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Glossary of terms

If you are completely new to Internet Marketing (IM) and don't know anything, then you may find the glossary below to be useful - especially since it is hard to find an answer to questions like this on forums.

Contained is the definition for the major IM term you will come across. Once you start doing IM for some amount of time, the following terms will become second nature.

Adsense: AdSense is a service from Google that allows webmasters (That is, people with websites) to display small text advertisements on their site from third party advertisers. Then, whenever someone clicks on one of those text ads, the webmaster recieves a set amount of money, as does Google.

What this does is allow the person owning the website to instantly monetize and begin to make money from any amount of website traffic.

Adwords: AdWords is like AdSense except that it is from the advertisers point of view - that is, when you talk about people running AdWords campaigns, it means paying a set amount everytime someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.

This is the simplest, most common way of paying money to generate targeted traffic to your website.

Affiliate: An affiliate is someone who will send traffic to a sales page through their own affiliate link, so that when someone clicks on the affiliate link and buys the product, the affiliate gets a certain commission.

Commission is generally now between 50% and 75%, that is, the affiliate who refers the sale will get 50% to 75% of the sales price delivered to them. Product sellers can afford to do this when there is a high profit per sale, such as for example with digital products like eBooks and software where there is no cost to deliver the product.

Autoresponder: An autoresponder is a service that allows you to send out emails to a list of people (see definition of "list" below) and manages the names and emails who you can send out emails to.

The three main autoresponder services are Aweber, GetResponse and EmailAces. (By the way, those links are affiliate links from Coding Elite - so if you subscribe to the service from those links, instead of your payment going fully to the service, we will get a commission on it. This is just to illustrate the example of affiliate links given above.)

Copywriting: To put it simply, in internet marketing, copywriting is writing words that sell things. When you hear about "copy", that is writing - and "sales copy" is just writing that aims to get people to buy your product (hence the name sales copy). This is an important skill to learn in order to be successful.

People who write copy are refered to as copywriters, and you can hire people like this to write sales letters for you if you don't want to do it yourself. Just keep in mind though, because copywriting is so important, good copywriters can charge extremely high (such as up to forty thousand dollars for one sales letter if you hire the best.)

Conversion rate: This is a term you will hear a lot of, and is just the percent of people coming to your sales page who buy your product. This is calculated, of course, by dividing the number of sales you have by the number of people who have visited your site.

To give you an idea, most people are happy with 1-2% conversion rate for a $47+ product. Anything above 3% is very good, while 7% or higher is awesome. Anything below 1% means that your product is either not in demand or else your sales copy needs work (see above).

eBook: Ebooks are what most people doing Internet Marketing sell, and are basically just .pdf documents (opened in Adobe Acrobat) that have information about a certain topic. These are frequently called "infoproducts" because they contain information, and yes, people are willing to pay for information contained in an ebook.

Joint Venture: A "Joint Venture" is, as the name suggests, a deal between two people who both gain something. Frequently, this involves one person promoting another persons product as an affiliate, so both partners make money out of the arrangement.

Joint Ventures are probably the most powerful thing you can use with Internet Marketing (if you can get them, that is) because they allow you to leverage other people's assets.

List: A list is, quite simply, a list of emails who you have permission to send emails to from the email owner. This means that the owner must have entered their name and email into your subscribe form to voluntarily join your list.

When it comes to Internet Marketing, your list is probably your most powerful asset (you will often hear the phrase "the money is in the list" thrown around a lot) and you can use it to either promote your own products or promote other peoples products as an affiliate, all with one quick email.

To manage this, you need an autoresponser service (see above).

Niche: A niche is simply a market of buyers who have a demand for a certain product or service. When you do internet marketing, you will be looking for niches where you can serve a niche and not be overrided with competition.

One Time Offer (OTO): An OTO is, as the name suggests, an offer that only appears once, and which represents (or is at least meant to in theory) a much better deal than what the public at large generally gets. This compells the potential buyer to check out the offer.

OTO's are generally given as soon as someone subscribes to a list by giving their name and email (although this is becoming less and less effective), or once someone buys a product or subscribes to a service. In short, they appear once the visitor has shown an interest in whatever is being offered.

Opt-in: When someone enters their name and email into your subscribe form to join your list, they are said to have "opted-in" to your list.

You also have the option of double opt-in, which is where the owner of the email adress must confirm their subscription by clicking on a link on an email they recieve. Only after they click on the link in their email, they will be added. It is highly recommended that you do this in order to avoid spam complaints and to ensure the owner of the email adress wants to get your emails.

As an example, you can see the subscribe form at the top right of this page, which uses double opt-in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO involves optimizing your site so that it ranks highly in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. What this does is allow you to get free, targeted traffic to your website without spending any money on advertising, since people searching on search engines will come to your site.

When doing SEO, it's important to optimize your website for specific keywords.

Squeeze Page: A squeeze page is a simple page with a bit of sales copy and a form asking for your name and email that entices the visitor to give their details to join a mailing list. Typically, once the visitor enters their name and email they will be taken to a sales page (an "OTO", if you like) where they have the option of buying some product.

In order to entice someone to join your list, you need to provide some incentive for them to do so, mostly in the form of a free ebook related to the topic your list will be on. Otherwise, if you simply have great content on your site then you generally don't need to try as hard with compelling sales copy to get someone to join your list.

Upsells/Downsells: As the name suggests, these are different packages where the buyer has the option of paying more for a premium package, or paying less for an inferior package. Often, you will see the terms "Gold", "Silver" and "Bronze" - where Gold is the premium package, Silver is the standard package and Bronze is the most limited package.

What this does is appeal to different types of buyers, who may have different needs or else may just have different budgets. It is therefore highly recommended that you use upsells and downsells in order to serve your different customers.

Viral Marketing: This is a term that is thrown around quite a lot and has a lot of buzz, and basically refers to marketing where your business spreads like a real virus (hence the name "viral" marketing).

Like a real virus, this essentially means that the bigger it gets, the faster it grows.

Web Hosting: This is a less exciting term - a web host is just someone who can host your website for you, and obviously if you want to do anything at all then you need this. There are tons of web hosts out there (the most common being GoDaddy), however, the one CodingElite uses and the one I would recommend is HostGator. (Affiliate link from Coding Elite.)