"Any fool can know. The point is to understand."- Albert Einstein
Affiliate marketing is an extensive topic covering many marketing channels. We have no doubt that there will be some disagreement about some of the descriptions, any feedback or new term request are welcome.
Affiliate
Affiliates (also known as associates) can be companies, groups or individuals who promote a merchant’s (advertiser) products online in exchange for a monetary value. This therefore makes an affiliate a virtual sales person.
AdSense
AdSense is the Google program created for publishers (website owners) who want to earn money by displaying automatic text, image or video advertisements that are targeted towards specific site content or audience. Money is earned when visitors view or click on the ads.
Affiliate Network
Affiliate networks are the third party connecting merchants and affiliates. In doing so, affiliate networks provide affiliates with marketing material, tracking software, payment processing, reports and advice on how to better promote merchants and their products.
HealthTrader is an affiliate network specialising in health related offers.
Algorithm
An algorithm is a sequence of rules or instructions used to solve a problem. In relation to SEO, the term is generally a reference the Google algorithms used to index websites in order for the best search results to be displayed.
Advertiser
An advertiser, otherwise called a merchant, is the company who produce and sell a product and/or service that affiliates can promote in exchange for a monetary reward.
At HealthTrader, our affiliates are rewarded with a commission of each sale they generate.
Above the fold
Above the fold is the term used to define the section of a webpage that is visible in a browser without scrolling. As this is the first section of a website that is seen by viewers, the area “above the fold” is where the most important and compelling information should be displayed.
Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs are provided by merchants for affiliates to use to promote merchant products and/or services in exchange for a predetermined monetary value or commission rate.
Affiliate Link
This is a tracked link allowing affiliates to be rewarded correctly for generating sales, clicks or impressions.
At HealthTrader, affiliates are rewarded for the generation of sales and each affiliate link includes an affiliates ID in order for commission to be allocated to the correct affiliate.
Affiliate Data Feed
An affiliate data feed is a file provided by merchants that contain specific information about their products. These files contain information on product name and description, URL, image links, pricing and more.
Aweber
Aweber is an email marketing tool enabling easy management of email addresses (opt-ins and opt-outs) and the sending of emails.
Autoresponder
An autoresponder is a program that automatically sends predetermined email responses. These emails can be a response to various types of actions such as signing up, subscribing or they can be generated based on time for example, newsletters.
Authority Site
An authority site is a website recognised as being superior and as having an authority on a topic. Websites are considered to be authority sites when they publish quality information, have high page rank, are well designed and when they are considered experts in their niche.
Anchor Text
This is the text in a hyperlink that is clicked on in order to be redirected and it should be relevant to the page being linked to.
Anchor text is an important factor in off-page SEO as it influences which keywords a website ranks for.
Article Marketing
This is a form of advertising where businesses write and publish short industry related articles with the purpose of increasing brand awareness and improving organic search results.
These articles can be published on related websites to increase traffic and improve page ranking through quality backlinks.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO, otherwise known as spamdexing, are aggressive tactics used to redirect search results to particular pages. These tactics focus on search engines and not on humans and are against search engine terms of service.
Examples of black hat SEO tactics include keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming and blog comment spam.
Banner
This is an image advertisement placed on a website that when clicked on will redirect the user to a specified URL.
Banners are a key marketing resources used by affiliates to promote merchant products or services as they are great at catching user attention.
Bum Marketing
This is a term used to describe how affiliates can make money at zero cost to them.
For example, you could take someone living on the street, put them inside a library and they could make money with affiliate marketing.
Bookmarking
In order to quickly access particular websites, a site can be bookmarked, or added to the favourites in a browser.
Conversion
A conversion occurs when a website visitor completes a particular action or site goal. These actions include subscription, sign up, purchase or redirect to another website.
Conversion Rate
This describes the ratio of website visitors to those who complete the desired action/goal.
For example, the ratio between total visitors and those who make a purchase.
Contextual Link
This is a link that is included in the body of content of a website.
Content Islands
A collection of linked online content is known as a content island.
Commission
Commission is a predefined amount of money that is promised and paid to an affiliate by the merchant for the generation of a predefined action made by a user.
For example, our merchants offer a commission of each sale to affiliates at a predetermined percentage rate.
Cookie
A cookie is a text file sent from a website to a users web browser. There are many reasons why cookies are dropped and in affiliate marketing cookies assign affiliate IDs to the user in order to correctly allocate affiliate rewards.
With HealthTrader , if a cookie has been dropped and that user makes a purchase from one of our merchants within a certain time period, the cookie containing the affiliate ID allows us to allocated commission to the affiliate responsible for generating the sale.
Cloaking
This a SEO technique used to disguise affiliate tracking or the content of a site. This is when what is displayed to a search engine for indexing is different from what is seen by viewers.
Cloaking is against the terms and conditions of most search engines.
CPC
CPC or Cost Per Click is the actual price paid per click in a PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign. Advertisers pay a specified amount for each click made on a publishers website that redirects to the advertiser.
CPA
CPA stands for Cost Per Action. This refers to the cost a merchant is willing to pay for in return for a specific action.
This is also the earning method used by HealthTrader affiliates as they are paid on the basis of getting site visitors make a purchase.
Cookie Stuffing
This is the practice of an affiliate dropping cookies onto a users computer even though the user has never clicked on an affiliate link or visited the affiliate’s website.
The aim is to drop as many cookies onto as many different computers in the hopes to gain commission when someone eventually makes a purchase from a merchant. This is more likely to occur with large merchants such as Amazon.
HealthTrader affiliates will have their accounts limited and closed if cookie stuffing is uncovered and there is no rectification.
CTR
CTR is the abbreviation for Click-through Rate which is the ratio of page visitors to the number of those who click the affiliate link.
CTR is a great metric to use when analysing whether a text link, banner, video or other promote is good at generating clicks when compared to the number of possible clicks.
CPM
CPM is the cost of a campaign per thousand where M is the roman numeral of 1000. This is the cost per thousand impressions an advertiser would pay for an advertisement on a specific website.
For example, if it cost $10 to place a banner ad on a page that generates 1000 visitors, the CPM is $10. If that page generates 2000 visitors, the CPM would be $5.
Content Types
There are various types of written content that can be found online. These include articles, blogs and press releases.
An Article is traditionally a long non-fiction piece, describing something in detail. It is usually timeless and can exist as standalone content.
A Blog is a collection of dated posts that are often short and to the point. While still being factual, they generally lean towards being a platform for the blog author to express their opinion.
A Press Release is a very concise statement aimed at the general public to announce something newsworthy and written in order to highlight an important event, program or piece of information.
Domain Name
A domain name is the assigned address of a web server that is used by humans to visit a website. Domain names are used as they are easier to remember and use than IP addresses.
For example, healthtrader.com is domain name for this website. Please note that a domain name and URL are not the same thing.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is when identical content can be found on more than one web page. As most search engines will only display one version within search results, the other versions are penalised hence the issue of duplicate content an important topic in SEO.
It is understood that the more unique your content, the better this will be for SEO.
Double Opt-in
Opt-in refers to voluntary subscription to an emailing list.
Double opt-in, otherwise known as verified opt-in, is the process of verifying a subscription. After a user has subscribed, a verification email is sent with a link asking for confirmation before being added to the email list. In some countries this is required under anti spamming laws.
External Link
An external link are hyperlinks found on a web page that link to another website (to a page with a different domain name).
EPC
EPC or Earnings Per Click is the metric used to measure and review the average amount earned by an affiliate for every 100 clicks made on an affiliate link.
EPC is calculated by dividing total commission generated by the total number of clicks made on that link, multiplied by 100.
Email Marketing
This refers to marketing to your audience via email in order to gain high open and click through rates. In order to do this, email addresses first need to be collected with opt in acquisition resulting in the best open rates.
Footer
This is the bottom section found on most websites that typically contain important information about the publisher as well as copyright information. Many websites include navigation links to various pages that are not as important as those in the header. Social media links are also often found in the website footer.
First click
First click is the term used in an affiliate program where commission is paid to the affiliate who generated the first click on an affiliate link which resulted in a sale. This is regardless of which affiliate generated the last click before sale.
Feeder Sites
Feeder sites are websites that have been created with the sole purpose of redirecting, or feeding, traffic to the website affiliates use to make their money.
Grey Hat SEO
Grey Hat SEO tactics are a combination black and white hat SEO. They are tactics that are not deliberately black hat but some would disagree with using them due to unethical reasons.
Google Slap
A Google Slap is the term used to describe the disciplinary action taken against PPC advertisers who send users to irrelevant and poor-quality sites or even if the site loads too slowly. Google’s actions include increasing the pay per click amount and decreasing page rank.
Google Sandbox Theory
This is the theory that before a website can gain good search rankings, Google puts them into the “Sandbox” or under restrictions for a specific time. This is to discourage the creation of spam sites made purely to rank using black hat SEO.
Google Panda
The update made to Google’s algorithm in February of 2011 is known as Google Panda. This update improved the value of search results as it reduced the search rank of “low-quality sites” in order to increase the rank of “high-quality sites”.
Google Bowling
This is a black hat SEO tactic used to lower the ranking of competitor sites. After Google began penalising sites using site-wide text link ads to gain traffic, black hat SEOs started using this against competitors by linking to them rather than to their own site.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics, which is often abbreviated to GA, is a website analytics service provided for free by Google. This allows publishers to view and analyse traffic generation such as search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and more.
Google AdWords
This is the Google advertising service provided to companies at a PPC basis. Companies set their budget for the Google ads they want displayed on specifically searched keywords.
Hyperlink
A hyperlink is a word or phrase found on a web page that when clicked on allows a visitor to be redirected to, or linked to, another web page or page section. The text that is clicked (also called the Anchor Text) uses special HTML code to redirect the visitor.
Indexed
In order for a website to be displayed as a search result, it has to be indexed by the search engine. If the search engine is unable to access the site correctly then it will not be indexed and will have bad page rank.
Impression
This is the measure of every time that an ad is displayed to a viewer on a website.
Inbound Linking
Also known as backlinks, these are hyperlinks found on other websites that link to a page on your site.
The quantity and quality of inbound links can be used by search engine algorithms as a metric of popularity and can add to rank.
Internal Linking
Internal links redirect users to another page or page section on the same domain.
Joint Venture
A Joint Venture (JV) is a business agreement between two or more parties in order to collectively work toward the completion of a shared goal. Unlike a merger, each party retains their identity.
Keyword
These are the specific words used to summarise a topic or theme and are targeted by website publishers as they are the most commonly used words for online search. By targeting keywords, website publishers are more likely to gain relevant traffic to their websites.
Keyword Set Type
Sets of keywords are grouped by how broad or narrow they are. A broad set covers an extensive range of niche keywords whereas a narrow set is more focused on a particular area of a niche keywords.
Last click
If an affiliate program pays affiliates on last click terms, then the affiliate who generates the last click on an affiliate link before purchase will be awarded with commission.
HealthTrader allocated commission based on last click.
Link Cloaking
This also known at link masking and is the method used to hide the actual URL of a hyperlink with a friendly-looking URL. This is used to increase CTR as users are more likely to click on it.
Javascript, iframes and redirects are used to cloak links. This methods can be viewed as black hat depending on how it is used.
Link Juice
Link juice is the term used to describe the page value that can be passed through links from a high quality site to a lower quality site. Inbound links can be interpreted by search engines as an endorsement and therefore these links add to Page Rank.
Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are sequences of keywords used to target focused traffic. Although, long tail keywords result in smaller search volumes there is also lower competition making them ideal for ranking in specific topics and themes.
Link Farm
A Link Farm is a collection of web pages that have been created with the sole purpose of linking to a specific page in order to increase its rank. Link farming is viewed negatively by search engines hence there is higher value placed on links from quality sites rather than link farms.
A Link Farm is also known as a Link Network.
Latent Semantic Indexing
Commonly called LSI, is founded on the principle that words used in the same context tend to have similar meanings. LSI is a mathematical indexing method search engines use to index in a more "human" way as the relationship between words and meanings are taken into account.
Meta Tags
These are sections of code that explain web page elements to search engine bots and browsers. For example, the page title, description or whether it should be indexed.
Meta Refresh Redirect
This is a page setup to automatically redirect a visitor to another page. Meta refresh redirects occur at a page level and as they are normally slow, this is not a recommended SEO tactic. A small code in the page header tells the browser to refresh after a specified time period.
Merchant
Within affiliate marketing a merchant is the online store who actually sell a product. They pay affiliates a commission for each sale generated. For example, EuroClinix and SlimCentre are two of HealthTraders merchants.
Master Resale Rights
Master Resale Rights (MRR) gives a seller the right to use and sell a product as well as the right to pass on the resell rights of a product. For example, eBooks are usually sold with rights determining how the buyer can sell and use the product.
Alternatively, Private Label Rights (PLR) allows the buyer to use the product how they choose and Resell Rights (RR) allows product resale.
Mininets
A small network of sites created to promote a parent site.
Monetize
To monetize something, is to convert it into money. In regards to affiliate marketing, websites are monetized as the generation of an action (click or sale) on that site can in turn become a source of income.
Money Page
This is a website created for the purpose of making a sale.
Negative Keywords
These are keywords that are specified in an Adwords campaign to avoid displaying ads for. They ensure your ads only appear for searches you want to target.
One Way Link
This is an external link from one site to another that is not reciprocated by the later.
Online Commercial Intent
Online Commercial Intent (OCI) is the rating given to a keyword or phrase in regards to how likely it is for the person searching to make part take in a commercial activity such as make a purchase.
Opt In
Opt-in is the term used to describe when someone voluntarily signs up to mailing list.
Outbound Linking
An outbound link is one that links to a page using another domain name.
Private Label Rights
Private Label Rights (PLR) gives authority to a buyer to use the purchases product how they choose.
Payment Threshold
In affiliate marketing the payment threshold is the amount of commission an affiliate needs to earn before they can be paid. This is done to reduce payment fees.
HealthTrader payment threshold depends on the payment methods affiliates choose to use. The minimum payment threshold available is £100.
Pinging
Alerting a search engine when a website has been updated. This is done using an automatic pinging service, with the goal of increasing site index frequency with the hope to improve SEO.
Podcasting
Podcasts are audio or video files that are available online to download.
PPC
Pay Per Click, or more commonly known PPC, describes an online advertising model used where advertisers are charged a fee once their ad is clicked on.
Google AdWords is an example of PPC.
PPL
PPL is the abbreviation for Pay Per Lead which is an affiliate payment structure where affiliates are paid for generating a lead. Leads can come in an array of actions such as a completed survey, a requested quote, sign up for newsletter correspondence or any other actions required by a merchant in order to gain leads.
PPS
Pay Per Sale is commonly known as PPS and is a method used by merchants to pay affiliates for each sale they generate.
PPS is the payment structure that HealthTrader use. We pay affiliates a commission for each sale they generate. Payment is allocated due to the use of tracking which monitors the behaviour of website visitors.
PageRank
PageRank is a quality score given to each website by search engines based on its definition of what makes the site important. This includes site age, traffic, inbound links, design and content.
PageRank can be passed on through linking in a process known as passing link juice.
Quality Score
The Quality Score (QS) of a website is calculated by search engines and looks at a variety of factors to measure website importance.
Really Simple Syndication
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or web feeds is a vehicle used for publishing regularly updated works, such as news sites or blogs. Readers can subscribe to an RSS feed in order to get new content when it is added.
Reciprocal Links
These are links that are reciprocated between two sites. As they don’t have the same PageRank weight as one way links, 3 way linking is often used.
Redirect
This occurs when a site visitor is automatically sent or redirected to another page. There are various types of redirects, each used for a specific purpose.
Two types of redirected are 301 Redirect and 302 Redirect.
Resell Rights
If someone has the resell rights (RR) for a product, they have the authority to resell that product to others.
Return on Investment
Return on Investment or ROI is the return or profit gained from an investment.
Search Network
This is part of the Google Network where AdWord advertisements appear. When advertisements are placed on search networks, the ad is shown after specific keywords or terms have been searched.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving and optimising a website’s visibility in order for it to appear higher within the natural search results for specific keywords.
There are different types of SEO such as black hat, grey hat and white hat.
SERP
SERP is the acronym for Search Engine Results Page. This is the pages of results provided by search engines to a keyword search.
Shadow Domains
Shadow domains are created to closely match an existing domain. They are created to benefit from the high traffic generated by the domain that is being shadowed.
Silo Content
This is a collection of online content that link to each other. In doing so they create a content island or silo.
Sitemap
This is the list of pages from a domain that is available to users and crawlers.
One type of sitemap is an XML version, created specifically to make it easier for a search engines to index a site. The other type is created for visitors to use when they are having trouble finding information on a website.
SOC
SOC is the commonly used abbreviation for Strength of Competition. This is an average measure of the competition for a particular keyword and it indicates how hard it will be to rank for it.
Super Affiliates
These are the top earning affiliates of a program. Super affiliates are usually responsible for generating 80% of the sales of an affiliate program.
Syndication
Content syndication is a partnership between creators and distributors. This allows creators or writers to increase their readership numbers and CTR while distributors are able to attract greater readers with more content.
Traffic
Traffic refers to the flow of visitors to a website.
Targeted Traffic
These are the users or visitors that affiliates want to attract to their site as they are most likely to complete the purpose of that site such as make a purchase.
Title Tag
A title tag is a web page component used to defined the title of the page to users and search engines. This is an important element for SEO and user experience.
Tracking
This is an integral part of affiliate marketing as it allows traffic to be tracked from affiliate websites to merchant websites in order to monitor their behaviour. In HealthTraders case, tracking is used to monitor whether a website visitor makes a purchase, if so then commission is rewarded to the affiliate accordingly.
HealthTrader use various tracking methods to ensure 100% accuracy. This include the use of text and flash cookies, promotional codes, IP address and customer ID.
Verified Opt-in
Verified opt-in, also known as double opt-in, is the method used to gain email subscription verification. This is when a verification email is sent asking users to confirm their email address by clicking on a link.
Video Marketing
This is the marketing method that uses video as the vehicle to market to a target audience.
White Label
A white label is the term used when a merchant allows affiliates to sell merchant products on their own website without mention of the merchant. Visitors therefore believe that the affiliate is the one producing and selling the products. Satisfied customers will then return to the affiliate website to make repeat purchases, optimising the commissions earned by the affiliate. This option is often only available for super affiliates.
Webmaster
This is the individual or group responsible for a website.
White Hat SEO
White hat SEO is the use of website optimisation techniques that are approved by the search engines. These techniques have a focus on the human audience rather than just search engines.
XML
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language created to describe data whereas HTML was created to display data.
XML is used in applications such as RSS feeds and search engine sitemaps.
3 Way Links*
This is a popular practice to overcome the diminishing affect of reciprocal links in order to improve PageRank
302 Redirect
A 302 Redirect however, is a temporary redirect.
301 Redirect
A 301 redirect is the http status code returned by the server to indicate that the URL has permanently moved to another location. The 301 redirect has become the preferred redirection method for many SEO’s, as up to 99% of link juice will be passed onto the new resource.
