Internet Marketing terminology explained!

Affiliate - Refers to someone who sells another person's program for a cut of the sale.

Affiliate Directory - Refers to a place where you can find a bunch of programs to sell and take a cut of the sale, all in one place.

Affiliate Marketing - A subcategory of Internet Marketing referring to the art of actually selling the affiliate program you are registered with.

Internet Marketing - A broad term encompassing everything we are doing here. Everything we are doing is internet marketing. Emphasis on marketing. You are an internet marketer.

Pagerank - Websites have a pagerank, this is determined by google. The higher your pagerank the further up in search engines you will appear. Higher pagerank can increase your traffic exponentially, but don't go thinking it is the only source of traffic.

Keyword - Many things on the internet have keywords, keywords are placed in by the person who made the website/article or whatever else was placed there by a Human being to be found by another Human being on the internet. In terms of a website, you, the owner, would define keywords that you want your site to show up for. In an internet marketing (IM) sense, keywords are very important and complex. You may choose a keyword that has tons of competition, so much competition that you stand no chance of being seen on the first page of google search results. I'll get into this later.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google is a search engine, of course. Basically this means customizing your site so that it is more "Google friendly". There are many ways to do this, one method is keyword optimization, which refers to picking many relevant keywords that are chosen to get above the competition for those keywords.

CTR (Click-through Rate). Refers to the percentage of people who saw your affiliate link, and actually clicked it.

CPA / CPC / CPS (Cost per Action, Cost per Click, Cost per Sale): These are a bit confusing, they are of no "cost" to you, instead of cost it should be replaced with the word "pay", like "pay per sale". Refers to the amount you get for either a sale, action, or click by the customer. Some affiliate programs you will find, pay you for clicks to your link, not sales (do not click your own link, they will know, you wont get caught maybe the first 3 times because they assume it was by accident, but still). Others pay you by "actions", this action could mean a number of things, they could pay you if the customer enters their email, or some other action. Most affiliate programs you will be dealing with at this early stage is per sale.

I believe those are the only relevant terms to what we are learning right now. I want to keep it simple. We will encounter more as it becomes relevant.