AFFILIATE DEFINITIONS
Below you will find a list of glossary affiliate definitions of terms used throughout this website.
Affiliate
The term “affiliate” in the context of affiliate marketing relates to an individual or organization that actively promotes the products of another party in reward for a commission.
Affiliate Commissions
In this context affiliate commissions are normally the payments affiliates receive from networks for sales they generate for merchants on the network.
Affiliate Forum
An affiliate forum is an online resource where affiliates can post questions and/or ideas for constructive feedback to assist is developing ideas and projects.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process whereby individuals and organizations generate website traffic to big-named organizations such as John Lewis and are rewarded with commissions for any sales generated.
Affiliate Merchant
An Affiliate Merchant is normally an organization or individual who utilizes affiliates as a means of generating extra traffic and sales for its online website.
Affiliate Networks
The process is facilitated by “affiliate networks” such as Affiliate Window 10 that provide tracking software to create merchant-to-affiliate agreements. An example being:
Merchant: John Lewis
Network: Affiliate Window
Affiliate: Individual or Organization
The affiliate generates sales through (normally) search engine traffic to the merchant and is rewarded for each sale.
Affiliate Techniques
The methods an affiliate applies to his trade in order to generate firstly traffic and the sales and commissions can be described as affiliate techniques.
Affiliate Video Tutorials
Many affiliate websites include affiliate video tutorials which are designed to help and educate affiliates in good practice which can lead to commissions. The Untapped Program includes over 3 hours of affiliate video tutorials which offer step-by-step guidance in the best practices associated with using the affiliate software as a means to generate traffic, sales and thus commissions.
Deeplinking
Another common word or term in the affiliate sector is deeplinking. This relates to the practice of creating affiliate links that can be included on affiliate websites and when clicked will direct the visitor to a specific product rather than a home page or product category page. Deeplinking is widely available on most affiliate networks. The Untapped video tutorials cover the art of deeplinking in considerable depth.
Free Highly Targeted Traffic
In the world of affiliate marketing free highly targeted traffic generally relates to website visitors that arrive on a website looking for a very specific product, e.g. “hotels on Shaftsbury Avenue London”, and arrive there from clicking a result in the free, or organic, search listings on search engines such as Google. Free highly targeted traffic is the opposite of paid traffic which is often generated by affiliates from paid search marketing such as Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter.
FTP
The term FTP or “File Transfer Protocol” relates to the process of exchanging files over the Internet. FTP functions in the same way as HTTP for transferring webpage files from a server to a user, or visitors. FTP is most commonly used to download a file from a server using the Internet or to upload a file, such as a webpage, to a server.
Highly Niche Products
Affiliates are constantly looking for unique or “low in competition” methods to attract website visitors in order to convert sales to commissions. One such way is by creating websites or paid advertising campaigns, such as Google Adwords, that focus on highly niche products. An example of a highly niche product website would be one that is dedicated to, say, a Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffee making machine as opposed to a generic website about coffee machines in general. By focussing on highly niche products and affiliate faces less keyword competition.
Highly Targeted Keywords
When aiming to generate free traffic to a highly nice product website an affiliate may focus on highly targeted keywords. An example would be by focussing paid search engine marketing or on site SEO on a keyword such as “Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffee machine” as opposed to more generic keywords such as “coffee making machines”.
Highly Targeted Traffic
When focussing online marketing efforts on niche products and highly targeted keywords, the webmaster should be in a strong position to generate highly targeted traffic whereby his website visitors are looking for exactly the products he is promoting.
Hosting
Any website requires hosting in order to be accessible to internet users. Hosting normally provides hard disk storage where a websites files are stored in order for them to appear online. Hosting is often a paid service although some companies offer free hosting and other special deals to persons requiring it.
Niche Website
A niche website generally describes a website that is highly targeted in its aims and objectives. Rather than a generic website, say, about travel in general, a niche website may focus on travel to a particular resort. Niche websites stand a far greater chance of a higher position in the SERP than a more generic website as the number of displayed search engine results is likely to be far lower for niche keywords.
Niche Keywords
Over recent times affiliates have been seeing the benefits of focussing on niche keywords rather than generic keywords. See “highly targeted keywords”.
Price Comparison
Throughout the online sector price comparison websites are playing an ever more important role in delivering value to the customer experience. Price comparison relates to prices of given products or services such as insurance, travel, electrical goods and so on being displayed in a table of results which allows the website visitor to compare different offers and prices. The normal aim of this practice is to provide the website visitor with the lowest or cheapest price for like-for-like products.
Product Niches
Product niches are often defined as profitable and lower in competition than generic product categories. Product niches are by definition attractive to an affiliate marketer because of the lower ratio of competition promoting the product.
Profitable Keyword
A chosen keyword that attracts either free or paid search engine traffic can be described as a profitable keyword if the cost of attracting the visitor is outweighed by the ratio of commission the keyword generates for the affiliate. Again the swing in attention affiliates are paying to niche highly targeted kewywords reflects the fact that these are often more profitable kewywords than generic terms.
Search Engine
A search engine (SE) is a website, such as Google, which allows users to search the internet for almost anything. The search results are displayed in what the Search Engine operators determine to be the most relevant results. Affiliate marketers and merchants themselves constantly try to improve their search engine positions.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the term used to describe the practice of improving a websites position in search engine results pages. This is often achieved by applying guidelines laid out in “webmaster guidelines” at top search engines such as; Google, Yahoo and MSN. The practice of SEO involves balancing favourable keywords against general site content in: page content, text links, header tags, page Meta sections and more. SEO also involves webmasters obtaining quality links to their websites from other related topic websites.
SERPS
What does SERPS or SERP mean? The term “SERPS” means search engine results pages. It is often referred to in the context of search engine optimization and the position of given affiliate websites in the search engine results.
Search Engine Ranking
The actual position, or page on which a given website appears, is commonly referred to a; search engine ranking. For example; a website appearing in the number 1 spot in Google for the search term “profitable keywords” would be said to have a “number 1 search engine rank”.
Text Links
Text links relate to elements contained within website text which when clicked direct the visitor to another page on the website or to another entirely different website. Text links play an important role in search engine optimization especially when the text link itself includes strong keywords that link to a page offering more information about that keyword. Text links from one website to another can also significantly improve the search engine position of the destination page.
URL
The commonly used term URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. In layman’s terms this is the address that relates to a given website or webpage and defines the route to the file/s on an Internet server. URLs are typed into a Web browser to access Web pages and files, and URLs are embedded within the pages themselves as hypertext links. A widely known URL is http://www.google.co.uk