TERMS IN AFFILIATE MARKETING
Affiliate Marketing is developing and getting more and more popular. People are doing it and the results are somehow amazing. Making money through affiliate marketing is on the way to becoming the main income and improving everyone’s living standards lately.
In order to help newbies understand Affiliate Marketing, in this article, I will recapitulate the terms that are usually used in Affiliate Marketing.
However, my guides are only for those making money online so the definitions and explanations might be for affiliate purposes.
That means it is for people promoting products, not the general terms of affiliate marketing.
PUBLISHER
The publisher is abbreviated to “Pub”.
It is you and me, us. We create the content, publish it through content, and social media, and attract people to that content.
The more trustworthy the content is, the more customers will buy it through our links and we get a commission.
ADVERTISER
Abbreviated to Ad, and also known as vendor or merchant.
They have the products, they create them, and want to promote them by affiliate marketing, they will need publishers to bring them, customers.
Usually, they would do it through networking to simplify the process. However, some advertisers have their own affiliate system and management team.
AFFILIATE NETWORK
Aka Affiliate Marketplace. It plays an intermediary role in the affiliate marketing field.
They provide a link between publishers and advertisers. They put advertisers’ products on their system, and publishers will find the information much more easily.
Regarding payment, the network will charge the advertisers and then pay the publishers. All the affiliate network has professional software that supports to survey data cross-checking, traffic statistics, explicit payment and dealing with fraud, etc.
E.g.: Commission Junction (CJ.COM) is a top-notch affiliate network.
PRIVATE AFFILIATE PROGRAM
Some companies have adequate conditions to develop the software supporting affiliate marketing and HR departments so they will open their own affiliate program, which is called a Private Affiliate Program.
They sometimes work through networks, you can work directly through their own system.
Private Affiliate Program earns higher commissions because they do not have to pay commissions to a third party, and you will get better service and support from their affiliate manager.
AFFILIATE LINK
When you sign up to be a direct affiliate or through the network and promote any product, you will be provided with your own one-and-only link.
It is called an affiliate link, it helps collect the data to see “who helps the promotion?”.
When a user clicks on your affiliate link and does things like shopping, filling in the form, signing up, filling in the survey forms, etc. You will get commissions.
AFFILIATE ID
Some affiliate program has “creating affiliate ID” features, when you sign up for an affiliate account, then your account has a corresponding ID.
From your affiliate ID, you can create an affiliate link for any product by attaching the ID along with the link based on the affiliate link’s guides.
This means you can attract any users to any product just by adding an affiliate ID to the end of that page’s link and going promoting.
AFFILIATE MANAGER
Many networks or advertisers have supporting experts for their affiliate programs, these are called Affiliate Managers.
You can call them AM for short. You might find them after logging in to the system.
An affiliate manager’s responsibility is to help publishers in every issue relating to making affiliates for that advertiser’s products.
Such as supporting publishers with promoting methods, product info, payment, maintenance, which product is on-trend, etc.
For example, an affiliate manager will give the lists from the potential that the company staff finds out, hinting to you all the marketing forms that can bring high profits based on data statistics, recommending some efficient marketing tools, etc.
COMMISSION
If you do a good job, you will earn much, and that is called commission.
It is the money you will receive when a customer uses your link to buy things, fill in the survey forms, etc.
The commissions are different in different affiliate programs, sometimes it is the percentage or specific numbers.
Digital products’ commissions are higher than physical products’ ones. Because it doesn’t cost much to create the products, mostly based on intelligence while making physical products requires time and sales.
Commissions can fluctuate for each customer.
When you choose a product to promote, you will see the commissions they suggest.
PHYSICAL PRODUCT
They are tangible products, such as fridges, clothes, TV, wardrobes, cutleries, etc.
As I mentioned before, commissions for physical products are not really high and fluctuate from 3% to 10% of that product’s price. If you do this in the CPO model, the commissions will be pretty high.
Physical products’ buying powers are enormous and yearly, therefore, low as the commissions are, the quantity can make up, and you can make a yearly and inactive earning.
DIGITAL PRODUCTS
They can be used on computers in order to serve many purposes, mostly education, enterprises, computing, etc.
E.g. Online courses, software, and online-selling tools are digital products.
These products are made once but can be sold to multi customers. Therefore, the commissions are super high, from 30% to more than 50%.
Some products even have 100% commissions.
There are 2 popular affiliate networking for digital affiliates: Product Launch and Clickbank.
PROMOTE METHOD
It is the promoting form.
Even if you are promoting others’ products to gain commissions, you must pour your heart and soul in them as if they were yours. Because it has a high potential in gaining profits.
There are many ways to promote, based on their own nature.
You also have to follow the rules about promoting that the advertisers and network gave out.
Physical products have low commissions so you have to choose the form that requires less fee ( like SEO), and as for the high commission products, you can promote in various forms, even pay for ads, as long as you gain profits.
PAYMENT METHOD
It is the method that the advertisers or network will pay you.
If you work domestically, you only need a bank account. And if it is international, then Payoneer or Paypal is the best choice. They are the two most popular accounts that everyone in MMO should have.
The payment process takes 1-3 months from the day the customer brings you commissions. However, some networks still pay weekly like KTcity or Adflex.
LANDING PAGE
This is for selling and the advertiser creates it. When a customer clicks on the affiliate link, they will access the page to order or fill in the information.
Some companies use A/B testing on their sale page, therefore it is flexible.
PRELANDING PAGE
Or aka Prelinger
This is also a type of landing page, but it will help optimize your earnings and increase the change rate before you let users on the official landing page.
The pre-landing page is like a stepping stone to building a bridge between goal customers and sellers.
Instead of pouring traffic directly from the advertising channel into the landing page, potential buyers find it not persuasive enough, pretender is the best tool to boost the buying process.
Popular pre-lander:
- Success stories
- Common sense science shares product information
- Review, In-real-life experiences
COUPON AND CUSTOM COUPON
It is the discount code that advertisers provide to affiliates so they can boost sales.
Depending on the affiliate program, coupons can be attached to your affiliate link, which means you can create a distinct link for this coupon when a customer clicks on the affiliate link, the price will automatically decrease.
Or maybe the coupons will be separate when promoting. tell you, customers, to enter a coupon when paying, the price will be reduced by xx% or reduced by a specific amount.
Many top affiliates will be offered special discount codes that are only for that affiliate, it is called a custom coupon or exclusive coupon.
This coupon can give customers a better discount than a common coupon, or it can always carry the brand name of an affiliate.
CLOAKING LINK
Affiliate links often look very clumsy and unprofessional, because it is a separate link performing the role of control and measurement.
So if you want the affiliate link to be more concise and professional, you should use the link shortening method according to your domain name, this method is called Cloaker link.
However, whichever affiliate program you work with, read carefully the terms for affiliate there, because there are some large affiliate programs (e.g. Amazon), that will not let you shorten the link, because they need to check, a measure of which pages your customers are coming from.
Cloaking link technology is also used for more advanced purposes such as tracking clicks with its own system, performing A/B testing, or changing affiliate links at any time without creating ads.
COOKIE
As in food? No, just kidding.
In affiliate marketing, cookies are files of affiliate programs, created to store customer browsing information.
For example, if a customer clicks on your affiliate link, the browser will save the cookie, and the time the cookie is saved depends on that affiliate program.
For example, if a cookie is stored for 60 days, then the customer doesn’t buy immediately, but within 60 days they go to the right computer, the same browser buys, and the commission is still charged to you (but make sure they has not clicked on the affiliate link of another affiliate).
Depending on the affiliate program and the specific product there will be different cookies.
Cookie stuffing is a cookie trick. The mechanism is that when customers visit your website, the affiliate link will run to store cookies in the client’s computer without having to click on your affiliate link. The affiliate link will run in a small pop-up or automatically load itself in a very short time.
Most networks and affiliate programs today have algorithms that detect cookie stuffing and if you do this, your account will be quickly locked and no payment will be made.
LAST CLICK AND FIRST CLICK
Here are the commission calculation mechanisms decided by the advertiser.
When a customer clicks on the affiliate link of publisher A first but does not buy, after a few days they click on the affiliate link of publisher B. If the commission is calculated for:
+ Publisher A: First Click
+ Publisher B: Last Click
For fairness in competition among publishers, affiliate programs nowadays are almost done under the mechanism of the last click.
CPA (COST PER ACTION)
This is an affiliate marketing method which advertisers or networks will pay you a commission when customers take an action through your affiliate link, this action can be buying, filling out a form, registering, completing surveys, closing, etc.
Depending on the level of action, the commission can be high or low, for example, Cos Per Lead (CPL) is very simple, and the conversion can happen easily, the commission will be below, and the purchase (PPS) is a more unlikely event so the commission will be high.
CPS, CPL, CPO, CPI
These are the types of affiliate marketing that tell you how much commission you will receive when a customer completes an action.
- CPS (Cost Per Sale) is an affiliate marketing program where advertisers or networks will pay you a commission when customers buy from your affiliate, customers have to make a successful payment and if the payment is verified then the commission will be yours.
- CPL (Cost Per Lead) is an affiliate marketing program where advertisers or networks will pay you a commission when there are customers fill in their personal information through your affiliate marketing.
- The information that customers fill out is usually email, name, address, phone number, etc. companies providing products and services often need this information to market to customers. The information will be validated, the commission will be calculated for you.
- CPO (Cost Per Order) is an affiliate program where advertisers or networks will pay you a commission when the customer completes the order & the call center confirms successfully. You will not need to wait when customers receive goods & pay.
- CPI (Cost Per Install) is an affiliate program that advertisers or networks will pay you when customers install the app successfully.
EARN PER CLICK (EPC)
It is an indicator that most affiliate programs have statistics and show you, it will calculate the average of each click of customers, how much money you can make (can be seen for each product, or the whole process of making affiliate marketing)
CONVERSION RATE (CR)
It is the conversion rate per 100 customers, calculated in of%.
For example, if there are 100 people who click on your affiliate link, but only 7 people complete the action and bring you a commission, the conversion rate is 7%.
COST PER 1000 IMPRESSIONS (CPM)
CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is the cost of advertising for 1000 impressions.
Some platforms allow you to place ads based on CPM, you just need to show ads to users and it will start paying you.
ADVERTISING NETWORK (ADS NETWORK)
It is the company that provides the ads network. This means you will buy ads on these networks.
When you do affiliate marketing, you also need to promote your products in many ways. For some products with high commissions, besides finding free customers, you need to find the right networks to run ads that bring higher revenue.
SEARCH NETWORK
It is a form of advertising of the Advertising Network, which means when customers do a search for something, your ads will be displayed along with the search results that customers see.
Ads networks often make ads stand out more than regular search results so that customers have more click-through rates on ads.
DISPLAY NETWORK
It is a form of advertising of the Advertising Network, which means that your ads will be displayed to users on the websites, and applications, … that users are using under the permission of the service provider and according to your own set-up.
Popular display ads are Facebook Ads and Google Display Network (GDN).
BANNER AD
A banner Ad, also known as a web banner, is an advertisement that places an image (.jpg, .png, .gif) on the website. This type of advertisement will usually embed a code into the website to display.
Also, it can be displayed according to the image file placement and insert links.
The purpose of banner ads is to promote the brand or to leverage traffic from the website to send users to the landing page of purchase.
PAID TRAFFIC
Paid traffic is a form of paid advertising that is used to drive traffic to your specific website, sales page, or landing page.
There are many forms of advertising based on CPA (cost per action), CPM (cost per 1000 impressions), and banner ads.
The most popular and effective paid traffic channels are:
- Sales on a personal profile
- Sales on Fanpage
- Build website & SEO top Google
- Building channels, videos & SEO top Youtube, etc.
BIDDING
Bidding is a term that means bidding only in advertising, bidding price is the maximum amount you accept to spend for 1 click or 1000 ad impressions.
2 common bid types are CPC and CPM:
- Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount you pay for a click from customers when running ads.
- Cost Per Impression (CPM): Also known as cost per thousand impressions, this is the amount you have to pay for 1000 ad impressions.
SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)
It is optimizing your website to be suitable for both users and search engines, this job is very important, it helps your website to rank well when users search for relevant keywords.
SEO is a long process that you must learn and practice daily if you want to make money with affiliate marketing.
Whether you have a big or small budget, you should still use SEO because affiliate marketing revenue from free visits from Google is huge.
SEO knowledge is very wide, with a lot of different factors, but the factor that is most appreciated by Google is the quality of your website content, so the first job you need to learn in SEO is to create and produce high-value content for users.
CONTENT MARKETING
It is a form of marketing using good content. You use reasonable content tactics to reach customers, thereby gaining trust and persuading them to buy.
Nowadays, online marketers understand the importance of content marketing and a lot of creative and interesting content marketing strategies.
Content marketing is not just about text content, and articles, but also content for viral videos, and story videos … content will help products & brands convey messages to customers.
HOSTING
To build a website, you need a place to store data. Hosting is a data storage space, it stores your content, images, and databases while making a website.
There are many different hosting providers, free of charge, also available.
DOMAIN
It can be seen as an address to your website. It will be connected to hosting so that when a user types your domain name into the browser, it will automatically display the content you have configured on hosting.
The domain that is used widely and contains the highest trust and confidence is the dot COM domain, followed by the dot NET domain and the dot ORG domain, but I still recommend that you choose the dot COM domain.
