Glossary of Terms for Affiliate Marketing

Many people surf the internet and come to sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, and Infobarrel because of advertisings that are offering writers an opportunity to come write, publish and earn some money. Many people come to these sites with hopes of earning an income that will pay their monthly bills only to find out that there more to it than typing a few words, pressing a few buttons, and filling their Paypal accounts.

Even established offline writers find it difficult to produce content that will meet the stringent and often tedious task of being search engine friendly. Many who have been published in print take it very personally when they find that their online writing is only earning enough to purchase a cup of coffee after a month or two of continuously adding content.

One of the biggest barriers for writers to transition into successful online content producers is the terminology. Below, I will attempt to establish a glossary of terms that every writer of online content, especially those wanting to be affiliate marketers, should know and understand. I will try giving definitions of the terms in the simplest language, that even my 60 year old mother, who barely knows how to find Google’s search engine, might understand.

Of course, this is going to be a work in process, so if you find a term missing or still unable to grasp then let it be known in the comments section below and I will address it further, as will my many readers.

Adsense – This is Google’s contextual advertising network and the granddaddy of all of all affiliate programs on the internet.  After being accepted to their affiliate program, publishers can place ads near their content to establish a revenue stream for their sites.  Affiliates are paid by Google when visitors to their sites click on an ad and also by a measure of page impressions.  Advertisers can target keywords to get relevant placement on publisher’s sites.

Adwords – This refers to Google’s auctioning of keywords to advertisers.  Advertisers place bids on keywords. Certain keywords get draw more traffic than others so their costs will rise accordingly with the competition of advertisers bidding on them.  Publishers would do well to keep up with which words are being bid on and for how much so they can create content that will draw in the higher paying advertisements and earn higher commissions.

Affiliate – An affiliate is a person that acts as a middleperson between a manufacturer and a consumer.  By promoting a manufacturers product or service, an affiliate can earn a commission when a promotion provides a lead or a sale.  An affiliate online rarely handles any of the monetary transaction and almost never handles any of the merchandise or customer service.  (See also Super Affiliate)

Affiliate Marketing Program – This refers to any program where a merchant provides a system where affiliates can earn a commission by promoting the merchants products.  Affiliates earn a commission when visitors perform an action.  Getting these visitors to perform an action is generally harder than just placing some relevant keywords in their content.  An affiliate has to lead a visitor to perform this action, which they cannot do when promoting just Adsense advertisements.  To learn more about leading a visitor to perform an action, visit my article on Persuasive Writing.

Anchor Text – This commonly refers to a URL link that is hidden within a keyword or keyword phrase. Anchor text is used when trying to get backlinks on an authoritative site using a keyword or phrase that you are trying to rank for in the search engines.  An example of an anchor text:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/">Your Niche Keyword or keyword phrase</a>

(For more examples of anchor text and how to make them for different sites, go read my Guide to Backlinks article)

Backlink – A backlink is any URL that links to your content that is typically placed on another site. The URL can be what is called an absolute URL which contains the entire http address of your content, or it can be produced as an anchor text link as discussed above. Backlinks are like pointers that direct visitors as well as search engines to your content. The more backlinks you have pointing to your content the more potential your content will have in being located. Placing backlinks is a key marketing strategy for affiliate marketers who provide online content. (For more information on backlinks, you may be interested in reading The Easiest Ways to Get Backlinks.

Blogger - refers to the blogging platform owned by Google. Users can create an account that will support an unlimited number of blogs and even allow up to 100 team members to write to a single blog.  This blogging platform is great for people just starting out with a blog to get an idea of what is involved in the process.  It's owned by Google which makes it easier for newbies to acquire a Google Adsense account.

    - it is also used as a term to describe an individual that writes for a blog.

Bum Marketing – As related to affiliate marketing, Bum Marketing is a method by which you as an affiliate of any program will write tons of articles promoting your affiliate product and then submit them to article directories. Inside the author’s resource box, you will place a link to your program that has your affiliate code embedded. The magic behind bum marketing is that you don’t even have to have your own website. Most authors’ resource boxes can contain 2 links, one is to your affiliate product and one is usually to your own site or maybe your profile here at Hubpages. The word Bum is a misnomer because you do an awful lot of work writing unique articles that are optimized with your keywords and phrases. A successful Bum Marketer will typically write 10-20 unique articles of 300 to 500 words each week for a bout 6 months, for just one niche topic or affiliate program. With 250 to 500 articles on one niche will nearly guarantee that you will saturate and dominate the market and earn big commissions as your reward. This can be a real drag for writers that fancy themselves as freelancers because it leaves little time for creating any other content.

CPA - Cost Per Action – Most affiliate marketing programs and contextual ad programs, such as Adsense, are structured and measured by the effectiveness of a cost per action basis. Examples of an action can be clicking on an ad, signing up for a free trial, or purchasing a product.

CPC – Cost Per Click – Advertisers bid on contextually targeted keyword ads through an auction like system and charged a certain sum when their ad is clicked on.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand (the M is the Roman numeral for 1000) – Also seen as eCPM which is the effective cost per thousand.  This is a dollar amount that is used to measure the profitability of an ad campaign by how much is earned for every 1000 ad impressions.  The higher the number the more profitable it is for affiliates and the more costly it is for advertisers.

CTR – Click Through Rate – This is a measurement in percentages of how many viewers actually click on an ad that is placed inside the publishers content.  This can be used to determine the best placement of the ad and also the effectiveness of structure of the ad. 

Deep Link – Very rarely will you see an authoritative site with only one page of content.  A deep link is a backlink that is pointed at an internal page of a website.  The link will provide the most benefit if it is on a page with relevant content.  Site owners use deep linking to help give their internal pages a boost in page rank (see below) and publishers are more likely to get a backlink from an authoritative site to their own content when the link is placed internally and not on the homepage.

DoFollow – There is no attribute on any website called DoFollow.  DoFollow is a term that has been made up.  When a site is not instituting a NoFollow (see below) attribute it generally means that the backlinks you place on those sites will be recognized by the search engines and give credit to your backlink.  When people use the term DoFollow, they are really saying there is no Nofollow.  This will become more clear below.

Duplicate Content – Duplicate content refers to any content that appears elsewhere on the internet even if it is your own content.  Search engines do not like duplicate content because it creates clutter.  Search engines will recognize the duplicate content and give credit to the first place it has appeared but it is also the most controversial subjects when it comes to article marketing.  There are many schools of though on the subject but in general, authoritative sites only want original content and they want content that will only appear on their site.  However, as an article marketer it is generally accepted that duplicate content may be placed wherever it is accepted in order to get the backlinks that are placed within the author’s resource box.  Revenue sharing sites like Hubpages will not accept duplicate content and you wouldn’t want to place it here because you wouldn’t be able to earn from it.  There are literally thousands of article directories which will accept any content of a certain length and are there for the sole purpose of creating backlinks.  IMHO duplicate content used in affiliate marketing has its place as a  useful tool.

Dynamic Content – This is any content that is constantly changing over time.  Search engines tend to give more credit to sites and content that is changing or updating on a regular basis. When their spiders crawl the page they recognize and remember the content.  When it changes through a dynamic process, such as new info being delivered via RSS or news feeds, the spiders will credit the content and may provide better indexing in the search engines.

EPC – Earnings Per Click – Publishers that use contextual advertising, such as Adsense, can estimate their potential earnings based on how much money they earn from each click.

Inbound Link – An inbound link refers to any link that is pointing to your content from another site.

Keyword – Any word that is likely to be searched for on a search engine.

Keyword Density – This refers to a measure of how often a keyword is uses within the body of content.  Keyword density is no longer relevant for indexing except as a measure from keyword stuffing. (see below)

Keyword Stuffing – This is an outdated practice of excessively using a keyword in an attempt to rank for that search term.  Search engines can now conceptualize the use of stuffing keywords and will negatively affect the page rank of that content.

Link Building – This is a process that content providers and site publisher employ in order to rank better in the search engines and build site popularity as well as traffic.

Link Juice – (Also known as Link Authority) This refers to the authority that is given when a backlink is placed on a site. The more prominent the page rank where the backlink is placed, the more link juice it has. Getting a backlink on the homepage of an authority site will give you more link juice than having a backlink on that sites internal pages, but since all the internal pages are linked in some manner a little link juice will pass along through your backlink. Link juice can be obtained internally too. For example, here on Hubpages you will notice that every user name is hyperlinked to the user’s profile page. Every time a user performs an activity here on Hubpages, such as making forum posts, commenting on hubs, answering and asking questions, or publishing new hubs, the username will garner a tiny bit of link juice from the page the activity takes place on. Commenting on high page rank hubs will give the user more link juice than posting a reply on a non ranking forum page.

Long Tail Keyword – A long tail keyword is a phrase that narrows down a broad keyword term to a more specific term. For instance, searching for the term “boots” is very broad and will likely return very many results from the search query. A long tail search such as “brown leather boots” gets more specific and weeds out the unnecessary results. Long Tail Keywords are more niche specific and easier to rank with. For more information, check our my article on how to find long tail keywords.

Multiple Streams of Income – Having multiple streams of income means that you are receiving revenue from several sources.  This is key to earning real money on the internet because if you are earning only through one source and that source is shut down then you are out of business and need to start all over.  I explain in detail some of the sources I use as multiple streams of income in my article, Earning Money Online – The Secret to my Success.

Niche – This refers to narrowing down the focus of a broad topic to a sub-category of the broad topic. In affiliate marketing, finding a niche that is popular or gaining in popularity and has little or no competition can be a very profitable prospect. Learn more about finding a niche in my hub, How to Start a Blog –Finding a Niche

NoFollow – This is an attributed which is commonly used to prevent link juice/authority from being passed on through a backlink. A backlink placed on a site creates an outbound link for that site and some of that sites authority is then siphoned through it. To prevent this, site publishers often place an attribute that is attached to backlinks that prevent the search engines from following the link thereby giving the link authority. An example of this attribute looks like this:

<a href="http://yoursite.com.com" rel="nofollow">anchor text </a>

Organic Traffic – This refers to traffic that arrives to your content through a natural route such as a search engine query.  This is the best type of traffic to have because it means that you are optimizing your content correctly.  You can see this organic traffic with the use of analytics.

Outbound Link – This is a one way link that leaves your content. In affiliate marketing they are often used to send traffic to an affiliate program or offer.  On other types of content, they are used to add relevancy to the contents topic.

PR – Page Rank – This is a value assigned to a web page that determines its worth as an authority.  Page Rank starts as unranked and proceeds through 11 levels PR0 – PR10.  The higher the number, the more page rank the page has.

PPC – Pay Per Click – In a CPA program the action would be a click on an ad in exchange for a cash amount determined by the advertising network’s keyword auction process.

PPL – Pay Per Lead – In a CPA program the action would be a visitor filling out a form to receive further information in exchange for a pre-determined cash amount.

PPV – Pay Per Visit – A rare instance when an advertising network will pay a pre-determined cash amount for each visitor that views a posted advertisement.

Rank – This refers to an action by a search engine based on the keyword link building activity of a publisher.  It is benefit directly related to publishers efforts to establish an authority for a given keyword or phrase.  The benefit is the rank in which the content is indexed within the search engine results.

Reciprocal Links – This refers to an exchange of links between two or more content providers.

Referral Link – A referral link is a link which has an affiliates tracking code embedded with in the link.

Residual Income – This is a recurring income stream that will continue to benefit the affiliate for as long as the referrer continues to be a customer of the affiliate program.  These are the best types of income streams to attempt to receive.

RSS – Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary – Both refer to the syndication of a site’s content where a recipient would need a feed reader to view the content.  RSS feeds can be very useful to content providers because each feed that is created also contains a backlink within the feed.  When a searcher finds the feed and subscribes to it, it creates a backlink.  For more information on RSS and their benefits check out my article How to Use RSS Feeds to Get More Traffic

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the process an online content producer performs to make his/her content search engine friendly.  Different types of content require different types of optimization.  Articles, for instance, need to be written in a manner by which searchers will query for the information through search engines.  To do this, a content producer needs to do research on the terms people are searching for within a given niche.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page – This is the page that a search engine returns when a search query is performed.  On most search engines, the first 10 relevant results are returned for each page.  As an online producer of content, it is most favorable to try and get your content ranked as high as possible on the first page of the SERP’s. 

Spider – These are programs that the search engines use to travel through every publicly viewable page of online content and index the relevancy those content pages.  By indexing them and assigning them a value through a difficult algorithm, the most relevant content will be returned at a higher rank on the SERP’s.

Viral Marketing –Viral marketing can be the life-blood for an affiliate marketer.  This is a marketing technique that is self propagating.  A one time action is performed, such as an email campaign, distributing an eBook, uploading a video to YouTube, and in some cases Social Bookmarking, and then the viewers or receivers of that action continue the action for you by spreading the word and passing it along.  The action becomes Viral and if done properly it will become infectious to the point of being extremely profitable.

WordPress – WordPress is a blogging platform that is both free and paid for. On the free Wordpress.com platform, a blog is a sub domain and harder to optimize but has many benefits. With the paid for, self hosted Wordpress blog, a blogger purchases a domain name and installs the Wordpress software on his/her server. This is by far the best option at building a brand to earn money online. For more information on a self hosted Wordpress blog, read my article on How to Start a Blog – Getting Started with Wordpress.

This glossary is far from a complete listing of all affiliate and SEO terms and explanations.  If any term above is unclear then let me know in the comments below and I will do my best to make it clearer.

If you know of a term that is missing from the glossary and believe it should be included, post it in the comments below and I will consider adding it to the list.

If you believe that any of the definitions or explanations of the terms above are incorrect then provide your explanation below and if confirmed I will update the glossary.