Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terminologies

Every business has a peculiar vocabulary and terminology, so is affiliate marketing.  For a newbie, some of this lingo may be confusing at first. Not to worry! As you get along in the business, you no doubt become familiar with these terms, clichés, and concepts.

Here are some of such terms you just have to know:

Customer: The name for the end user or purchaser of the merchant’s product or service.

Merchant: The owner or creator of a product or service.

Affiliate: The partner who promotes the merchant’s products for a commission.

Publisher: The name an affiliate is also called if he runs his business from a website or blog.

Affiliate program: A program set up by merchants to pay commissions when affiliates refer people to their products.

Commission: An agreed percentage of the total sale that is paid to the affiliate for referring the sale.

Cookie: A smart web instrument used to assign a unique ID to the buyer in order to tag the purchase as being referred by an affiliate. Cookies usually have a predetermined lifespan. So, even if the buyer doesn’t purchase right away, the affiliate will still get credit for the sale if it occurs within the set time frame, say 24 hours, 7 days or even 60 days or more.

Referral: Credit for a click or a sale that occurs when the affiliate sends traffic to the merchant’s site.

Affiliate agreement: A contract that merchants and affiliates agree on specifying the rules, responsibilities, rates to be paid and other legalities.

Affiliate link: A trackable URL that identifies the affiliate as the source of targeted traffic to a merchant’s site.

Referral: A click on an affiliate link counts as a referral.

Affiliate network: An online marketplace where merchants list their products and where affiliates can find products to sell.

How Smart Bloggers Make Dumb Choices

 Do you know the pluses and minuses of affiliate marketing? Great if you do. Even if you don’t, it just takes a bit of digging behind-the-scenes to look. You’ll discover many dumb things even expert bloggers do. Here’s a sampler.

Some merchants may be above-board, but may not be a good fit for your own type of audience. Sticking with such merchants is a dumb thing to do. 


 
Regularly, some bloggers get fooled by unscrupulous merchants all in the name of business. For all you care, all the noise about a particular product may just be mere hyping and some bloggers easily get carried away by that. More often than not, these bloggers forget the cliché, “If an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Not heeding that is exactly why many bloggers sometimes get seduced by the tactics of less ethical and unscrupulous merchants.

It is easy to find numerous tips and tricks in affiliate marketing forums that might help you make a quick buck.  Such tricks could quickly lead to a break in trust with your audience. That is not the best way to go. In any business, trust counts for much and once it is lost, a lot is lost.

Anyone, no matter how experienced and expert they are can get fooled once in a while. Here are some quick tips to help you stay safe:

Don’t promote any product until you have all the vital information you need to promote it. To get this information, be sure you’ve subscribed to your affiliate partners’ email list and know exactly what your readers can expect in terms of follow-up marketing. That leaves you on very sure and safe grounds to promote the product as expected.

Do not pay a fee to become an affiliate. That is inclusive of membership or setup fees. Most credible affiliate program are FREE to join and many even entice people with sign-up bonuses. When you see product merchants asking for fees, it is likely they are running scams. Beware!

Don’t get involved in using tricks and unethical methods to promote any product.  Some marketers habitually use aggressive SEO tactics that focus exclusively on tricking search engines to market their products. That is a very dumb thing to do even if you may record a few successes here and there. If humans don’t wise up to your tricks soon enough, search engines will and they could have you banned from search engine listings. A real disaster if that happens.