On this page, you find all of the important terms (aka “jargon”) you’ll encounter in online marketing related material. Each term is explained briefly and linked to a more substantial, in-depth explanation, if applicable.
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Above the Fold
In printed newspapers “above the fold” refers to the top half of the page, which is visible when the paper is folded up, as you will encounter it at a news-stand. In online marketing, “above the fold” refers to the content on a website that is visible without scrolling down. You will often encounter advice on what kind of text, pictures or ads to place above the fold on your website.
Adsense / Adwords
Adsense and Adwords are the two components of Google’s pay-per-click advertisement service. Adsense allows you to place Google text-ads on your website, anywhere you choose. Every time someone clicks one of the ads, you get a small commission. Adwords is the advertiser’s side of this system: It lets you create ads and bid a certain price for each click-through to your website. In effect, you can use Adwords to pay for a certain amount of extra traffic to your site.
Affiliate Marketing
An Affiliate is someone who sells someone else’s products for a commission. For example, you can get a personalized affiliate-link to someones homepage, where they sell an ebook. Whenever a user reaches that page through your affiliate-link, you will get a cut of the sales-price (usually between 50% and 80%). Read more on this topic: What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Auto-Responder
An auto-responder is a program that automatically sends pre-defined email messages to you mailing-list. A good auto-responder will allow you to set individual messages for different mailing-lists, determine the time-intervals between the messages and much more. Auto-responders are used to market products via email and save a lot of work compared to manually sending mail. They also encourage inbox-spamming by over-enthusiastic marketers.
Article Marketing
Marketing products by writing articles on public article databases, where anyone can contribute (e.g. ezinearticles, squidoo and others). This can either be done as direct article marketing, with affiliate links placed in the article itself, or as a promotion for your affiliate site, with links to your website or squeeze page in the article. Writing articles linking to your website is also a common link-building strategy. Click here for more info.
Back-end
The back-end is where the customer is led once they have made the first purchase. Since the best types of customers are ones willing to buy and these can be easily identified by the fact that they have just bought something, many marketers try to instantly upsell every new customer. The back-end can also refer to all types of products and services you offer to your existing clients in the long-term. A well known maxim is that it is a lot easier to sell to an existing customer than to obtain a new one. For this reason, most marketers make sure they have a rich back-end program.
Black-hat SEO
Using illegitimate methods, deception and “hacks” to generate traffic to your site is referred to as black-hat SEO.
Bum Marketing
Marketing on the budget of a “bum”, i.e. doing online marketing with minimal or no monetary investments. Article marketing is often referred to as “bum marketing”.
Broad Match
A broad match search result is what you get whenever you type in a search term into a search engine. The search engine will look for relevant sites containing the words you typed in any order. I.e. typing “cute little bunnies” will list a page called “little cute bunnies” in the broad match results. The counterpart to broad match is the exact match.
Conversion / Conversion Rate
Typically, about three to five out of a hundred people who visit a product page actually end up making a purchase (this would be a conversion rate of 3-5%). The visitor clicking through and making a purchase is a “convert”. Of course, a good sales-page will have a higher conversion rate than a crappy one. Conversion rates of the sales-page are one of the many factors to consider when choosing a product to promote.
CPA
CPA is the abbreviation for “Cost Per Action”. In this advertisement model, you can get paid for a certain action the customer performs, like sharing his address and phone-number or signing up for a newsletter.
CPC / Cost Per Click
The Cost Per Click is an analysis metric that determines how much you are paying for each click in your campaign. The goal of every paid traffic campaign is to keep the CPC as far as possible below the EPC (Earnings Per Clicks).
CPV (sometimes called PPV)
CPV stands for Cost Per View. As opposed to PPC, where you pay each time someone clicks your add, with CPV advertising, you pay every time your ad is served to a visitor, regardless of whether they click or not. CPV ads are usually served in pop-up or pop-under windows.
Doorway Page
A doorway page is a page on a website specifically designed for search engines. The doorway page will be invisible to actual human visitors and contain information that is designed to make search engines think the website is particularly relevant for a certain search-term. Using doorway pages is the kind of practice that might temporarily increase page-ranks and drive some traffic, but will be of no use in the long-run if the website behind it doesn’t offer actual quality.
EPC / Earnings Per Click
Earnings Per Click is an analysis metric that tells you how much money you are making for each click. As a simple example, if you are promoting a product that nets you $50 per sale and it converts at 1%, this offer has an EPC of $0.50 (100 clicks result in one sale, therefore $50 profit divided by 100 clicks).
Exact Match
An exact match search will only return results that match your search term exactly, including the order you typed the words in. In this case, a page titled “little cute bunnies” would not be listed in your exact match search for “cute little bunnies”. To do an exact match search, simply type your search term inside quotes.
Exit Pop-up /Exit Page
An exit pop-up is an annoying little piece of script that makes a prompt appear in your browser when you try to leave a website (either by closing the window or navigating to a different page). The prompt usually says something like “WAIT, STOP RIGHT THERE! Before you leave, here is a one-time only, super exclusive offer just for you! (yeah right!)”. It is designed to change your mind and sign up or purchase anyway and also to annoy the hell out of you. An exit-script can also lead you to an exit-page, where you will find more offers trying to convert you.
Oh and if you are a marketer, the exit pop-up isn’t so much annoying as it is a potential cash-cow.
Front-end
The front-end is what the marketer presents to new customers. Here, you will find initial sales-pitches and often get offered a lot of bonuses and extras, meant to coax you into your first purchase. Once that is completed, you will be lead to the back-end.
Grey-hat SEO
A term sometimes used to describe methods for attracting traffic that don’t exactly violate the search engine’s terms of agreement, but use some loopholes and not-entirely-legitimate techniques.
Joint Venture / JV
When one marketer turns to another and says: “Hey, you’ve got a mailing list that’s different from mine. Why don’t you sell them my product and we’ll share the profits?” and the other marketer responds: “Sure, give me a minute to pull an airquotes-”review” of your product out of my arse so I can heartily recommend it to my list.”, that is the birth of a joint venture. Often works both ways so that the two marketers will be cross-promoting each other’s products.
Keyword
A keyword is a word or phrase that someone enters in a search-engine. Affiliate sites usually “target” a specific keyword that they try to get high rankings on the search-engines for.
Keyword Density
The keyword density is a non-concrete measure of how often you targeted keyword appears in relation to the amount of other words on a given page. You don’t want your keyword density to be too low, because this could cost you page-ranks but you also don’t want to have an overly high keyword density (this is called keyword stuffing), because search engines penalize this. And it also makes your texts a pain to read.
Latent Semantic Indexing / LSI
LSI is a method of text-analysis used by Google to determine the relevancy of a page to any given search term. LSI doesn’t just look at how often or how prominently the search term itself appears in the text but also checks for related words and phrases and how they appear on the page. One of the benefits of this is that the search engine can detect keyword-stuffed pages and ditch them in favour of pages with “real” content. LSI is very complex and very interesting. Bottom line is that it’s goal is to find more relevant, more interesting content to match your search term.
List / List-Building / List-Marketing
In online marketing a “list” refers to a mailing-list. Visitors to a website are usually given some sort of incentive (most commonly a free ebook) to submit their e-mail address. This is also known as an “opt-in”. The marketer builds a list of people who have submitted their e-mail address and markets products to them via e-mails. This is called list-marketing.
Long Tail
The long tail refers to specialized niche markets and is in no means limited to just online marketing. The long tail has become much longer and much more lucrative with the rise of the world wide web. As an example, think of “sports”. There are billions of people interested in sports in some way. And there are some companies that dominate the bulk of the market – huge sports-coverage TV-channels, sports news websites, gigantic sports supplies stores. Next to these there also exist a “long tail” of much more specialized, smaller companies offering very specific services – selling retro football jerseys, offering advice on how to improve your three-point throw and other highly focused niches.
Micro-Niche
A niche within a niche is sometimes referred to as a micro-niche. It’s not always clear where the niche stops and the micro-niche begins. As an example, outdoor climbing is a niche within sports/outdoor sports and a book about the gear you need to go outdoor climbing in cold conditions would be targeting a micro-niche within that niche.
Niche / Niche Marketing
A niche is a narrow field of interest that can be marketed to effectively. If you try to market to people who are interested in “how to make money”, you are up against a lot of competition, because it’s a broad term and broad market. Within this market are smaller niches (e.g. “how to make money by flipping websites”) that are much less competitive.
One-Time-Offer / One-Time-Only
An offer that is supposedly exclusively available only this one time. Immediate upsells are often presented as OTO. Obviously, this strategy is supposed to put the customer under pressure and make them buy on a whim. (See also: Time Constraints)
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is traffic that you get for free, via search-engines and other means. Generally, you get organic traffic to sites that offer interesting and relevant content, because the search-engines pick up on this, visitors return to your site and post links to it etc. In other words, organic traffic is traffic that you don’t pay for and that “happens by itself” to a certain extent.
Page Rank
Page Rank (or PR) is an arbitrary score, between 0 and 10, assigned to web-pages by Google. Basically, the higher the PR or a page, the more trusted and authoritative it can be assumed to be. In terms of search engine rankings, PR has only very little significance because in the search results, relevancy beats authority.
Pop-Up
A second browser-window opening up as a result of a click is called a pop-up. Pop-ups are incredibly annoying and spammy and I hope they all die a horrible death.
PPC
PPC is the abbreviation for “pay-per-click”. This is a type of advertisement where the advertiser pays a certain sum for every time someone actually clicks on his ad. The host of the advertisement gets paid a certain (smaller) sum every time someone clicks on a PPC ad on his/her website. The difference goes to the middleman (mostly Google). This is basically a risk-smallwin-bigwin situation: The advertiser pays and carries a risk, the host gets paid if his site is popular enough and people click on the ads and the middleman gets to roll in a lot of money.
Scraping / Content Scraping
Copying content from other websites and adding it to your own is referred to as scraping. There are services that propagate scraping as a brilliant way to build sites with relevant content without having to put any actual work in. Good luck with that.
SEO / Search Engine Optimization
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is what you do to make your website as “friendly” as possible to search engine bots. Since search engines read websites differently from humans, just having good, relevant content isn’t always enough. With some tweaks to your layout and the right kind of meta-information, you can make sure that your website is just as readable to bots as it is to your human visitors.
For more details on SEO, read this blog post.
SERP
Abbreviation for “Search Engine Results Page”. What you see when you type in a search term and hit enter.
Social Media Marketing
Using social media platforms like Facebook, twitter or Youtube for promoting products is described as social media marketing.
Split Test
Testing two different versions of a sales-page to see which one converts better is called split testing. This can be done via scripts that display one of your pages to 50% of your visitors and another to the other 50% of your visitors automatically. Split testing allows you to test for the best headlines, ad-placements, article-lengths and many other factors.
StumbleUpon / SU
From the perspective of the marketer: “Oh my God, so much traffic!” *tear in corner of eye* (if one of your pages catches on, that is).
From the perspective of the user or “stumbler”: “Oh my God, I have wasted my existence on the Internet!” *keeps stumbling*
Time Constraints / Fake Time Constraints
Very, very common marketing-strategy: The customers are told that right now, they can get the product at a special, reduced price and that the offer will expire very soon. These time-constraints are almost always fake. You can go back to that site six months later and it will still say “Get it now, before the price triples!!!” (in bold, red letters, no less).
Traffic
Ah, traffic. It’s all about traffic, in online marketing. Well, not really. Traffic refers to the visitors coming to your website. Obviously, the more visitors (traffic) your site gets, the more products you can potentially sell. Of course, for successful selling, it also depends where the traffic is coming from, what kind of visitors you get and whether they have any money.
Two-Tier Affiliate Marketing
If you are part of a two-tier affiliate marketing campaign, you will not only get commissions for every sale made through you but also get paid a small commission made by anyone else who signed up to the campaign through you. So, in theory, if you can convince a lot of people to sign up for the program via your affiliate-link and they make a lot of sales, you could be making a lot of cash on auto-pilot. In practice, this is the idea everyone gets so everyone will be signing up new affiliates and no-one will be making any sales (this isn’t always the case, of course, but you get the picture).
Upsell
When you decide to buy a product and clicking the “buy now!” button takes you to a page where there is a further “special bonus!/one-time-offer!/take this system to a new level!” sales pitch, that’s called an upsell. In short, you’ve been sold one product, so the marketer might as well try to sell you another one right away. Sometimes you will also see delayed upsells in follow-up e-mails.
Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is basically trying to get the general public to do the advertising for you. For example, a very controversial ad can potentially stir up a huge buzz, get coverage on blogs, in the news, get talked about during coffee-breaks etc. Lots of people talking about and paying attention to your product or brand is obviously a good thing. Marketers often try to make something “go viral”, but it’s not something that can be strictly constructed. It takes at least a little luck for any campaign to go viral.
White-hat SEO
Attracting traffic to your websites in ways that are completely legitimate (i.e. “not cheating”).
