You are in: ECommerce-Guide > News > E-Commerce News

ECommerce-Guide Essentials eBiz FAQ Everything you need to know to start your own successful e-business. Selling on eBay How to make money in the online marketplace. PayPal Payments and More What's new in secure payments for your online store. Shopping Cart Software Solutions to close, process and track your online sales.

Helpful Affiliate Terms: Part Two
June 28, 2001

By Cynthia Arko

To be a pro, you have to sound like a pro. Here are some more terms and words you should be familiar with to help guide your affiliate marketing efforts.

Hybrid: commission structures offered by merchants with a selection of pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, pay-per-click and two-tier.

HyperText: text that contains links to other documents.

Impression: the viewing of an advertising banner, link, or product on the Internet.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): JPEG is most commonly mentioned as a format for image files. JPEG format is preferred to the GIF format for photographic images.

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. How to Achieve Super Affiliate Status How to take your affiliate program from "ordinary" to "extraordinary." 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. Helpful Affiliate Terms: Part Two To be a pro, you have to sound like a pro. Cynthia Arko concludes her glossary for affiliate marketers.

KB: kilobyte or a thousand bytes. This is a standard of measurement for file size.

Keywords:words used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. Typically used for synonyms and alternates of title words.

Mailing Lists: a collection of e-mail addresses and personal information from your site visitors. Developing an opt-in e-mail list can be an effective vehicle for letting your visitors know of upcoming sales, promotions and hot deals.

Merchant: an online business operating an online service. Or a business that offers an affiliate program for affiliates to either re-sell the product or service or display free content on a Web site.

Meta Tags: provide keywords and descriptions on pages that for some reason may lack text. There are several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the description and keywords tags. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create. The keywords tag provides keywords for the search engine to associate with your page.

Online Reporting: reports accessible through a password-protected area that provide affiliate sales, commission earned, banner impressions, clickthroughs and returns for a specific period of time.

Pay-Per-Lead: commission structure where the merchant pays the affiliate a flat fee for each qualified lead (customer) that is referred to the merchant site.

Pay-Per-Click: commission structure where the merchant pays the affiliate a fee for every unique visitor that is referred to the merchant site.

Pay-Per-sale: commission structure where the merchant pays a percentage or flat fee to the affiliate, based on the revenue generated by the sale of a product or service to a visitor who came from affiliate site. Some programs offer a sliding scale of commissions to reward affiliate sites with high traffic; other programs stick to a flat commission rate for any level of sales.

Pixel: Short for Picture Element, a pixel is a single point in a graphic image. Graphics monitors display pictures by dividing the display screen into thousands (or millions) of pixels, arranged in rows and columns. Many solution providers require that affiliates display a 1x1 pixel for tracking purposes.

Privacy Statement: a document outlining the protection of the collected personal information from your visitors. A privacy statement should tell your visitors that you will not sell their name or any personal information to any other source.

Product Reviews: enhance the content on your site and provide your visitors with additional information on a particular product. A quick review of your featured item provides the visitor with additional information needed to make a purchasing decision.

Publisher: (also Affiliate) an independent party, or Web site, that promotes the products or services of an advertiser in exchange for a commission.

Real-time: No delay in the processing of requests for information, other than the time necessary for the data to travel over the Internet.

Response Rate: the percentage of people that join an affiliate program, based on the total number of people that have been solicited in a marketing effort or advertising campaign.

Recurring Revenue: a recurring commission based on the spending behavior of a particular customer.

Revenue: income generated by driving sales or leads to a merchant site.

Robot: a program that runs automatically without human intervention. Typically, a robot is endowed with some artificial intelligence so that it can react to different situations it may encounter. Two common types of robots are agents and spiders.

ROI: return on investment or the assessment of the usefulness of a marketing effort or advertising campaign.

Solution Provider: a third-party technology company responsible for the development of affiliate tracking technology, online reporting and payment aggregation.

Spam: any unsolicited e-mail message sent to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; also known as junk mail.

Spider: a program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines.

Syndicated Content: fresh content that is automatically updated in the HTML or source code on a daily basis. Syndicated content sites provide Webmasters with a wide selection of headline news, sports scores, stock quotes, e-mail, calendars, chat games, horoscopes, comics, movie reviews, weather reports and more.

Top Level Domain: the unique name that identifies an Internet site (i.e: refer-it.com, tennis.com). Not a sub folder or homepage building site such as: http://www.refer-it.com/main.cfm?screen=webmaster&header=webmaster -or- http://geocities.yahoo.com/johndoe/homepage.html

Two-tier: affiliate structure that allows affiliates to sign up sub-affiliates in a tiered structure. When the second tier affiliate makes a sale, the primary affiliate receives some small portion of the commission. Sometimes disguised as multilevel marketing (MLM), two-tier programs could provide a lucrative ongoing revenue stream for your affiliate site.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator): The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet that is part of the World Wide Web (WWW), e.g. www.internet.com.

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.