A Glossary of Internet Marketing Terms for Newbies

You may find the various internet marketing terms used by internet marketers a bit hard to understand if you are new to the world of internet marketing. All the jargon we use may tend to be a little confusing (or very confusing!).

So your first step as an aspiring internet marketer is to get familiar with the terms that you are likely to be exposed to on a regular basis.

In this article, we take a look at the meaning of the most commonly used internet marketing terms.

First, let us take a look at three of the most commonly used basic terms that you need to understand as a marketer.

Affiliate – An individual who promotes the products and/or services of another individual or business.

Merchant – An individual or business that sells products and/or services.

Affiliate Network – A business entity that offers third party services to both merchants and affiliates. It is the place where merchants look for affiliates to promote their products and affiliates look for products that they can promote.

It takes care of various processes associated with internet marketing like tracking, reporting, and payment processing. It basically acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate.

Now that you have a clear understanding of these basic terms, let us take a look at some more internet marketing terms.

Autoresponder – An email management and storage system that sends emails to your subscribers automatically.

Blog – A web log or online journal that you can use to express your opinions, talk about your business, and share information with your readers.

Clickthrough – The action a visitor takes when he/she clicks on a link and visits a website.

Clickthrough Rate – Commonly referred to as CTR, it is the percentage of visitors who click on a link and visit a website. So if you send a link to a 100 people via email and they all read your message but only 10 click the link, then the clickthrough rate is 10%.

Commission – The money that an affiliate earns for making a sale or generating a lead.

Conversion – The term used to indicate that a visitor has taken a desired, profitable action on the merchant’s website. The action could be entering his contact information, completing a survey, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a software program, or buying a product.

Conversion Rate – The percentage of clicks that result in a profitable action. So if a 100 people click on your ad and wind up at your sales page, but only 5 buy your product, then the conversion rate is 5%.

Domain Name – The unique name of a website or blog, for example, www.cnn.com.

Email Marketing – The practice of promoting products and services by sending promotional emails to subscribers of your own list or other people’s lists.

Email Open Rate – The percentage of subscribers who open an email that you send.

Forum – An online community where people interact with each other and share information on a particular topic or a set of topics.

Keyword – A word or phrase that people use to find information on the web. For example, a person who wants to know about laser printers might enter the term ‘laser printers’ on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. That would be a keyword phrase. If they typed in “printers” only, that would be a keyword.

Pay Per Click – An advertising model wherein the advertiser pays money to the advertising network only when someone clicks on his ads.

Pay Per Sale – An affiliate marketing program wherein the affiliate gets paid every time the visitor buys a product from the merchant.

Pay Per Lead – An affiliate marketing program wherein the affiliate gets paid for every lead he/she generates.

Recurring Commissions – Means commissions are paid both on the initial sale of a product and on the subsequent purchases of the same product.

For examples, affiliates who promote a membership site or a web hosting company might get paid every time a member pays his membership fee or every time a website owner renews his hosting account.

Resale Rights – They give you the right to sell a product which you have bought or downloaded from someone else. So if you have resale rights to a product, you can sale the product and keep all the money even if you did not create it.

Squeeze Page – A web page created primarily for the purpose of obtaining the email address of a visitor. It sometimes collects names as well.

Split Testing – Testing two or more things at the same time. You can, for example, create two different ads for the same product, write two different articles on the same topic, or create two different squeeze pages and test them at the same time to see which one performs better.

Traffic – The number of people who visit a website.

So there you go. This is by no means a complete list of internet marketing terms. As you start your journey as an online marketer, you will come across more terms and phrases that will help you understand the world of online marketing a lot better.

I will keep adding to this glossary so feel free to use it as a guide whenever you come across any internet marketing terms you do not understand.

To Your Success,

Bruce