What is a…? Internet Marketing Terms
If you’re in ‘overwhelm’ mode with all the marketing terms flying at you and you need clarification, do not hesitate to drop in on the Marketing Help page and leave your question there.
Marketing Terms and Their Definitions
If you’ve just started your business online no doubt you’ve heard a pile of new words and terms for running an online business or promoting a website.
It gets confusing…
So I’ve put together this list of terms for you – to help make sense of it all and to use as a resource you can return to from time to time.
Marketing Terms – Marketing Definitions
- Ad Tracker
- Software that records the number of click-throughs or sales per link you’ve set up on your site.
- Affiliate
- A person who markets, promotes, or advertises someone else’s product or service in return for a commission. Online salesperson. You can become an affiliate for free at ClickBank and start earning right away.
- Affiliate Link
- When promoting a product or service as an affiliate (see above), you would use a specially coded hyperlink to ‘point’ to a sales page. That hyperlink code would be tied specifically to your account at the vendor’s site. Affiliate links vary across merchants and networks and are generally well explained on the merchant website. Sometimes your affiliate code is numerical, alphabetical or of your own choosing. If you’re in the internet marketing field you should check out this affiliate network – I’ve had great success promoting their products.
- Auto Responder
- Software or a paid service that sends email to your list of subscribers on a pre-determined schedule. My recommended auto-responder service.
- Blog
- Short form of Web Log. The trend began as online diaries that, dependent on the blog writer, may have solicited collaboration. Blog software is now widely used as an easy way to run a website. Smartzville’s Web 2.0 Blog is here. Another of my blogs on Web 2.0 Traffic is here.
- CAN SPAM
- This is a legislative act on email content and delivery meant to minimize spam, but is now a cornerstone of regulations on email marketers.
- Classified Ad
- A small text ad with a link to the advertiser’s site, used in newsletter marketing online.
- CPM
- An advertising standard. CPM = cost per thousand readers of an advertisement.
- Content
- Content is essentially the words on your web page or within your site but may also refer to an RSS Feed’s text. "Content is King" is a buzz-phrase passed around for the last few years when large search engines (such as google) changed their top results listings to the larger, content-rich sites.
- Copy Writing
- Effective written copy. Used to sell or teach.
- Co-Registration
- Services offered by some companies to assist you in building a subscriber base. Cost per subscriber varies by market and service provider.
- CPA – Cost Per Action
- CPA is a model used for advertising online where the rate for every action taken by a user is preset. The advertiser and publisher agree on what actions (a sale, a sign up, a site visit, etc.) will be tallied, registered and a commission rewarded.
- CPC – Cost Per Click
- CPC is the model used for advertising online where the rate is tallied, registered and rewarded for every actual ‘click through’ that results in a new visitor to the advertiser’s website.
- CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions
- CPM is the model used in advertising online where the rate is set for every thousand impressions. In other words, an advertiser pays a publisher $40 for displaying their advertisement 1000 times.
- CTR – Click Through Ratio or Click Through Rate.
- The number of people who clicked on an ad vs. the number who viewed the ad.
- Database (Relational)
- Not to be confused with a datafeed (something I write quite a bit about on this website.)
- A database is a file that contains many ‘strings’ of information that is searchable and usable in a variety of software applications.
A phone book is a database of names and phone numbers although I’d never use one for internet marketing because mine, personally, isn’t in computer ready format. In the computer sense, a database I might use would be the names, emails and telephone numbers of my past customers and a list of their purchases over the years.
Lately I’ve worked extensively with MySQL databases (which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy but if you have a geek-ish mind, you’d find them quite powerful for content management and creating and managing online stores.
- Directory
- A finely tuned category of information. Yahoo for instance serves their search results based on directory headings.
- Double Opt-In
- Where email subscribers must verify (even after subscribing) and confirm that they did indeed want to be on your list.
- Download
- Saving files from the internet to your computer.
- Ebook
- Electronic Book. Ebooks created in PDF format can be read on both MACs and PCs. Where we once used ebook software to create our ebooks to sell, now we pretty much all use PDF since they have low risk of carrying viruses.
- Ezine
- Electronic Magazine, generally delivered by email.
- Follow-Up
- A sequence of email messages sent to a subscriber usually by an Auto Responder (see auto responder).
- FTP
- File Transfer Protocol. The means of getting content on your hard drive to the internet. Also used for downloading entire websites from the internet and onto your hard drive.
- Forum
- An online meeting place of like minded individuals.
- HTML
- HyperText Markup Language. The programming code that displays web pages.
- Joint Venture
- JV – Two marketers team up to present, sell, or share resources for the sale of a product.
- Lead Generation
- Similarto Co-Registration but also any means necessary to get people to sign up to a marketer’s email subscription. The ‘pre-sell’ part of follow-up.
- Moderator
- King (or queen) of a particular forum or forum topic. A moderator ensures that posts to the forum are appropriate and follow the forum’s guidelines.
- MP3
- Audio file format for computers or MP3 players.
- Name Squeeze
- A hot new way to tease a reader into subscribing to your follow-up messages. Used for lead generation and invented and tested for efficiency by marketing guru Jonathan Mizel.
- Niche Marketing
- Categorizing your potential customers by their likes, age, similarities. Finding out what they want to buy and how to reach them, then selling your product or service to them. Frank Kern was one of the big marketers who talked and trained extensively on niche marketing.
- PPC
- Pay Per Click. An advertising charge system where the advertiser pays for every click from the ad to his/her website. Perry Marshal is the expert on Google Adwords PPC opportunity and he has a free course here.
- Portable Document Format. The file format most often used for ebooks.
- RSS
- Really Simple Syndication. A way of using varying programming code to syndicate content. See my RSS success story here.
- Sales Letter
- Text written using copy-writing skills to entice buyers.
- Solo Ad
- A one time, focused advertisement sent to a list of subscribers.
- Split Test
- A way of testing the effectiveness of copy. 1/2 potential customers are sent to one version of a sales letter, the other 1/2 to a different version. Each action is recorded and copy is tweaked as a result.
- Syndication
- Displaying content of one site on another site. See RSS.
- Target URL
- The landing page for a click through.
- Target Marketing
- aka Niche Marketing
- Teleseminar
- A conference call where learning is achieved.
- Thank You Page
- A special page (usually with download information) where the customer is directed after ordering.
- WYSIWYG
- What You See Is What You Get. Used to describe a type of web page creation software.
