My friend and coach Marlon Sanders created this cool internet marketing glossary of terms for his “newbie” members, and so I thought I’d share it with you…
Continuity: The means something that people are charged
for regularly, typically monthly or quarterly. In the biz,
we call this “continuity income” or recurring billing.
Newsletters are usually paid for monthly as are membership
sites. The reason you see a lot of emphasis on continuity
offers is it provides steady income and gives you a way to
pay your bills. The classic example is the book club of
the month programs.
Forced Continuity: Forced means you don’t have a choice.
The way this works is when you buy one product, you’re
given a free trial of a newsletter, membership site or CD
of the month club. The trial is usually 14 to 30 days.
Sometimes as long as two months. At the end of that time
period, if you don’t cancel, you’re charged monthly for
whatever it is.
Some marketers get people in continuity billing then NEVER
send emails or communications hoping people will FORGET
about the purchase and let the billing continue forever. I
find this to be legally risky. If you do forced
continuity, make sure people know they’re being charged
and can cancel without jumping through hoops.
Back End: The back end of the business is everything AFTER
the initial sale. In other words, it’s the follow up
business. In the ideal world, you break even or make a
small profit on the initial sale (or what we call the
“front end.” And you make your profits on the upsells,
downsells and subsequent sales.
Upsells: Additional products or services offered at the
point of the sale. As crazy as it sounds, the EASIEST time
to make another sale to the customer is when they already
have their credit card out! Any additional product offered
is an upsell.
Downsell: If the upsell is declined, another offer for a
lower price than the upsell is made. This is called a
downsell.
Target market: A market is a group of people who are in
the MARKET for a product or service. A target market is
the market you’re targeting. For example, males online
between the ages of 35 and 65 who want to start a
home-based business would be a target market. Stated
differently, it’s the people who are the potential buyers
of what you sell.
Sales letters: In this business, we often use very long
sales letters similar to the direct mail letters you
receive in the mail. We call these sales letters because
they’re me-to-you letters that SELL something. These are
different from a brochure, which is an impersonal
communication. Sales letters are written as though you’re
talking to the person directly. They’re more personal and
persuasive.
Membership site: These are password protected sites that
have content delivered regularly and often have a forum or
other way to interact with members.
Forum: These are places you go to talk to others who share
a common interest.
Opt ins: When someone joins your email list, they “opt in”
to receive emails from you.
Double opt in: When someone joins your email list, they
receive an email asking them to click a confirmation link
to PROVE they subscribed to the email list. This is an
anti-spam feature and is now standard practice.
Autoresponder: This is a software program that lets you
send email broadcasts to everyone on your list. It will
also send a sequence of emails any number of days apart
that you specify.m
Shopping cart: The ordering mechanism you use to get
people’s name, address and credit card or check info and
process their order.
Affiliate program: A program where you promote a vendor’s
product or service and receive a commission when there’s a
sale. The classic example is Amazon.com. You can link to
books on Amazon. And if a visitor to your web site buys
one of them, you get a small commission.
Associate program: Same as affiliate program
Banner ads: Those square or horizontal ads on web sites.
Ebook: Basically the same as a printed book but delivered
online, quite often as a PDF.
PDF: Portable Delivery Format. This is a uniform format
for delivering digital information. A standard of method
of delivering documents on the web.
White paper: A research paper or report delivered as a
PDF.
Name Squeeze: A term trademarked by Jonathan Mizel. See
Squeeze page.
Squeeze page: A page with only one purpose to obtain or
“squeeze” a name and email address, or email address
alone, from the web visitor.
Lead capture page: Same as a squeeze page.
Power Squeeze page: See squeeze page
Hits: Some stats programs measure web site traffic by
hits. This is not a particularly accurate way to measure
visitors.
Unique visitors: Stat programs attempt to identify actual
visitors and eliminate duplicate visitors in a 24-hour
period.
Cookies: The way things get tracked on the Internet. These
are little text files put on your computer. They contain
tidbits of information that allow stuff to be tracked. In
the case of affiliate programs, the way we track sales and
credit the correct reseller with the commissions is
through the use of cookies. The cookie simply contains
that affiliate’s ID number.
PPC: Pay-per-click advertising. Google made PPC a dominant
advertising method. As a ppc advertiser, you run ads on
Google and ONLY pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Monetize: When you find a way to make money with
something, you monetize it. So you’ll hear people talk
about monetizing their traffic. All their talking about is
finding a way to make money off of their web site
visitors.
Traffic: Visitors to your web site or web page are
traffic.
Product launch: When a number of affiliates promote one
product o one day or one week. Typically last for one or
two weeks and often involve heavy promotions by affiliates
who are trying to win cash and prizes.
Aweber: One of the main autoresponder services.
One Shopping Cart: Another autoresponder service that also
contains a shopping cart, ad tracker, affiliate software
and other bells and whistles.
Ad tracker: A program that lets you create links that
track when people click on them and then also count
actions or sales that follow the click.
Affiliate software: Software that allows you to run your
own affiliate program and pay affiliates commissions when
they sell your product or service.
Clickbank: A marketplace for ebooks sold by affiliates.
This list was by Marlon Sanders. Visit Marlon’s blog at: http://www.marlonsnews.com
