Words, explained

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.