Sunday, May 27, 2012

Online Terms and Definitions

Below are some online terms and definitions to help you better understand working online.

Ad and Link Tracker—This is an online tool that you use to track links when you do advertising so you know where your hits are coming from. For example, let’s say you owned the entire system and wanted to promote it. You could put the link out on the Internet and when someone clicked on the link, they would go to your site. The problem is you could have that link in hundreds or thousands of different places so you would never know which of those places is giving you the most hits.

With an ad tracker, you would use the tracking link generated by the tracker and place it in different places on the Internet. Then each time someone clicked that link, the tracker takes note of it and you can review your hits right in your back office. This saves you money and will make you money because even if you only use free advertising places, it still takes time to setup those ads and time is money.

And paid advertising is even more important to track. Assume you are paying $10 for an ad on site A and $10 for an ad on site B. You could put tracker link 1 on site A and tracker link 2 on site B and as people click the links, you will know which site A or B is the better value. If you get 20 hits from link 1 and 0 from link 2, then you would not advertise on site B again, but increase your advertising on site A.

You should use an ad tracker link in place of every link you have on the Internet.

Advertising—In essence, advertising is the promotion of your business, product and or service by using a variety of resources to accomplish the end result which is sales. Advertising can be paid or free and as simple as placing your URL in your signature line of your email or as complicated as pay per click advertising on any of the major search engines.

Attachment—This term refers to an image or file of some kind being attached to an email similar to a trailer being attached to a car. The image or file goes to the same person as the email and they can open the attachment on their end. This is also how most viruses are moved around the net as someone will send you a file—usually someone you don’t know and tell you to open the attached file to win money or some other bogus line and as soon as you open the file, your computer becomes infected with whatever virus they sent.

Autoresponder—This is a tool used to automatically stay in touch with prospects. Generally it works in conjunction with a capture page and form where people subscribe to get more information about a product or service. Once they subscribe, their email address is placed in the AR and the AR will send pre-written messages to the persons email address.

A good Autoresponder is essential if you are going to succeed online.

Banners—A method of advertising on the Internet. You see banners at most sites and all banners are clickable which means you are directed to the seller’s site when you click on the banner.

Branding—This is also a method of advertising and is essentially getting a name or product known by a set audience. McDonald’s is known to kids as a place they will get a toy with their meal. Dominos pizza was once known for the company that delivered your pizza in 30 minutes or you got it free. Budweiser has branded itself as the King of beers.

Branding on the Internet for most people is getting their name known by the search engines or specific sites. Branding is important especially if you are involved in affiliate or Network marketing because you need to set yourself apart from everyone else in the company who is selling the same product and or service as you.

Broadcast—Generally used to describe an email blast to your own list of prospects and is done through an Autoresponder. A broadcast to your list is a message that goes to everyone on your list about a special offer, opportunity or product.

Browser—This is the tool used to surf the Internet. The 2 largest are Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox. Some people swear by one or the other of these and some people swear at one or the other of these. IE is the most common browser on the Internet and many programs will only work with IE. The bottom line is if someone asks you what kind of browser you have, you just need to tell them what it is based on how you get to the Internet to surf.

Capture Page—This is also called a squeeze page and is used in conjunction with an Autoresponder to acquire email addresses of prospects that you can sell a product or service to. Capture pages should not contain links or banners or anything that will distract the reader from taking the desired course of action which is to subscribe to get more information.

Classified Ad—These ads are short 3 – 5 sentence ads that most ezines (Online Magazine) run for free. They are similar to classified ads in newspapers and don’t give lots of information about a product, but almost always contain a URL where the reader can get more information.

Contact Manager—This is used to manage your prospects and your time. A good contact manager is a necessity if you are making calls to prospects as it will give you the ability to take notes on phone calls and on your prospects, give you reminders on when you need to take a desired action such as a return phone call or send an email, mail a card etc.

CPA—Stands for Cost per Acquisition which is the cost to acquire a sale or prospect depending on your desired goal of a set campaign.

CPC—Stands for Cost per Click which is how much you pay for one click on your URL or to your website depending on the method of advertising. This is used quite extensively in search based advertising as the search engines will charge you based on how many clicks you receive from a sponsored ad or ad campaign.

Domain—The name of your website address such as,,,, etc. Domains are necessary if you are going to have your own website and are used in conjunction with a hosting account (See hosting) so you can get online and work or play.

Double opt-in—Refers to the way a person signs up to a mailing list. Double opt-in is the safest method of lead generation because it guarantees that only the owner of the email address could have subscribed to get details.

Double opt-in means the person supplied his/her email and other required information and then had to click on a link in an email sent by the Autoresponder in order to be added to a list.

Email Blast—This can be similar to a broadcast, but is usually not done with your list, but done through someone who has a list of email addresses and they charge you a fee to send an email blast to their list with your offer. Can be a good form of advertising if the list is not over used and the seller has a good rapport with his/her clients.

Many times email blasts are not worth the cost because you get a very low return of clicks and that means very low return of buyers.

Ezine—This is an online magazine of some kind and they are usually similar to offline magazines in that they focus on a specific topic such as animals, business, airplanes, etc. These can be good places to advertise your business if you can find one that has been grown by truly opt-in and not purchased leads. This means the owner advertised his/her ezine and people signed up to get information based on the subject matter of the ezine.

FFA—Stands for Free for All and when they started it was a good advertising vehicle, but that was in the very early 1990’s. The intent was you placed a link on a page for free and others would place their link on the page for free and the links would continue rotating so as new people came to the FFA page, your link would be seen and could be found by others searching for different things online. The problem is there are too many links and any new link will quickly get buried by all the new links.

Hits—Refers to a person going to your webpage or clicking on your link to your webpage. Hits are important as they are one of the criteria used by search engines to rank websites.

(See raw and unique hit definitions below)

Home Page—This is generally the first page of any website. There are thousands of pages in but there is only one home page and that is what you see when you first get to the site. This is the same for any domain you go to.

Hosting—This is the vehicle by which a website is given access to the Internet. In order to host a website, you need a domain which would be or .net, .org or a variety of other dot somethings. Hosting is a service that can cost from nothing to thousands of dollars per month depending on the size of your sites and your needs.

HTML—This stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the code used to create websites. Sometimes you will see it used for emails where someone might ask if you want text based or HTML emails. In this instance, HTML simply means your email could have colors, images different fonts, etc.

Most people will never need to learn HTML as there are editors that you can use to create WebPages, documents, pictures, emails and everything else you need to do.

Leads—On the internet a lead is generally an email address and usually one that you buy from a list broker. Leads can be good if you find a good broker but the problem is they are sold so many times to so many people that they become useless by the time the 3rd or 4th person gets the lead.

The bottom line on buying leads is you need to do your homework and find a good lead source that does not sell the leads multiple times and preferably one who telemarkets or advertises to get the leads they sell.

The term leads can also be used to describe someone who subscribed at your capture page as they are a lead that you can call or email to get them to buy.

There are many places that sell leads, but very few who sell good leads. There are also many classification of leads such as surveyed leads, day old leads, email leads etc.

Masking—This is a process by which you essentially hide your affiliate URL by using an ad tracker or rotator or some other form of URL redirect (See redirect) so people cannot remove part of your URL and go directly to the corporate site thereby bypassing your commissions.

Unfortunately this is necessary as there are people out there who will cheat affiliates even though they gain nothing by doing this. By masking your affiliate URL’s you can combat this and if you use an ad tracker or URL rotator you keep extra benefits because you will be able to track your links. Just advertising a regular affiliate link will not allow you to know which advertising service is bringing in the best response.

Opt-in—This refers to someone subscribing to get more details on a product, service or program. There are single opt-ins and double opt-ins. Single opt-ins means the person placed his/her email address and maybe other details in a form and hit submit and they are automatically added to the list of prospects.

(See Double opt-in above)

PPC—Stands for Pay per Click and this is also used in conjunction with search engines as this is a measure of how much you are willing to pay for a click. The price of a click will vary depending on its popularity. Popular words such as money, income, airfare, etc. will cost a lot vs. words that few people ever search on such as zebras or umbrellas.

Raw Hit—This means one hit to your website. If the same person clicks on your site 3 times, you would have 3 raw hits and one unique hit. See Unique hits below.

Redirect—This is a process that allows you to automatically move people from one site to another without them having to take any action. This is how a rotator or ad tracker works because people will click on a link that is being tracked and be redirected to another site other than what is in the domain name. For example, could be used to redirect people to an affiliate sales page or any site of your choosing, so is simply redirecting people from one URL to another.

Safelist—This is another form of usually free advertising where you signup to receive emails from people who have signed up to receive emails from you. In theory this is a good idea, but the problem is you get so many emails and the other people do as well that everyone uses a junk email address so very few people actually ever read your ad copy.

Safelists generally brag about having tens of thousands of subscribers but the number of subscribers is useless if nobody ever reads the emails.

Search Engine—This term is used to describe a vehicle used to find information on the Internet. Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the largest in the US and many countries have their own versions of these as well as their own search engine.

SEO—Search Engine Optimization and can get really expensive really fast if you hire someone to do this for you. There are many things that go into SEO, but the bottom line comes down to having your site made to be search engine friendly and getting lots of traffic to your site.

(See the SEO help in the Newbie Training Center)

Solo Ad—These are generally run in ezines as noted above and if done correctly and through a reputable ezine can generate very good results for you. They cost more than Safelist advertising but the return is generally much better.

Traffic Exchange—Another form of usually free advertising where you sign up and agree to click on other peoples sites and they in turn will click on yours. You generally receive credits for viewing these other sites that you can use to get other people to see your site.

Some Traffic Exchanges will pay you to click, but the amount of time you spend clicking is never worth what you are paid as it works out to pennies per hour.

Traffic—This can be used to describe how many hits you are getting to your site. Traffic can also be purchased whereby people are sent directly to your site by use of a pop-under or redirect of some kind.

Traffic is not designed for direct sales or signups, but is used to help with your SEO, branding and popularity. You can accomplish the same thing using traffic exchanges but you would spend hours searching exchanges to get the same amount of traffic you can buy for a few dollars and you need to spend your time online wisely as opposed to clicking for traffic.

Unique Hit—This is a way to know how many individual people come to your site. If you got 10 hits to your site but only 3 unique, then you had a total of 3 people come to your site and some of them clicked more than one link at your site or came back multiple times.

URL Rotator—This tool is used to promote multiple URL’s or websites with one URL. For example if you wanted to advertise site 1, site 2 and site 3, you could go to an advertising service and run 3 individual ads or you can create a rotator that would combine the 3 URL’s under what is called a master URL rotator. You would take that master rotator URL and advertise it so each time the master URL was clicked it would direct people to each of the sites in the rotator.

URL—This stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but in simple terms it is the website address of any website such as You can always see the URL or the page you’re viewing by looking in the address bar of your browser. The address bar will be found at the top of the page.

Webpage—Any page of a website. Generally when you talk about a webpage, you are referring to one page of a site. Some sites contain thousands or tens of thousands of WebPages. Look at a webpage the same as you would a page in a magazine. The magazine itself would be the site and the pages of the magazine would be the same as WebPages.

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