Affiliate Marketing Glossary

A redirect means taking a previous URL that no longer works. Or has updated and pointing it to a newly created and working URL.

An error message; the URL or webpage cannot be found.

Advertising can be in the form of video, flash, banner, text or any other method displayed on the internet. If you get money from a brand, you should use “AD,” “Advertisement,” or “Sponsored” in your online advertising on social media sites, as required by U.S. law.

Using real time bidding for buying and selling inventory.

An individual (YOU) that partners with a company, and promotes that company’s products in exchange for commissions. You will also see an affiliate listed as a publisher or an associate.

An agreement between the affiliate and the advertiser (merchant or brand). The agreement includes the rules, terms, and conditions based on which the affiliate is rewarded commissions for sending visitors, leads, or traffic to their website.

An affiliate who uses a blog as a promotional method.

When the affiliate generates a sale, the company that he or she is affiliated with will reward the affiliate with a percentage or a set amount of money, which is called a commission.

A tiny file has been stored in your browser. Affiliate cookies have a lifespan. Some range from 24 hours to days, months, a year, or a lifetime. For the cookie to work your visitor must click your link first.

The FTC, requires blogs to disclose or add a disclaimer to their websites. By law, it is required to let your audience know that you have a financial relationship with a brand.

An affiliate ecosystem is where the advertiser (or merchant), affiliate marketer (or publisher), affiliate network and customer all work together in order for the sale to happen.

As an affiliate link, – (YOU) will receive a unique link that is specially coded for you. Once a customer buys a product that you are promoting through your link, you will receive a commission. (money). An affiliate link might appear similar to this http://www.advertiserdomain.com/jur6c.hop.merchant/affiliatesID=58468732

This is the agreement that you make when joining a brand, affiliate network, or affiliate program. The policies will inform you of rules, commissions, and click attribution.

An affiliate program is an arrangement between an affiliate marketing forum and a brand. The merchant has decided to use this online advertising method (affiliate program), which allows their brand to reach a larger audience, also increasing the brands sales opportunities.

The person in charge of the affiliate program and its affiliates They manage the own affiliate program on behalf of the merchant or brand. Affiliate managers also handle the recruitment of affiliates.

An individual who becomes an affiliate, then promotes other people’s, merchants’, or brands’ products for compensation.

Performance-based advertising, whereby affiliates promote a brand’s product/service.

It’s a platform, that acts as the middleman between the affiliate (the publisher) and the merchant (the advertiser or the brand).

A small operation that started in London, UK. It was the first and largest affiliate network run and owned by Digital Windows.

Sends and receives data from a server, which is done in the background without interfering with what is displayed on the existing page.

It is the visible, clickable, hyperlinked text on a website.

A blog run by an anonymous person who may also use a pseudonym.

A blog archive is a collection of old blog posts and pages.

A quantifiable measure that helps track the average value of an

order. It’s calculated by dividing the total value of orders within a certain timeframe by the number of orders.

A group of people who are interested in listening to or reading what you have to say.

Automatically accepted; no approval needed. It is a process during an affiliate application where all applications are immediately accepted right after submission.

The backend of a website is the hidden portion of your website. Your visitors don’t see this part of the website. Its purpose is to house and organize all the data. It ensures everything is working.

A backlink, also called a inbound link, is a link coming from another website (not yours) and linking to your website. They are considered to be one of the strongest ranking factors for search engine optimization.

Manipulative search engine optimization techniques. Frowned up by Google. It’s gambling with your website’s reputation, profits, and audience. Black Hat SEO consists of buying links, using PBNs, AI-written content, invisible text, doorway pages, page swapping, keyword stuffing, cloaking, blog comment spam, duplicate content, and link spamming.

A website that provides content on certain topics. The blog is updated regularly. They can be run by individuals, small teams, or a large company.

A blog page is a page on your blog, that visitors can visit at any time. Blog pages are usually for your most important pages, such as your About page, Contact page, and Legal page. Typically, comments are disabled on these pages. Blog pages are also called “timeless pages.” 

Once a blog post is ready for publishing, it will appear on your blog roll or timeline. A blog post, is where most of your content is created. Comments can be enabled or disabled on these posts. Blog posts are harder to find if they are not internally linked to other posts on your website. This is why internal linking is essential. 

A blogroll consists of your blog posts. It changes each time you publish a post. A blog roll is also called a blog timeline. 

Navigational links that appear at the top of a post.

Software that crawls websites, webpages, for the purpose of indexing them into search engines. 

When products, services, or transactions are exchanged from one business to another.

When products, services, or transactions are exchanged from one business to a consumer.

Inherits all features, styles, and functions from its parent theme. A child theme is used when you need to modify features without changing any files, functions, or features on your parent theme.

Commission Junction is a major affiliate network. They have a presence in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Sweden. 

A CMS is where you would create, edit, organize, and publish all your content. A CMS is also useful because you do not need to know coding, or technical knowledge when building your website. Example: WordPress

Comment spam can have a negative impact on the user experience. They can consist of unrelated comments, outbound links, promotional content from random website visitors, or threats. Usually, spam bots or fake user accounts are responsible for comment spam.

Any form of content provided by a website.

When you browse for information, your browser on your computer store information about your preferences.  For example, you visit a website for the first time (a unique visitor). You also see a display that says “accept or reject cookie consent” on almost every website. If you were to visit that same website again, the cookie consent would not show.  And that’s because, your browser has stored a tiny file on your computer. It works the same way with “affiliate cookies.”

It’s when a person creators valuable, helpful, and interesting articles to read. The content can be informative, educational, factual, or fun to read.

A unique identifier to track clicks. 

It’s when you have persuaded a visitor to take a specific action, like joining your newsletter, making a purchase, clicking on a hyperlink, and so on. 

It’s the number of visitors verses the amount of people who converted.

CPA also known as cost per acquisition or CPA affiliate marketing, is when an affiliate is paid a fee every time a website visitor performs a specific action. You would join a CPA Network to participate in this type of affiliate and payment model only.

This is when affiliates are paid for getting potential visitors to sign up to a product, service or offer.

An affiliate is a paid whenever a visitor buys something using the affiliate link.

Contextual links are links that are within your post, and related to another post, statement, idea, or event that is on another blogger’s post. An example of this is if you were writing a post about “yellow sweet onions” and then linked out to another website that was talking about “red onions or purple”. The reason you linked your yellow sweet onion to the red onion post is because it made contextual sense for your readers to continue reading more about the subject.

A content creator is someone who creates educational, entertaining, or informational material. The content creator can deliver this material through any channel.

cPanel is a Linux-based control panel. The benefit of having access to you cPanel is it allows you to manage your hosting features without having technical knowledge. Most shared hosting plans gives you cPanel access. Without cPanel you will need the technical knowledge to manage your website successfully. 

Cost per thousand is also called cost per mile. It’s when display advertisers pay you for every 1,000 impressions, with each ad being one impression. Therefore, every time your banner ad is seen 1000 times, you can expect to earn a commission.

A conversion is when you take the percentage of a visitor’s action after all the clicks. So if you had 100 clicks and 4 visitors made a purchase, you would have a 25% conversion rate.

CSS stands for cascade style sheets, its a HMTL markup language. Its purpose is to help properly display information and keep everything formatted correctly.

Your explicit offer, it encourages the visitor to do something.

It’s a ration of how often people see your ad or product, and end up clicking the ad or product listing.

A custom field is stored in the metadata. It associates values other than the excerpts, titles, or content on your blog post.

A custom post type is a regular post but, used for different purposes. With custom post type you can create posts that look different from the rest of your site. For example, if you blog about books, and you want to have a portfolio as well. Then you would create a custom post type.

Customer acquisition cost, or CAC is the amount of money a business, organization, or company takes to acquire a new customer.

A disclaimer is a legal page for your blog, when you want to have the right to “disclaim” or “deny” legal liability for whatever is published on your blog. Its purpose is to protect you, as a publisher, from any grievous consequences. 

A disclosure is the same as an affiliate disclosure. As a blog owner using a blog for profit, it is handy to have this page. You are supposed to disclose to your website visitors that affiliate links, sponsored products, if used, will earn you a commission. 

Furthermore, according to the FTC a disclosure needs to be clearly stated and conspicuously placed.

The opposite of No follow. Link juice will be passed from the referring website to the linked website. 

The domain is the unique web address for a website. It’s also your main URL for your website. For instance, the domain name for She Tried That is https://shetriedthat.com/staging

Corporations make use of dark blogs. They speed up communication, which allows information to be shared more quickly. These are blogs that the public will not see and do not have access to.

Duplicate content is when the same content appears on more than one website. This can have an impact on SEO. It can cause you to lose traffic because, Google has to figure out which article is original. As long as you don’t participate in manipulative and deceptive ways, Google does not automatically penalize you for duplicate content because, according to RavenTool.com 29% of the crawled pages are considered duplicate content.

Dynmaic URLs are important for database websites. The dynamic URL allows the website owner build the pages and service them based on custom inputs.

E-A-T is Google guidelines ensuring that the search engines results are providing helpful and relevant information to a website visitor. E-A-T stands for Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. 

The “E” in E-A-T addresses the content creator the experience.  Is the content creator basing a review off research, hear say or first hand experience. According to Google search guidelines its best to have first hand experience if you want to achieve trustworthiness.

The second “E” in E-A-T addresses the content creator the expertise. What level and type of experience does the content creator have. 

The “A” in E-A-T addresses the content creators Trust. According to Google, most websites do not have an official, authoritative website but, is the website you are going to the go-to-source. 

And with all the above taken in consideration, we arrive at the “T” which is the most important factor “Trust” Is your website trustworthy? And is the content creator trustworthy?”

Double E-A-T also called E-E-A-T, is an important consideration in page quality. The most important element in double E-E-A-T is trust. Google has search quality raters that view each website, and what they are looking for is if the content on the page is accurate. Is the content creator and content being honest. They also want to make sure your website is safe and reliable. 

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing. It’s a way to stay in contact with your audience. You can also promote your business’s services, or products through email. Using the email marketing channel can help make customers aware of the latest discounts, events, offers, or products.

EPC is a marketing metric that allows an affiliate marketer to understand how much money, on average, an affiliate would make based on each affiliate link click.

It’s the article that represents your article. It can be featured inside of your article as well. It’s usually the first image that you will see on a blog post. 

The opposite of last click attribution. If a visitor clicks your affiliate link first, and then turns around and clicks other affiliate links. The sale will apply to you because, it is a first click attribution. 

It’s when you have a website and provide your own service or product on your blog. 

A frame is a part of a website, or browser window. It displays independent containers. 

The front end of a website is the part you see. All visitors see this side of the website. Therefore, frontend is the opposite of backend.

File Transfer Protocol, also called FTP, is a set of instructions that tells your computer how to transfer files between online systems.

A funnel, also known as a sales funnel, is a marketing term that helps track your potential customer’s journey to purchase. Funnels can be beneficial because, they provide data that helps you understand where you are losing your customers interest, which they call a leaky funnel.

This is a platform that you need to use for your website. It provides insight of what is happening on your website. The service is free. If you want to learn more about Google Analytics, you can take their free course.

Ghost blogs, are also called “Proxy Blog and “Psedo Blog”. Ghost blog are to enhance a company’s relationship. These blogs may also publish under other names that supply the content.

A good affiliate site is viewed well by Google when the content creator (or affiliate) offers their audience valuable and helpful information, which should include testing, comparing other products, pricing, and writing an original review.

Google search console is a free tool by Google which helps you monitor the performance of your website traffic.  It also allows you to monitor and fix any issues that your website might be experiencing. By using this tool, you can improve your websites performance.

A mix of Black Hat SEO and White hat SEO.

It’s when a content creator writes on another blog within their niche.

Hosting as called “Web Hosting” is where your website files, text, images, and videos are stored. People all around the globe can view your website because of the hosting.

HTML is a set of markup instructions. It’s a language that helps webpages understand how the sections, paragraphs, links, and tags should be built on the blog post.

A data transfer code used on the internet. 

It’s a highlighted word on your blog, and when a visitor clicks the word, it takes them to a different destination.

It’s an image that gives you a visual explanation with very little text.

An internal link is when one of your website pages or posts points to a different page or post on your website. Internal links never point to outside websites.

When two or more people join their resources together for the purposes of achieving a business goal together. Each party will take responsibility for costs and losses.

It’s a computer programming language. It’s used for creative interactive effects within your web browser.

A revelatory phrase or word that has been chosen by the content creator. The keyword is what will help drive traffic, if your content matches the search query. 

Keyword cannibalization is having too many similar keywords on your blog posts and throughout your website. If you do this, search engines will become confused and not understand what content to rank higher than the others because, all the content appears the same. 

This happens when you publish posts with similar topics, or change URLs that had content on them and write the same content on a totally different page. To prevent that, you must redirect the URL. Using certain keyword tools can help you find any cannibalization within your website content.

Example: How do you create a blog? How do I start a blog? How to grow red apples? How to grow green apples?

Keyword intent, also called search intent, is when you answer the question that your audience is looking for, and if you answer the question fully, then the visitor will stop exploring for more options.

A keyword tool also called a keyword research tool, or SEO tool is used for SEO foundation. It helps learn what keywords to focus on, and what people are searching for. Each keyword tool has different capabilities.

The opposite of first click attribution. It’s when a visitor has visited the same product from different affiliates. Let’s say the visitor has clicked all the affiliate links. The affiliate that gets the sale is when the visitor clicks on the very last person’s affiliate link.

A landing page, also known as a squeeze page, is a one page website. It is not connected to anything else other than the landing page optimization platform. The purpose of a landing page is to encourage visitors to opt-in, make a purchase, or download a lead magnet.

A person who takes interest in purchasing the product or services offered.

It is when you are in the process of attracting prospects to your business, offer, product, or service. In the online world, its a part of digital marketing.

A lead magnet is something that marketers offer their audience in exchange for their name, email, and sometimes phone number. The purpose of the lead magnet is to convince a visitor to opt-in to their newsletter in exchange for something free. The lead magnet that the marketer offers is something of value. The visitor sees it as valuable if they sign up to receive the lead magnet.

A lightbox is a popup on a website. The lightbox, can be beneficial to display promotions, surveys, important messages, or ask questions of your website visitors. Its purpose is to dim the background and draw attention to the lightbox, thereby catching your visitor’s attention. 

Link building is the marketing efforts a brand uses to gain links from other websites to their. 

A directory website set up specifically for the purposes of creating outbound links to other websites. They do this to improve their rankings. Today, link farms are viewed negatively. Google has strict guidelines when it comes to link farms. They don’t tolerate them. At the same time, Google isn’t always able to discover all Link farming is also considered Black Hat SEO.

Link building is the marketing efforts a brand uses to gain links from other websites to their.

Opposite of Auto-Approve. The affiliate manager has to validate the affiliate application. After validation is performed, affiliate applications are approved, rejected, or declined. To increase your chances of approval, have a well developed website, with high quality content along with your legal pages.

A company, person, or brand that sells goods for profit. They pay affiliate commissions when visitors make a purchase or take a required action on their website.

The meta description is a snippet or summary of the website’s content. It appears in the search engines.

Hidden code, that tells the search engine what your web page is about. Every page or post has a meta tag. The code is only visible in HTML.

The Meta title is also known as the title tag on a website. The HTML code will appear similar to this </title>This is where your title tag goes.<title>

Platforms like Twitter is a good example of microblogging. Short and instant messages.

A very specific topic for a highly targeted audience.

This means an affiliate will be paid 60 days later. For example, if an affiliate earns income from June 1 to June 30. The affiliate will be paid 60 days later, on August 29.

A newsletter is when an organization, blogger, or business shares valuable and helpful information with their customers, prospects, audience, or subscribers. 

A large market broken down into a specific topic, while focusing on a targeted audience.

No downtime occurs when your website is always accessible. The downtime has something to do with your hosting infrastructure. The purpose of having no downtime is you don’t website to provide a bad user experience. If your visitors can not access the website, they will click away and may never return. Resulting in loss of traffic, sales, and sometimes trust.

A nofollow link is a link from a referring website to another linked website. It tells search engines to ignore the page that was linked to. Therefore, no link juice will pass. The no follow link will have the “rel=nofollow” HTML tag applied to it.

A link from your website pointing to or linking to another website.

Most affiliate programs, have a threshold. It’s when you need to reach a minimum amount before your total commission payment can be received. 

It’s part of affiliate marketing, where an advertiser pays an affiliate for the converted leads that he or she brings them.

Also called a “permanent link,” it is the permanent URL or address of a blog post, page, or website and is not expected to change. That’s why it’s called a permalink. If this link is changed, it needs to be redirected, which becomes a 30 redirect, or you will have 404 error messages.

Also known as link farm, is a group of websites, created to link out to other websites. 

PID is also called publisher ID its a unique number given to you as an affiliate. This is how the advertiser or affiliate network knows who the sale belongs to.

A pingback is when you link to another blogger’s website. The blogger you’re linking to will get a notification called a pingback, if they have the pingback notification enabled. 

It’s an add-on that has capabilities to make technical things easier. WordPress has thousands of plugins that you can add to your affiliate blog.

It’s the condition of a post. Your post status can be pending review, published, scheduled, draft, or trashed.

It’s a compensation model. An advertiser will give you clear guidelines on what action, they would like you to receive from your website visitor. If you accomplish it, you will receive credit as an affiliate.

Every single time your affiliate link is clicked, you will earn credit.

This is when an affiliate receives payment for any qualified phone calls that the advertiser or merchant receives.

It’s a compensation model for ads on your website. An affiliate can earn money based on the number of times, website visitors view the display or text ads on their website.

As an affiliate, you are credited every single time, you generate commissionable leads, as long as you use the methods that are clearly defined by the merchant or advertiser.

PPS is when you are paid for every sale. It’s the most favorable payout for affiliate marketing.

Every time a visitor delivers a view to an advertiser’s or merchant’s website, you are credited for those views.

A privacy policy is required by law. If you are trying to do the right thing,  you need a privacy policy page on your blog. This is one of the first and foremost pages that you need to have on your website, out of all the legal pages. If you do not have this page, you can simply courting trouble.  

A potential customer, but not a customer yet. Prospects are in your market with the resources to make a purchase but have not done so yet.

A publisher is also called an affiliate. Publishers generate traffic through websites, blogs, and email marketing. Each time a publisher sends traffic that results in a commissionable action, such as filling out a form, clicking a link, making a purchase, or any other action that the advertiser is willing to pay for, the publisher (the affiliate) earns a commission.

A raw affiliate link is the original uniquely coded link that the affiliate program or affiliate network provides you will.

It’s usually long and hideous.

An example of an affiliate link looks like this. https://hop. clickbank . net/?affiliate = YourClickbankID&vendor = socialpaid&pid = limitedtimesale.

A redirect is when you have created a URL and, for whatever reason, have decided to change it. In this case, you will redirect the old URL to a new and updated URL. It will make the browser go from the old URL to the new URL. The purpose of having a redirect in place is so that your visitor does not hit a 404 page (error page).

It’s when you share with someone how to receive help, get more information, take action, or visit a place or person.

It’s when businesses pays a customer to bring that business new customers.

Is when you spread the word or recommendations of a particular service, product, or company. It helps a business grow their customer base through current or past customers.

Similar to affiliate marketing. It’s a marketing strategy that companies use to reward customers or employees for recommending their company.

Remarketing, also called “retargeting,” is a form of digital marketing in which affiliate networks, marketers, or online marketers use it to serve ads to a website visitor who has previously shown interest but has not taken action.

Residual income is when you receive lifetime commissions as long as the customer remains an active customer. With every new purchase they make, you continue to receive a commission. 

This is when your website has a design, that shows well on all resolution screens and devices, making the user experience good.

This is a code in your text file on your website. It gives instructions to search engine crawlers about which parts of your website they can or can not access.

RSS also called Really Simple Syndication. It’s a feed. If this feature is active on your website, whenever you publish new articles or content, your updates will display on a program called RSS.

It’s when a content creator has written a post that needs to be published at a later date.

Scraped content is viewed as content taken from somewhere else, without any additional value added to the article. For example, if you apply to Google Adsense and are denied, this is something you do not want to get denied for, so it is best to create your own high quality content.

It is a process that affiliates take to improve their position in the search engines. It includes both SEO and pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising.

SEO is the process of improving website visitors (or traffic) to a website through search engines.

When a visitor makes a search query, the search engines display a result. Those results are supposed to be the most accurate answer to the visitor’s keyword query.

The slug is the backend of your URL. For example, the entire URL of this page is the backend of the URL, called the slug. Taking the example of this article entire URL, the slug would be the portion that says affiliate-marketing-glossary. https://shetriedthat.com/staging/affiliate-marketing/affiliate-marketing-glossary

It’s on the side of your website. Some themes allow the content creator to choose either the left or the right side.

It is the blueprint for your entire website. It helps search engines find, crawl, and index your website.

A “sponsored product” is when a content creator has been paid to promote a particular business or product. A sponsored product is not the same as an affiliate product. It also does not mean the person who is promoting the product as sponsored has actually used the product. It simply means that they are getting paid to promote the product for profit.

A squeeze page is also known as a landing page. It is designed to help marketers collect email addresses.

Tags can help a content creator group, similar topics. If a visitor clicked on a tag, an archive of articles would display. Tags are useful for content organization.

A tagline tells online searchers what your website is about before they even arrive.

 A theme is what you will use to design, and control your website’s decorations.

A thin affiliate website is a website that has very little information that adds no value to the readers or topic. The sole purpose is financial gain.

It’s a legal page that your blog must have. It is the set of rules governing everything between you and your website visitors. It’s a statement letting your website visitors know how you, the owner, expect them to behave on your blog. It also lets visitors know what to expect when interacting with your website.

When other bloggers link to you, you will receive a trackback if the option is enabled in your WordPress dashboard.

A URL is the address link visible in your search bar. It’s the website’s unique address. 

A click has come from one unique person (the same one).

A link that is unique to one person, such as an affiliate link. It’s coded with a purpose.

The visit comes from one unique person to your website.

It’s when a website URL has changed or been updated because, the original one does not exist. A redirect is needed, or this will cause a poor user experience.

It’s an online service that will help you take a long URL and make it shorter. This is also considered a URL redirection.

Website Hosting also called “Hosting”, it’s the place where you website files, images, videos, and text are stored.

Website Hosting Infrastructure is your hosting service’s foundation. The hosting infrastructure should provide reliable and secure services.

A website migration is when your website undergoes major changes. These changes are also known to impact SEO. The purpose of a website migration is to change the setup, URLs, design or theme, platform, and website hosting.

The website owner is the person, company, business, or organization responsible for a website.

It’s when a website URL has changed or been updated because, the original one does not exist. A redirect is needed, or this will cause a poor user experience.

WordPress is the way you can manage and keep your content updated. It’s your content management system (CMS) and website builder.

A term for “What you see is what you get”