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.