Ten “Must-Know” Acronyms for Affiliate Marketing Newbies

Affiliate marketing newbies take note. You will quickly discover that visions of acronyms and affiliate marketing terms are haunting your sleep. Relax, you’re not alone. It’s not the least bit unusual for affiliate marketing newbies to experience acronym overload at some point in the learning process. Well we’ve been there too, and we understand the need to have one place to find the definitions of those acronyms that are most relevant to this business.

We’ve discovered that there’s a whole new lingo that all affiliate marketing newbies need to learn. In the following quick reference guide we share the ten most common acronyms. We’ll provide updates periodically, so stay tuned.

1. CTR – Click-Thru-Rate – The percentage of people who actually click on a banner.

2. PPC – Pay Per Click – This is when you get paid each time a customer clicks a certain link.

3. RSS Feed – Really Simply Syndication, Rich Site Summary, Raw Data Feed Site Summary – You have certain reader programs (Google Reader, Internet Explorer has a reader) that allows you to subscribe to the RSS Feeds of different websites and see the updates on those sites as soon as they make them.

4. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Used to ensure that a website ranks at the top of a search engine result. This is a popular marketing technique that uses articles, keywords and other methods to help ensure the website is within the top results and thus more likely to be seen by searchers.

5. CPA – Cost-Per-Action – Refers to a click, lead or sale. For example, a merchant offers its affiliates $0.30 per newsletter sign-up. Even if the visitor doesn’t buy anything, the merchant will still pay you for the “action” or in this case, the newsletter sign-up.

6. CR – Conversion Ratio – The percentage of clicks, views, etc., needed to achieve a specific action (sale, lead, etc.). Translation: If one out of one hundred visitors to your website signs up for your report or newsletter, your website has a two percent signup ratio for that item.

7. SEM – Search Engine Marketing – Promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, paid inclusion, digital asset optimization and contextual advertising. This term is also used to describe an individual (Search Engine Marketer).

8. HTML – Hyper-Text Markup Language – the authoring language used to create documents on the internet and to define the layout and structure of web documents using various attributes and tags.

9. URL – Uniform Resource Locator – the global address of documents on the internet specifies the protocol identifier and the resource location name (IP address or domain name) which are separate by a colon and two forward slashes.

10. ISP – Internet Service Provider – a company that provides access to the Internet for a monthly fee. Service includes a modem which allows you to log on to the Internet to browse, and also allows you to send and receive email.

Affiliate marketing newbies: These are important acronyms to know and understand. They are critical not only to online marketing but also to everyday life on the world wide web (WWW) in the 21st Century.

Affiliate Marketing Newbies – First Month Lessons

We’re at our first month anniversary as newbie affiliate marketers and whew – lots of lessons learned! Here’s a few:

• Pick a niche – something you’re interested in, something lots of other people are interested in and something where there are products to sell. Examples of some of the ones these newbies picked are weight loss, weight training, credit repair and a new favorite life topic – going green.
• Do a keyword search before you do buy a domain or do anything else. Check out the Google Keyword Tool – easy to use and free. Or try out our favorite keyword tool, Market Samurai that has lots of other features to help in any kind of Internet marketing.
• Focus, focus, focus. Create a roadmap for your affiliate marketing journey. This is not a business that you want to meander along in and miss the opportunity to make the mean green.
• Ignore “bright, shiny objects”. As you get involved in affiliate marketing, you will see wonderful things on the learning curve, things I call – bright, shiny objects, the “accessories” of the trade – courses, programs, tools, resources and my favorite – ready-made affiliate websites. Unless you have a trust fund, you can’t get them all so this is where having a business plan comes in real handy to keep you focused.
• Pass on most of the freebies you run into on the Internet – teleseminars, webinars, ebook, special reports. They are there to get you to buy a paid product. Freebies usually tell you the “what” on a topic but never the “how”. And they can really be a time suck. If something really speaks to you though, follow your intuition, go for it and sign up.
• Ask questions – there are any dumb ones or I would have asked all of them already! One thing I’ve found is that experienced affiliate marketers are always ready to share some advice with a newbie.
• Take your mistakes – like the ones I’ve made this month – as absolutely necessary affiliate marketing lessons learned.

Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you somebody who has never achieved much. ~ Joan Collins

Here’s Why You Need To Use Landing Pages

All the products that you want to sell online are ready. You have already signed up with the Google Adsense program or with other affiliate marketing programs and you have already prepared the ad you want to post on your affiliate’s site. Your mind is now set to being the next most successful online businessman. But is there anything else that you might have forgotten to prepare? Maybe none. But how about your landing pages? Are they all set for your business?

Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad. For affiliate marketing, landing pages would refer to the web page where you, as a merchant, would want your potential customer to be directed after clicking your ad on your affiliate’s website. Landing pages are, at most times, nothing really different from other web pages in a particular website, especially if the said website is an e-commerce site. Some online businessmen would even use the homepage of their websites as the landing page for their ads. Are these businessmen making a big mistake? Or should you follow their method in creating landing pages for their ads?

Well, you can always follow what most online retailers do, directing their potential customers to the homepages of their websites. But if you want to achieve something more from your online business, and if you want to earn a lot of profits, you better create a special landing page for your web ads. Why? Here are a few reasons why you need to use landing pages for your web ads. And take note, it would do you a lot better if you create a great landing page than a so-so one.

Reason no. 1: It is the only way you earn conversions in an affiliate marketing program.

There are a variety of affiliate marketing programs today, but most of these programs let the merchant pay the affiliate in a pay per click basis. Basically, all you have to do is sign up with the program and submit your ad. The program owner would then distribute your ad to various affiliates who would then place your ad on their websites. Whenever your ad is clicked, a visitor would be directed to your landing page and you would have to pay the affiliate for his service.

As a merchant, you earn in an affiliate program through conversions—that is whenever a visitor that is directed to your site actually buys a product on your site. Without these conversions, you actually earn nothing from the program. Also, the more visitors that your affiliates have directed to your site, the larger would your expense be. And the only way that you can recover from these expenses is through conversions.

Now, you sure won’t get any conversion if you have posted an ad on your affiliate’s site without an actual landing page for the potential customer to be redirected into. It’s just like advertising a product without actually having a store to sell your product. Your advertisement may be enticing enough to encourage people to purchase a product, but without the landing page, how will they know how to purchase the product

It is therefore important to have landing pages for your ads because it is the only way for you to earn something in an affiliate program. Without landing pages, all you do is spend money paying your affiliates without actually getting anything in return.

Reason no. 2: Other web pages may just not be enough.

Many people make the mistake of making their website’s homepage as the landing page for their ads. The same is true for those who make use of other pages like a “contact us” page or a product page. Homepages are often designed to serve multiple users and contains a lot of links to other pages or to other websites. The same is with the other two pages mentioned. If you want to be successful in an affiliate program, we’re sure that you don’t want your landing page to cater to the needs of various people, most of which may not be really interested with your product.

When choosing a landing page, you must always have the customer directed into that page in mind. Therefore, your landing page must be relevant to the keywords and the contents you placed on your ad. It is also important that the landing page can induce your visitor to take action—that is to purchase your product or at least provide leads for potential customers.

Final Word

You probably entered into an affiliate marketing program with these things in mind: to save on advertising expenses and to gain more profit. But if you get into an affiliate marketing program without actually having a landing page, you’ll end up paying too much without getting anything in return. So if you still don’t have a landing page for your ads, you better start creating one now. And don’t get us wrong; it isn’t enough for you to have just a landing page—it should be a great landing page!

Google Adsense Profits Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing

Are you a webmaster who needs funds to keep your website running? Or is your website the only way for you to earn income? Whichever you are, for as long as you are a webmaster or a web publisher and you need cash, affiliate marketing may work well for you. With affiliate marketing, you may get a lot of cash pouring into your bank account easily. And if your website is rich in great contents and you want to earn more profit, why not get into the Google Adsense program as well?

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Well, simply because affiliate marketing is the easiest and probably the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other businessman’s products on your site. But even online retailers can benefit from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate marketing actually works for merchants as well as it works for the affiliates.

Affiliate marketing, simply said, is a relationship or agreement made between two websites, with one site being the merchant’s website and the other being the affiliate’s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant advertise his products on the affiliate’s site. The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the affiliate in whatever method they have agreed into. This would generally mean easy income for the affiliate, as he would do nothing but place the retailer’s ad on his site. This would also be very beneficial for the merchant, as getting affiliates to advertise their products would be a lot more affordable than hiring an advertising firm to promote their products.

There are a variety of methods on how the merchant would compensate the affiliate for his services, and for the webmaster, these methods simply translates to the method by which he would earn easy cash. Among the more common methods of compensation are the pay-per-click method, the pay-per-lead method, and the pay-per-sale method. The pay-per-click method is the method most preferred by affiliates, for their site’s visitor would only have to visit the advertiser’s site for them to gain money. The other two methods, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they would only have to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products.

Getting much profit on affiliate marketing programs, however, does not depend so much on the compensation method is it does on the traffic generated by your site. A website that can attract more visitors would generally have the greater chance of profiting in affiliate marketing programs.

What about Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is actually some sort of an affiliate marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the affiliates and the merchants. The merchant, or the advertiser, would simply sign up with Google and provide the latter with text ads pertaining to their products. These ads, which is actually a link to the advertiser’s website, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the websites owned by the affiliates, or by those webmasters who have signed up with the Google Adsense program.

While one can find a lot of similarities between Google Adsense and other affiliate marketing programs, you can also see a lot of differences. In Google Adsense, all the webmaster has to do is place a code on his website and Google takes care of the rest. The ads that Google would place on your site would generally be relevant to the content of your site. This would be advantageous both for you and for the advertiser, as the visitors of your site would more or less be actually interested with the products being advertised.

The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly. Also, the Google Adsense program provides webmasters with a tracking tool that allows you to monitor the earnings you actually get from a certain ad.

So, where do all of these lead us to?

Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether you are the merchant or the affiliate. For the merchant’s side, a lot of money can be saved if advertising effort is concentrated on affiliate marketing rather than on dealing with advertising firms. For the webmaster, you can easily gain a lot of profits just by doing what you do best, and that is by creating websites. And if you combine all your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it would surely convert to a large amount of cash.