments.  An example taken from this website below:

Gravatar Hovercard A pop-up with information about the gravatar which is available with some of the WordPress themes. There is also a plug-in you can install into your website.

H

Hard Disk This is the place where you install programs on your computer

Header Head of content on top of your blog / website.

Home page This is the first page people come to when they visit your site’s URL.  It may also be referred to as landing page.

Hosting Refers to the web server where your website is stored. You might select a web hosting company to pay for the service of hosting your website(s).

Hover To roll the cursor over a link

HTML Hypertext Markup Language is the code for building websites.

https Stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol and is the protocol for transferring data across the internet. The start of all websites is https:///[yourdomain].com

I

Impression This is an advertising metric which indicates the number of times a promotion link is displayed.

Internet Explorer A popular browser just like Google Chrome or Firefox.

IP Address This is a unique identifier for your computer’s location. Every computer requires an IP address to connect to the world wide web or Internet. There are two kinds of IP addresses, static and dynamic.  The static IP address always stays the same. The dynamic one changes whenever you log on to the computer.   Every computer has a unique IP address.

Inbox This is referred to the location of your new private messages.

Install Most software programs will require that you first install them on your computer which refers to writing the necessary data to your computer’s hard drive so the program will run effectively.

Internet Service Provider (ISP) This is company that you have signed up with that provides your connection from your home computer and other devices to the internet.

J

Java No, I am not talking about coffee here.  Java is a complex computer programming language that can write small programs to be embedded into your website(s). Often times when you are downloading new software, you may asked to install a Java plug-in. It is a small program that is required to run certain websites.

Joint Venture This is a business agreement whereby the parties agree to develop for a specified amount of time a new entity and assets by contributing equity.

K

Keywords Words or phrases that can be used to describe content. When a user searches on Google, they are using keywords to search for appropriate and relevant content meeting their needs.   In order to achieve ranking in Google, you need to have to keywords plugged into your content.

Keyword Density The ratio between how many times the keyword was searched for and the total number of words appearing on your webpage. If your keyword density is too high, Google may penalize you for keyword stuffing.

Keyword Stuffing The act of placing an excessive number of keywords in your articles to try and achieve a higher ranking in Google.  This is an unethical process which will get you penalized by Google.

L

Lifetime Commissions Some affiliate programs pay a commission on a continued renewal product or service that the customer buys from the vendor (merchant) thereby earning a commission for the lifetime of that customer’s membership or the lifetime of your affiliate partnership with that particular merchant or the lifetime of the vendor (merchant), whichever should end first.

Link When you are reading a web page, you will see text highlighted in either blue or another color. These highlighted texts are typically links which will take you to another place internally within the website or externally to a completely different website.

Link Popularity The total number of qualified websites which link to your URL.

Live Chat You can receive answers to your questions in real-time using this feature.  Many web hosting companies have a Live Chat feature for when there are problems needing immediate attention.

Live Traffic Feed This website has a live traffic feed along the right hand side near the bottom in a dark shade of green.  It is when you show where your visitors are coming from in real time.

Login Whenever you are required to enter your user name and password to access a website, you are logging in. You are authenticating your authorization to enter the website.

M

Malware This is short for malicious software which attacks your computer causing it to do unwanted and undesirable actions.

Merchant Another word for vendor. They sell goods or services.  As an affiliate, you will establish partnerships with the merchants.

Media Media may have many different meanings. However, when you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard, the term media is another word for attachments, such as images or PDF files.  When you are logged into your WordPress site and click Add New Post, you will see the following option to Add Media which means Add Image.

Menu Bar Nearly all websites and software programs have a menu bar which is a horizontal or vertical bar which permits the user to navigate through the website by having links to other internal pages within the website.   This website has a horizontal menu bar.

Meta Tags A meta tag is information stored within the HTML heading tag that provides a description and the keywords of a particular webpage. Notice the example below I took from this website.  Within the <head> …… </head> tags, the <meta charset=…. is referring to the character set of the content within the website (or blog info as it is being referred to in the example below). The next one down is <meta name= … which is calling a value by the name of viewport and assigning a width to it.

 

Metadata Metadata is basically data about data. For example an image can contain metadata about the image size, width, length, image resolution, when it was created and RGB color scheme. A webpage can have description and keyword meta tags about the content within that webpage.

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) This is a type of company involving the sale of products or services through a group of independent distributors who buy wholesale and/or sell retail and sponsor other people such as their friends or relatives to do the same. Many MLMs are actual pyramid schemes and are operating illegally.  Herbalife, an MLM company, has been seen all over the Internet lately for being investigated by the FBI and SEC for operating under a pyramid scheme.

N

Name Server The parameters indicating where your website is hosted with. Every web hosting company has specific name servers that point a particular website to them.  A name server translates domain names into IP addresses. Wealthy Affiliate, BlueHost, Miss Hosting, NameCheap and many other web hosting companies have two name servers. The first one is the primary name server. The second one is the backup in case the first one goes down.

Network Although can have many meanings, within the world of affiliate marketing,  this refers to your followers and those that you are following.

Newsgroup A discussion online focusing on a particular topic.  The discussion has electronic newsworthiness posts that members of that newsgroup can read.  Yahoo Groups is an example of a newsgroup.

Newbie Someone who is new to affiliate marketing and has no prior experience.

Niche A niche is your passion, the thing you are most interested in building your website around.  Click here to learn about discovering your niche.

O

Online Another word for being connected to the internet – opposite of offline.

Offline Means to not be connected to the internet – opposite of online.

Open Source This refers to software which is freely available to the public.

Outbox Messages that you have sent to another person or member of a community.

P

Page When referencing the Internet, it refers to a timeless and static webpage within your website.

PayPal This is a website which allows for ease of payment from one entity to another for services or products rendered.  On this website, I have a donate to PayPal feature near the bottom right hand corner.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Popular way for affiliates to get top ranking within Google or Bing or Yahoo by paying for link placement.  The affiliate pays the search engine (Google, Bing, etc) whenever a link is clicked through.

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) An affiliate program where you (the affiliate) receives a commission for every sales lead generated for a merchant website.  An example of this is a survey that a user completes or a sweepstakes entry form.

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) Programs whereby the affiliate receives a commission for every product sale or service they refer to a vendor’s website.

Plain Text Another word for unformatted text. This text is not a heading, not boldface, not italicized, not underlined, etc. It is regular text.

Phishing Instead of fishermen fishing in a pond, this type of phishing refers to scams phishing for your personal information via sending you false emails pretending to be from legitimate resources asking you to provide your user name, password, social security number, etc.

Portable Document Format (PDF) A format for documents developed by Adobe Corporation and used in conjunction with a free software called Acrobat. It creates a static document in which the text will not change when sent from one computer to another.

Profit Money or revenue you will earn from your affiliate commissions.

Plugin This term is used when referring to WordPress add-ons.  A plugin is an application or algorithm within WordPress that adds specific features or capabilities to your website. BackWPUp is an example of a plugin.

Ponzi Scheme – Similar to pyramid scheme, a ponzi scheme is a system whereby you take from Peter to pay Paul.  The term comes from Charles Ponzi who ran the first known Ponzi scheme.

Portal A website used as a main point of entry to the Internet. MSN.com is an example.

Post: Refers to a relevant article of your niche. It could be a newsworthy item or new product which was released recently. It can become outdated and can be tagged. As of the writing of this particular post, I have 36 posts on this website alone.

Privacy Policy Every website  is required to have a privacy policy.  It is one of the first pages you will want to create when you building a website.  A privacy policy describes how you will collect and use information about your visitors.  It describes how cookies will be generated and retained among other pieces of information.

Private Message A message between two or more people that is private and does not reach the public.   It can be a message sent from one person in a community to another member of the same community or it can be an internet message through Yahoo or Gmail.

Profile Whenever you join a new affiliate partnership you will be asked to create your profile.  This is also used for your WordPress account.  When you build a website using WordPress you will have a WordPress profile created.  If you use social media networks, you will have a Facebook or Twitter profile for instance.

Pyramid Scheme A pyramid scheme is an illegal scheme where the bulk of the money is made from the recruitment of new distributors instead of the actual sale of merchandise.  Many MLMs operate under a pyramid scheme.

Q

QuickTime A multimedia software that was created by Apple to store images and movie files (.mov).  Learn more about where to store your videos or a comparison of video creating (screencast) software.

R

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) This is an XML-based format for syndicated content.  Many websites will have an RSS feed.

Real-Time When a function happens immediately, this is real-time such as when you are in Live-Chat, you are communicating in real-time.

Return on Investment (ROI) This is an accounting term to reference the monetary amount from subtracting your net revenue from your total cost.

Responsive A term which refers to how your website adapts to mobile devices, such as Smartphones and tablets

Restore Refers to returning a file or a website or a computer to its original or previous version.  When you backup your website, you may need to restore it to a prior version.

Residual Earnings These are earnings that are a continued source of income for the affiliate.  They are generated through a monthly or yearly membership which continue throughout the lifetime the membership.

Robot In the computer world, Robots are programs that crawl through your website indexing all of your content to be used when determining your search results rank from various keywords entered through the search engines.

ROM A storage medium standing for Read Only Memory and allows the computer to read data off a device without saving or overwriting the data.

Router A hardware device that receives and analyzes segments of data from one network to another. The router below is a common home computing router.

S

Search Engine Search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and are used as the platform for entering keywords into.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Refers to how well you are able to position your website to receive high ranking within the search engines, such as Google.  Click for more information about SEO.

Screenshot Using a specific software, you can capture a portion of your computer screen and convert it into an image to be used on your website.

Scroll Bar When a web page is too long to see all of the content within the computer screen, you can use the scroll bar to the right of the screen by clicking on it and move down the page to see the rest of the content.

Shortcode: A specific code which lets you do things with less effort.

Slider Referred to an image or banner which presents itself as a slideshow with rotary images

Snippet A small block of HTML code that can be copied and pasted into a section of your website, such as a side widget or a footer.

Social Media This refers to sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+. You can leverage your social media to get more traffic to your website.

Spreadsheet A tabular listing of data that is stored in horizontal and vertical grid-like formats. Examples include MicroSoft Excel and Google Sheets.

Spam It is when you are sending inappropriate material to someone for your own benefit.

Static Page Within the WordPress interface, all themes are initially set up to have your home page be a blog roll with all of your latest posts listed on this page. However, you can change your website to have a static page that users will go to when they visit your site. A static page is one that does not change or update unless you manually change it where as a blog roll is constantly changing whenever a new post is added.

Sticky Post: To create a sticky post is to make that post always appear as the first one in a blogroll.

Squeeze Page A squeeze page is a landing page specifically created for the sole purpose to solicit your name and email and put the “squeeze” on you to join their program or buy their product.

T

Tag Often referred to as an (HTML) tag. It is a part of the HTML code that tells the computer what the particular line of code will do. For example, a <p> tag tells the computer the content in between these two tags will be in paragraph format.

Targeted Marketing The process of distinguishing the different groups consisting of a market or a niche and developing appropriate and relevant products and marketing campaigns for each target audience.

Text Editor A text editor is a word processing program that allows you to enter text. Notepad is a common example.

Text Link A link not having a graphical image.

Theme When you set up your website in WordPress, you will be given a choice of different look-and-feels for your site. These looks-and-feels are called themes.

Toolbar – A set of icons that work with the program’s interface to perform various functions.  WordPress has a toolbar which I show you how to use in this video tutorial.

Tracking URL A tracking URL is a website with your special affiliate identification coded into it.  Visitors arriving at the side are tracked back to you through your special code or long numeric ID.

Training Lessons that will provide you with new found knowledge and skills. Check out my computer tutorials here which provide you with training.

Twitter A social media site used to leverage your website and its content.

U

Unique User A unique visitor to your website. Examining your unique users will most likely be the best indicator of site traffic.

Upload Transferring a file from your computer to a website.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) The address of a site on the internet.  It is another term used for your web address.

User name This is your specific identifier within a program or website.

Unfollow If you are following someone and no longer wish to follow them, you can unfollow them.  This is used most often in the social media networks, such as Twitter and Pinterest.

Upgrade Software improvements to maintain functionality based on new technological developments

V

Virus A small program or script that can negatively affect the functionality of your computer.

Visual Editor In your WordPress Dashboard in the section where you add your pages and posts you will first start by using this mode as you enter your content. If you need to enter HTML code, you switch off of this mode to the Text mode.

W

Webaddress Also known as URL. It is your domain name.

Web host A Web host company stores all of the pages of your websites and makes them available to computers all over the internet. Click here for examples of web hosting companies

Webmail Every time you log into an email system such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. you are using a Webmail system.  Many web hosting companies use a webmail system which allows you to create emails using your domain name as your extension.

Webmaster A webmaster is a developer who creates websites in a easy to navigate eye catching format. Every good webmaster will be creative when using a mixture of text and imagery to create a website.

Webpage A webpage is a single page on your entire website. For example, you might have a webpage that is About Me which is one page on your whole site.

Website A website is a collection of webpages to create a fully functional website with navigation links, images, content, etc.

Widget You will hear this word mentioned as you begin to consider ways to utilize the side bars of your website. In WordPress, you can create side widgets which can contain the code within your Dashboard but in the browser, you will see your Advertisements, Banners, Pinterest Board Widgets, etc.

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is a wireless way of connecting to the internet

Wireless Wireless refers to connecting to the Internet without connecting cables and wires.

WordPress WordPress is the website building platform that many webmasters use.

Word processor A word processor is a software program that allows you to write text and content that you can either save as a word processing file or copy and paste it into your WordPress dashboard as one of your posts to your website.  MicroSoft Word is an example of a word processor.

World Wide Web Another word for the Internet.  Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web.

X

XML – Stands for extensible markup language.. XML is an extension of HTML.  XML can be used to create specific functions within a website. The most common function that XML serves is to create a database within your website assigning definitions and values. The thing to remember about XML is that it is not a stand alone markup language. It requires the use of HTML.

An example of an XML script is below:

Y

Yahoo Yahoo is a search engine much like Google and Bing.

YouTube YouTube is a website that stores millions of videos. You will learn about creating your own videos and uploading them to YouTube to get traffic to your site and lead to higher conversions.

Z

Zip File A zip file is a compressed file. For example when you download a program, you might see filename.zip which means it is being downloaded as a zipped file. A zipped file takes up less room on a computer’s hard drive.

 

 

 

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I hope this terminology helps you as you learn more about the world of affiliate marketing and how you can earn a living online.  I would love to hear your comments below please.  In addition, if you see any words that I have neglected to mention, please include them in your comments and I will be sure to update as needed.  If you have any questions about any of the terminology listed in this post, please leave that question below and I will certainly respond and provide more clarification.