This is the second installment of affiliate and internet marketing related articles intended for those expanding past the Hubpages format or simply interested in maximizing their hub potential.

It is suggested that one read the original article on affiliate marketing and the article on formatting your Firefox browser to maximize your marketing efforts.

As one begins the journey of generating profit from the internet they will be exposed to a whole new language, your trip will be much easier if you understand the basic acronyms and abbreviations that make up the Internet Marketing lexicon.

Dont worry if it doesnt yet, a key exists at the bottom of this hub

As a content producer and/or web page developer you will be profiting by generating traffic. You will maximize your traffic by proper SEO optimization that will include using correct meta tags, relavant keywords; both simple and long tail, and building up backlinks and inbound links hopefully of a do-follow nature. You will then monetize this traffic by using publisher networks to supply you with advertisers who are willing to pay you for the actions of your traffic. You can be paid for a variety of actions,but usually by either generating a lead or a sale.

One tracks their traffic and sales via statistics programs, most publisher networks will have a console built into their site, analyzing impressions, sales, leads, clicks and CTR.

One will generally pick out an advertiser as being a viable resource based on network performance using variables such as EPC, EPM or in some networks $/sale, Total $/sale, %/sale, %refd or grav.

When selecting programs in CPA networks one will be concerned with email submits, zip submits, phone submits, one page registration and confirmation emails.

With email marketing and and newsletter creation, one may be concerned with opt ins, double opt ins and CAN-SPAM regulations.

When one is checking and following their earnings they will be faced with terms such as: earned commissions, pending, locked and bonuses.

In order to track campaigns properly one will want to add a SID to their affiliate links. In order to protect ones links they may want to use encryption or URL shortening services. A link is tracked by either a tracking pixel that fires at some point in a registration process and/or a tracking id that is attached to the link.

This pixel is contained in the second part of an html link and is usally a 1px by 1 px image, in the case of a banner it is is part of the image file.

Sometimes an advertiser may offer a flash based banner.

Most networks have a minimum payout level and may require a W9 form to be submitted.

In most cases you will be registering a domain with a domain registrar and purchasing hosting from a hosting provider, within your a hosting provider you will have a hosting connection which is usally cPanel based and many times may have a fantastico installer. You may want to mask or forward your domain or create sub domains. Many time your hosting applications will require mSQL databases. Your hosting options usually are Linux or Windows based and you may want to access your account via ftp services.

In order to design your page you may require a web design application or image editing application. You will have to become familiar with HTML or CSS or use pre-made templates that have these options built in for you. Images will have to be saved in formats such as .gif, .jpeg, .jpg or .png. You will have to pay attention to load time and image sizes. Many of your pages may use javascript plug ins or appets. Even when using a service such as wordpress or blogger one will have to pay attention to the frequency and interaction of javascript.

You may choose to organize a website as a blog, an eCommerce store, use a content management portal, a content provider such as a RSS feed, add on scripts or create a forum.

Cross-browser compatabilty will be a concern

So what the hell did all that mean, sounds foreboding, maybe you dont want to this after all...nah, heres your lexicon.

Key- vocabulary of an Internet Marketer in my plain english

Content Producer - Thats you, someone who creates content - articles, images, videos and audio for webpages - as your empire grows you may find yourself purchasing content. Also a term that is used within the Associated Content program for its members.

Traffic - visitors, the people on the web who visit your site

SEO - Search engine optimization - the techniques of designing your web page and content to rank well on major search engines

Meta Tags - or elements, descriptive terms used within the header section of a pages html - at one point these elements held major sway with search engines, this is no longer true. The most commonly used elements are.

• keywords
• description
• language
• robots
  

HTML - HyperText MarkUp Language - the code browsers (IE,fireFox,Netscape,Opera etc.) read to figure out how to display a web pages content.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets, the newest standard in web design - at its most basic allows a for a cleaner smaller code and allows one to set prioritity levels

Keywords - for our purposes, this refers to the query a user puts into a search engine - another meaning is words that appear at a high frequency within any document.

Long tail keywords - as most people create an article or page with the hopes of being found by a search engine, it helps to optimize at varying levels - if your user searches with the keyword query "money" you will have a lot of competition, but if you target the long tail "save money in a depressed economy" or another natural search term, you may have more luck.

Backlinks - or inbound links, Links outside of your webpage that link to your page or content, backlinks are one of the key factors to high site ranking in search engines.

NoFollow - some pages use the nofollow html attribute code, this tells a webcrawler for a search engine to not allow this link to effect pagerank - this is done to limit SPAM comments in ones pages as you are removing the incentive for a spammers link. This term was created by google but is recognized by yahoo and msn search.

DoFollow - the opposite of above. When you are creating backlinks to your hub,blog article or page, it is in your best interest to include links within sites and forums that are doFollow. There are plugins for Firefox that will show and recognize such links.

PR - PageRank - when discussing the quality of ones backlinks, the authority of the link is integral..one of the measurements of a links quality is the PR of the referring site.PageRank is an algorithm used by Google. PageRank is scaled between 0-10, 10 being the best, an example of a PR10..is google.com. The details of the algorithm are both complex and secretive.

Alexa Rank - Alexa ranking is another measurement used to value a webpages importance, this valuation is usally reserved for advertisers and site sellers, this ranking is more easily gamed. It is derived in similar method as TV's Nielsen ratings, it is traditionally accepted that one could rank higher in Alexa by using the Alexa toolbar, and surfing one own sites actively, inclusion of the Alexa widget is supposed to help also.

Advertisers - those who pay yee

Publisher Networks - A middle agency that acts as a middleman between advertisers and affiliates (AKA Publishers) they are responsible for payment to the affiliate, tracking and anti-fraud.

• Commission Junction
• PepperJam Network
• Hydra Network
• MaxBounty
• NeverBlue
• COPEAC
• ClickBank
  

I have a massive list of CPA networks posted here in the sidebar of www.themagicof.info

Publisher - You, the person who publishes content and advertisements to the WWW (World Wide Web)

Affiliate - You, as you are affiliated with a advertiser in order to campaign their product or service, it is not necessary to be a member of an affiliate network in order to be an affiliate, many companies have in-house affiliate programs.

Impressions - the number of times an ad is viewed.

Sales - sales generated by your links

Leads - information captured and forwarded to your advertiser, many times as part of a free trial promotion or other small incentive

CTR- Clickthrough, ratio of clicks to views (impressions)

CPA- Cost Per Action, or Acquisition - the payment you receive from advertiser for desired action

CPC - Cost Per Click, your average earning per click, sometimes shown as eCPC

CPM - Cost per thousand, sometimes shown as eCPM

PPC - Pay per Click, you may find yourself on the buying side of advertsing on search engines and content networks using AdWords or Facebook Ads - PPC is what you pay per click -sometimes you may also PPI

PPI - Pay per Impression

ClickBank- a network primarily involved in eBooks and always a product available for digital delivery. Commissions are generally $25-40 USD, one must make 5 sales from unique Credit cards in order to reach payout.

• $/sale - your commission
  
• Total $/sale - same thing, may be different if the product has recurring payments-not quite sure
  
• %/sale - what percent of sale you earn
  
• %refd - percentage of products sold by affiliates, a low percentage could mean they have success selling via their own methods
  
• grav -Gravity - number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a customer- this is a weighted measurement - this factor is usually used to quickly determine a products viability
  

Types of leads

Usually one will want to target a lead that is quick and easy for your traffic

• email submits -yep, enters email
• zip submit - thats zip code, in case your international
• phone submit - you get it
• Confirmation - sometimes a lead will have to confirm an email thats entered, sometimes they will receive a phone call, sometimes the mailing address will be checked for validity before your lead will register

email marketing - you might want to develop a mailing list or newsletter,if you do you need to conform to Can-Spam regulations

CAN-SPAM- Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003.

The 3 main rules of CAN-SPAM compliant mail

An OPT OUT option or Unsubscribe Compliance

• A visible and operable unsubscribeoption is present in all emails.Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.

Content Compliance

• Accurate from lines, meaning one cannot use false or misleading information including "friendly froms"
• Relevant subject lines, not deceptive
• A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.A label is present if the content is adult.

Sending Behavior Compliance

• A message cannot be sent through an open relay
• A message cannot be sent to a harvested email address
• A message cannot contain a false header

-wikipedia (CAN SPAM)

Double Opt-In - Your target enters an email address requesting info (opt-in) then receives a confirmation email with link that must be clicked (double opt in)

Pending Commissions - just because a lead is shown in your console doesnt mean its going to your bank account just yet

Locked Commissions - Your advertisers are given a time limit to confirm that they want to pay for your leads, once they confirm the lead, it is locked - now it is yours - that is if you reach minimum payout level. This date is usually within the second week of the month following the origination of the lead.

Bonuses - sometimes your advertisers offer an increase for certain performance levels or sales on special events, or the publisher network offers bonuses -for example the PepperJam network gives me 50USD in bonuses a month for blogging about their program.

SID- ShopperID - this is a code that you can personalize and append to your affiliate links within most publisher link consoles.

Encryption - you may want to hide the fact that your link is an affiliate link or hide the source of your referrers, in console encryption will not hide your referral source from your network! This is actually not a very useful function from within the console.

URLshortening - using services such as tinyURL will allow you to mask the fact that your link is an aff link, and allow you to put your own keywords into the links address, in addition you could track that links history via the the tinyurl console. There are many,many more advnaced ways to do this and TinyURL is pretty commonly known and overused by Spammers - its not even allowed on CraigsList!

Minimum Payout level - most networks arent going to cut you check until you make 100 bucks, sometimes its as low as 50 if you set up direct deposit. PepperJam has a $25 minimum payout level!

W9- Tax form that you will be required to fill out in order to be paid

IM - Internet Marketing or instant messaging, youll have to check the context.

Domain - a term which you register in order to assist visitors in finding your information. Words that point your unique IP address.

ex) sunforged.com (sunforged is the domain)

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

ex) http://www.sunforged.com/index.html

which would display the domain www.sunforged.com in your URL bar

Registrar- a company authorized by ICANN to sell and register domain names

ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

IP- Internet Protocol, usually used in reference to an IP address, which is a computers network address

Hosting Provider- A website exists on a server with a unique IP, traditionally one would purchase hosting from aprovider in order to have others be able to access ones content - plans usually revolve around bandwidth used, storage space and number of available subdomains and databases

cPanel - control panel used by web hosting services, serves as an easier interface with ones content and hosting applications than traditional ftp

Fantastico - a webscript installer, made popular by the ease of Wordpress installation, some caution should be used wwhen using fantastico as default settings are not always the most secure!

Domain Masking - when used in conjunction with forwarding will hide/mask the forwarded address in a browsers URL bar, ex) If one wants to use the domain iamawriter.com and have that address appear instead of their hubpages profile address www.hubpages.com/profiles/iamawriter they would enable this feature within their hosting control panel

Domain Forwarding - allows one domain to point to a location - one could buy 10 domains and have all of them point to the same IP location - is used in conjunction with masking -above

AKA - URL Forwarding, URL redirection - is intelligent to purchase common misspellings of ones domain name and enable this option

sub domain - a domain that is part of larger domainin the domain hierarchy system. ex) www.artists.sunforged.com - where artists is a sub domain - one can install unique scripts on a sub domain and point other domain names to such an address

TLD - Top Level Domain ( .org, .com, .info, .net etc,)

Hosting Applications - Scripts that are installed directly on your server space that assist you in managing, organizing an displaying your content. ex) Wordpress, Joomla, ZenCart

mySQL- databse management system that works in conjunction with many hosting applications

Linux Server - this is the option you want

Windows Server- just dont do it

Image Editing Application - a program that allows one to alter image files in size, appearance and format - Photoshop being the Industry leader - the Open Source application GIMP is a good alternative for those on a budget

.gif - graphics interchange format, this format is used to create animated images - is a lossless data compression formatand is well suited for multiple edits and vector images

.jpg,.jpeg - joint photographic experts group - a very high quality (resolution) image format file sizes may be larger than their .gif cousins - the choice for artist and photographers who want true displays of their work BUT is not lossless and will lose quality in relation to multiple edits and resizing- is not the best choice for vector based images

.png - portable network graphics - a bitmap format intended to replace .gif for net use, does not allow for animation, does allow transparency uses lossless data compression for relatively small size files

.bmp - bitmap - think MSPaint

Javascript- a scripting language usually effecting client side - you may use javascript codes in your aff links to create mouseover effects, insert adsense consoles or analytics, having multiple occurences of JS can slow down page load times

Wordpress - A popular content management system fro the blog format

Blogger- a free blog program through google, blogspot.com

blog- a web log - traditionally a frequently updated themed site

eCommerce - eCommerce sites or online stores, also a variety of webhosting apps like ZenCart

Content management

Content provider

RSS- Really Simple Syndication - an XML file that is also known as a feed, allows for the content of a page,blog or other frequently updatedweb source to easily be shared. It is wise to to use ones own RSS feeds in conjunction with feedburner and adsense to increase exposure and earning for ones work

Feed - a XML file, also known as RSS that allows one to syndicate their web content - they can then be read by RSS readers or aggregators

Cross Browser Compatability - Some people still use IE or have slow connections, your web design you cater to the lowest common denominator

cname - Canonical Name record - shows that one domain is an alias for another - an alternative to Domain Forwarding

Upload- adding a file from your local location to a remote location on the web

Download- the opposite

ftp - file transfer protocol - try Filezilla or cuteFTP

forum - a message board, an online bulletin board - hosting applications that provide this option include simplemachinesforum or SMF, PhpBB and vBulletin

As your doing your research and learning new methods, you'll most likely be exposed to some not so straightforward abbreviations used on SEO and marketing forums and blogs, sometimes these are even intentional used to keep search engines from returning results.

Big G or G = Google

eGay = eBay

GayPal = PayPal

CL = CraigsList