It's not easy to understand the many terms associated with doing business online. We've put together a list of terms to help guide your affiliate marketing efforts.
Above the fold: a banner ad or text appearing in the active window (screen) without having to scroll down.
Advertiser: (also merchant) any Web site that sells a product or service, accepts payments, and fulfills orders. An advertiser places ads and links to their products and services on other Web sites (publishers/affiliates) and pays those publishers a commission for leads or sales that result from their site.
Affiliate: a Web site owner that earns a commission for referring sales
to a merchant site.
Affiliate Operating Agreement: the terms and conditions that outline a relationship between the affiliate and merchant.
Affiliate Program: (also a Partner, Associate, Reseller, or Revenue Sharing Program): a merchant pays an affiliate for generating sales or leads from either a banner, link or text ad from an affiliate site.
ASP: (Application Service Provider) or a third-party entity that manages and distributes software-based services and solutions to customers across a wide area network from a central data center.
Banner Farm: a Web site (ranch) that raises 468 x 60's (cows), 234 x
60's (chickens) and other sized banners (goats). The Web site owner
(rancher) does not generate any substantial affiliate revenue.
Bounty: a per lead payment to an affiliate site.
Browser: short for Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
For more information
about affiliate programs, check out these other articles from Cynthia Arko's ongoing weekly series:
Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing
Revenue Sharing
101 In this first in a series of weekly articles, Cynthia Arko, Product Director for internet.com's Refer-it.com affiliate
directory, presents a no-nonsense approach to generating revenue from your Web site.
How to Indentify Quality
Affiliate Programs With literally thousands of affiliate programs available on the Internet, it could be difficult to determine which ones
are high quality. However, the process could be made easier when using some basic criteria.
Understanding Affiliate
Commission Structures If you want to get paid, you need to understand affiliate commission payments and the many different commission
structures that exist.
Content
Sells Making money with affiliate programs requires much hard work and continued attention to developing and retaining visitor
traffic.
Search Engine Tips, Part
I For affiliates, it is important to be listed with the major search engines because they can potentially generate much
needed traffic.
Search Engine Tips, Part
II Cynthia Arko explores the impact search engines have on affiliate programs in this second article of a two-part series.
Develop an Opt-in E-mail
List Mailing lists are a very popular way to create traffic and generate repeat visitors to a Web site, often leading to
additional affiliate sales and referrals.
Common Mistakes of
Affiliates If you're not generating much revenue from your affiliates, it could be due to some common errors.
Profiting from Seasonal Coupons and Hot Deals! Now is a great time to increase affiliate commissions by offering your visitors seasonal coupons, special offers and deals available exclusively to the Internet bargain hunter.
Helpful Affiliate Terms: Part One It's not easy to understand the many terms associated with doing business online. We've put together a list of terms to help guide your affiliate marketing efforts.
CGI: (Common Gateway Interface), a specification for transferring information between a World Wide Web server and a CGI program. A CGI program is any program designed to accept and return data that conforms to the CGI specification.
Co-branded pages: Web pages that are tailored with the look and feel of
two or more partner sites.
Cookie: A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. The main purpose of cookies is to identify users and possibly prepare customized Web pages for them.
Commission: Income received by an affiliate for some quantifiable action such as selling a product and/or service on the affiliate Web site.
CPM:(cost per thousand) the predominate metric for banner advertising where a rate is set for every thousand banner impressions, e.g. $20 CPM means it will cost $20 for 1,000 banner impressions.
CTR: click-through rate, the percentage of clicks for the number of banner impressions displayed.
CTRL-ALT-DEL: When nothing else works, try this to reboot your non-Apple
computer. :)
Cost of acquisition: the cost incurred by a merchant or affiliate to acquire a new customer.
DSL: (Digital Subscriber Line) elusive super fast connection over regular telephone wires that is extremely hard to come by in most areas.
Emoticon: acronym for emotion icon, a small icon composed of punctuation characters indicating how an e-mail message should be interpreted.
Favorites include :-) Happy, :-( Sad, and ====|:-)= Abe Lincoln.
EPC: earnings per click
Ethernet: magical connection between your DSL modem and your computer, a thick phone cord that gives headaches if not connected in the right direction.
FAQ: (Frequently Asked Questions): documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject.
FTP: (File Transfer Protocol) or the program used to send/upload files to a Web site.
Fraud: the practice of deliberately trying to deceive someone; in this
case stealing from a merchant program. Most common in pay-per-click programs.
Free content: editorial content designed to provide information and
facts to Web site visitors.
GIF: (Graphic Interchange Format): a common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing large areas of the same color.
Hit: a single request from a Web browser for a single item from a Web
server. In order for a Web browser to display a page that contains 3
graphics, 4 "hits" would occur at the server: 1 for the HTML page, and
one for each of the 3 graphics.
Home Page: the main Web page for a business, organization, or
individual.
HTML:(HyperText Markup Language), the authoring language used to create documents on the World Wide Web. HTML defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes.
HTTP:(HyperText Transfer Protocol): Defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.
Stay tuned for Part II of Helpful Affiliate Terms when Cynthia Arko presents the remainder of the glossary.
Cynthia A. Arko is the Product Director for internet.com's Refer-it.com (Refer-it.com) affiliate directory. She coordinates advertising,
site development, and conference planning. Cynthia helped grow Refer-it.com from a small directory of Affiliate Programs to
the Web's leading resource for information about affiliate programs. She also currently maintains KidsTown Direct, a shopping
portal for parents and young families. Cynthia can be reached at carko@internet.com.
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It's not easy to understand the many terms associated with doing business online. We've put together a list of terms to help guide your affiliate marketing efforts.
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