Words, explained

A web address with your name buried in it, so the company knows a sale came from you.

It looks like an ordinary link, but somewhere in it is a code that belongs to you alone. When somebody clicks it and buys, the company reads that code and credits you. Lose the code and you get nothing, no matter who you sent. This is why swapping a plain address for your affiliate address is the single most profitable five minutes in this business.

A tool that holds your email list and sends emails to it for you, automatically.

Two jobs. First it stores the addresses people give you, legally and in one place. Second it sends out a sequence of emails you wrote once, on a timetable, to each person starting from the day they joined. Somebody who signs up today gets your day-one email today, and your day-five email on Friday, with nobody pressing anything. Without one you are copying addresses into Gmail by hand, which stops working at about forty people.

A picture that is also a link, shown on somebody else's page.

Usually a set size, because sites reserve a fixed space for them: 468x60 is the classic wide one, 300x250 the box. Most banner traffic is cheap and cold, so a banner rarely sells anything on its own. Its job is to get a click to a page that does the selling.

An email that could not be delivered and came back.

A hard bounce means the address does not exist, and should never be mailed again. A soft bounce means something temporary, like a full mailbox. Too many hard bounces and the companies that run email start treating you as somebody who buys lists, which quietly sends everything you send to spam.

The one line that tells somebody exactly what to do next.

Not "learn more" or "submit" but "Get the checklist" or "Save my seat". A page without one is a page people read and then leave, feeling vaguely interested and doing nothing. Most pages that fail do not fail because the writing was poor; they fail because nobody was ever plainly asked to do a specific thing.

Of everybody who saw it, the share who clicked it.

A hundred people see your banner, three click it, that is a 3% click-through rate. It is how you compare two things fairly: a headline that gets twice the clicks from the same number of viewers is simply better, and no amount of liking the other one changes that.

People who have never heard of you, seeing you for the first time.

Almost all safelist, exchange and banner traffic is cold. Cold traffic does not buy; it has no reason to trust you yet. What it will do is give you an email address in exchange for something useful, which turns it into warm traffic over the following week. Trying to sell to cold traffic directly is the commonest way beginners conclude that none of this works.

Your share of a sale you brought in.

Either a percentage of the price or a flat amount per sale, decided by the company, not by you. Worth knowing before you promote anything: how much, how often it is paid, how long after the sale, and whether it pays once or every month the customer stays.

Somebody did the thing you wanted them to do.

It does not always mean a sale. On an opt-in page a conversion is an email address. On a sales page it is a purchase. Always ask what somebody means by it when they quote you a number, because "20% conversion" is extraordinary for a sale and ordinary for an opt-in.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving your website or marketing so a higher percentage of visitors take the action you want, such as joining your community, entering a giveaway, or making a purchase.

A small note the website leaves in a visitor's browser, remembering you sent them.

It has a lifespan: a 30-day cookie means you still get paid if they come back and buy three weeks later, while a session cookie means you get paid only if they buy before closing the tab. Two affiliate programs paying the same commission are not equal if one remembers you for a month and the other forgets you in an hour.

The currency inside a safelist or traffic exchange: you earn them by looking at other people's pages, then spend them having yours looked at.

It keeps the whole thing turning without money changing hands. The catch nobody mentions is that everybody else is there to be seen, not to buy, so credits buy you attention from an audience of advertisers. That is still worth having, as long as what you show them is an offer that makes sense to another advertiser.

Whether your emails actually land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

It is not about your writing. It is about your sending reputation: how many people open you, how many complain, how many of your addresses bounce, and whether your domain is set up properly. Nothing else in email matters if this is broken, because nobody is reading any of it.

Somebody gives you their email, then clicks a link in a confirmation email to prove it was really them.

You lose some people at that second step, which feels like a cost. What you gain is a list of addresses that definitely exist and definitely wanted you, which protects the deliverability of everything you send afterwards. Single opt-in builds a bigger list; double opt-in builds a list that gets read.

Everybody who joined under you, and everybody who joined under them.

The people below you in a programme that pays on more than one level. The word is used loosely in affiliate marketing for anybody you personally referred. See also upline, which is the same thing looking the other way.

The path you put somebody on, from first click to buying, one small step at a time.

A typical one: an advert, then an opt-in page, then a thank-you page, then a sequence of emails, then an offer. It is called a funnel because fewer people reach each stage than the one before. That is normal and not a fault. Knowing where most people stop is what tells you which single page to fix.

One showing of your advert to one person.

Not a click and not a visit - just the fact that it was displayed. Useful mainly as the bottom half of a click-through rate. A thousand impressions means nothing on its own; a thousand impressions and forty clicks tells you something.

Whatever page somebody arrives on when they click your link.

The broadest of these words - it describes a job, not a design. An opt-in page is a landing page. A sales page is a landing page. What makes it a landing page is simply that traffic lands there, and the whole point is that it is built for those arrivals rather than being your home page with everything on it.

A person who has given you a way to contact them again.

Usually an email address. The entire reason anybody builds a list is that a visitor is worth one visit, while a lead can be spoken to every week for years. The difference between someone who makes money here and someone who does not is usually just whether they collected the address.

The useful thing you give away in exchange for an email address.

A checklist, a short guide, a template, a video. It has to solve one specific small problem quickly - "my 40-page ebook" is worse than "the one-page checklist I use before sending any email", because the second one can be finished. Nobody hands over their address for "updates".

The specific group of people you are talking to, and the specific problem you help them with.

Not "health" but "men over fifty who want to lift again without hurting their back". It feels like you are shrinking your audience, and you are. What you get in return is the ability to write something that sounds like it was written for one person, which is the only kind of writing that works.

The share of people who opened your email.

Driven almost entirely by two things: whether they recognise your name, and whether the subject line made them curious. It has become a rougher measure than it used to be, because some mail apps now open images automatically and register an open that never happened. Watch the trend rather than the exact number.

A page with one job: get an email address. Usually a headline, a promise, a box, and a button.

No menu, no links out, nothing to click except the thing you want clicked. Every extra choice on the page costs you addresses. It is the single most important page most people will ever build, because it is what turns traffic you rented into a list you own.

Visitors who found you on their own, usually through a search engine, without you paying for the click.

Slow to build and the best there is. Somebody who searched for the exact thing you wrote about arrives already interested, which is the opposite of safelist traffic. It takes months. It also keeps arriving long after you stop working on it.

Money that keeps arriving each month from a sale you made once.

It comes from promoting things people subscribe to rather than buy once. Ten customers paying monthly beats fifty one-off sales within a year, and it is what makes the difference between starting again every month and building something.

A members-only list where everybody has agreed to receive everybody else's emails.

You earn the right to mail the list by reading other members' emails, usually by clicking a link and waiting a few seconds. It is not spam, because everybody joined knowing. It is also not a warm audience: you are writing to other marketers who are mostly there to send their own email. Treat it as a way to be seen, not a way to sell.

A page whose only job is to get somebody to buy, right now.

Usually long, because it has to answer every objection a person has before they will part with money. Different from an opt-in page, which asks for something free and therefore needs almost no persuading. Sending cold traffic straight to a sales page is the most expensive mistake in this business.

You pay somebody to email their list about your offer, and nobody else's.

Priced per click, not per sale, so you are buying visits and carrying all the risk. The quality depends entirely on whose list it is, which is why people ask for proof and start with a small order. Send them to an opt-in page, never to a sales page, so you keep the addresses whether or not anybody buys.

A very short page built to be seen in a few seconds, in a traffic exchange.

Big headline, one image, one button, almost no words - because the person looking at it is waiting out a timer and will click away the moment they are allowed to. A splash page cannot explain anything. Its only job is to earn one click to a page that can.

Another name for an opt-in page: one headline, one box, one button, and no way out.

The name comes from squeezing out every other choice until the only thing left to do is leave or type your address. See opt-in page, which is the same thing said more plainly.

The line of text that decides whether your email gets opened at all.

The rest of the email does not exist until this one line has done its job. Short beats long, curiosity beats cleverness, and a promise you then keep beats a trick. Open an email that tricked you once and you learn not to open the next one.

The page somebody lands on straight after giving you their address.

The most wasted page on the internet. The person has just said yes to you - that is the warmest they will ever be. Use it to tell them to go and check their email, and then to make your first offer. Most people put the word "Thanks" on it and nothing else.

A link that counts its own clicks, so you know which advert actually worked.

Run a different tracking link in each place you advertise and the numbers tell you where to spend your time. Without them you are guessing, and guessing usually means carrying on with the thing that feels like it is working.

A site where you view other members' pages to earn views of your own.

Surf ten pages, earn ten views. The audience is other surfers, usually waiting out a timer, so you have two or three seconds of half-attention. That is exactly what a splash page is built for, and exactly what a long sales page is not.

One person, counted once, no matter how many times they come back today.

Worth checking which number somebody is quoting you. A page with 1,000 views and 200 unique visitors is a page 200 people looked at five times, which is a different story from 1,000 people glancing once.

The person who referred you, and whoever referred them.

The people above you in a programme that pays on more than one level. A good upline is worth more than a good compensation plan, because they answer the question you are too embarrassed to ask in a group.

The offer that appears straight after somebody has bought something.

It works because the hard part - deciding to trust you with their card - already happened. This is where most of the profit in a funnel lives, which is why a product paying modest commission can still be worth promoting if what follows it is good.

People who already know who you are.

Your email list, your repeat readers, anybody who has heard from you before. It converts many times better than cold traffic for the obvious reason. The whole of this business is really just the business of turning cold traffic into warm traffic and then looking after it.