Most people who just use the Internet as source of information and social networking don’t understand affiliate marketing concept and its terms. In this article, I will list a few of terms used in affiliate marketing world for my newbie readers or beginners.

  • Ad Copy: A written sales pitch, also known simply as ‘sales letter’. Most follow the AIDA form (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). You can find it on any site that’s selling something.

  • Affiliates/affiliate marketers: An individual or company who refer and promote products or services of merchant for commission through affiliate links.

  • Affiliate Link: The hypertext links given by the affiliate program that differentiates affiliates from generic traffic at large and identify who the company/merchant has to pay commission. Unless you send someone through an affiliate link, you don’t get paid.
  • Affiliate Program: An agreement with a given company that has this sort of program to advertise and promote their products in exchange for commission. The commission payment model can be pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead or pay-per-click. Most of the programs are free to join but you promote their products on your own expense. I have heard of those that require payment to join, but I strongly recommend against them, as there are plenty of good programs you can join for free.
  • Commission: This is how you get paid by all affiliate marketing programs. It’s not a salary or a fee, and taxes are not deducted and thus your problem to track. Commissions are usually expressed in percent, although some are given in dollars per sale.
  • Conversion: The percentage of people you send to an affiliate site that actually buy. It is also called CTR (Click Through Rate). The industry average of CTR is 1%. Getting conversions is the name of the game in affiliate marketing.

  • Lead capture page: It is also called ‘landing page’, is a ‘pre-sell’ page for the affiliate product. You can pre-sell your prospect customer in this page to warm him up and then give him a link to your affiliate partner/merchant’s sales page. With this page, you can also build your prospect list.

  • Merchant: The company who recruit affiliates to promote their products or services.
  • Niche market: a group of people who are searching the Internet for a solution to a problem in particular niche/topic.
  • Pay-per-click: You get paid anytime someone clicks on a link from your site. The biggest example of a program that does this is Google AdSense, which gives you pay-per-click ads to put your site and pays you every time someone clicks on it. Miva, Yahoo!, BidVertiser, etc also have advertising programs that work this way.
  • Pay-per-lead: You get paid when you send someone to a site and they sign up for a free trial, e-mail list or sales call, it’s called a lead. This one is not common but very handy, because you are getting paid to give a potential customer something for free.
  • Pay-per-sale: The most common ways to get paid in affiliate programs. When you send someone to a site and they buy a product, eBook, download, or join membership, you get paid a percentage of the payment.
  • Super Affiliate: An affiliate marketer in the top 5% of all affiliate marketers. These are the ones that make 80% of all the commissions in affiliate marketing and the aspiration of all affiliate marketers looking to get rich doing this.
  • Two-Tier Affiliate Program: An affiliate program that pays you for your sales and a percentage of sales of affiliates you recruit. For all intents and purposes, if you recruit and train your second tier, they will make you money. Some programs are also multi-tier, which means you get paid on downline several tiers beneath you or more.

Hope the above terms give you give you a bit more understand of affiliate marketing and let you get you started making money with affiliate marketing.

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing • Internet Marketing

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