Glossary

The words that get thrown around in make-money marketing, explained in plain English. Every term links to a full guide so you can see how it actually fits into making money.

A

Advertising Pixel: A small piece of tracking code on your site that reports visitor actions back to an ad platform so it can measure and improve your ads.
Advertorial: An ad written to look like an article, using an editorial style to warm a reader up before the offer.
Affiliate: A person who promotes someone else's product in exchange for a commission on the sales they help generate.
Attribution: Deciding which traffic source or touchpoint gets the credit for a sale or signup, so you know where your money is actually coming from.
Autoresponder: A pre-written sequence of emails that sends automatically over time after someone joins your list.
Average Order Value (AOV): The average amount a customer spends in a single order, calculated as total revenue divided by the number of orders.

B

Backlink: A link from another website to yours. Search engines treat these as votes of confidence, so they influence how well your pages rank.
Bounce Rate: The share of visitors who land on a page and leave without doing anything else, expressed as a percentage.
Bridge Page: A short page that sits between your traffic and an affiliate offer, warming the visitor up before sending them on.

C

Call to Action (CTA): The specific instruction that tells a reader what to do next, such as a button or a link that asks for one clear action.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The share of people who click after seeing something, calculated as clicks divided by impressions and shown as a percentage.
Conversion Rate: The share of visitors who take the action you wanted, calculated as conversions divided by total visitors.
Cookie: A small file stored in a visitor's browser that remembers you referred them, so you get credit if they buy later.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): What it costs you, on average, to get one completed action such as a sale or a signup, calculated as total spend divided by acquisitions.
Cost Per Click (CPC): What you pay for a single click when you buy traffic through ads. It is the price side of the paid-traffic equation.
Cost Per Lead (CPL): What it costs you to generate one lead, such as an email address or an inquiry, calculated as total spend divided by leads collected.
Cost Per Mille (CPM): What you pay for one thousand ad impressions, where mille is Latin for thousand, used to price visibility rather than clicks.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The full cost of turning a stranger into a paying customer, including ads, tools, and any other spend divided by customers gained.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The total money a customer brings in over the whole time they buy from you, not just from their first purchase.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM): Software that keeps track of your leads and customers, including who they are, what they need, and where they are in your sales process.

D

DKIM (DKIM): An email setting that adds a tamper-proof signature to your messages, so receivers can confirm the email really came from you and was not altered.
DMARC (DMARC): An email policy that ties SPF and DKIM together and tells receiving providers what to do when a message fails those checks.
Downsell: A cheaper or stripped-down offer shown after a buyer declines an upsell, aimed at saving the sale.

E

Earnings Per Click (EPC): The average money you earn each time someone clicks your affiliate link, calculated as total earnings divided by total clicks.
Email Service Provider (ESP): The software that stores your email list and sends email to it at scale, handling delivery, signup forms, and automation.

L

Landing Page: A single focused page built to get a visitor to take one specific action, such as opting in or buying.
Lead: A person who has shown interest in a product or service, usually by sharing contact details such as an email or phone number.
Lead Magnet: Something useful you give away for free in exchange for a person's contact details, usually their email address.

M

Merchant (Advertiser): The company that owns the product and pays affiliates a commission for sending it customers. Also called the advertiser.

N

Niche: A specific, focused topic or audience a business targets, rather than trying to appeal to everyone at once.

O

Order Bump: A small add-on offer shown on the checkout page itself, usually a checkbox a buyer can tick before paying.
Organic Traffic: Visitors who arrive through unpaid channels like search results, rather than through ads you paid for.

P

Paid Traffic: Visitors you get by paying a platform to show your link, such as Google or Facebook ads. It is fast to start and stops when you stop paying.
Private Label Rights (PLR): Content or products you can buy, rebrand as your own, and resell. Cheap to acquire, but usually sold to many other people too.

R

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): How much revenue you get back for every dollar of advertising, calculated as revenue from ads divided by ad spend.
Return on Investment (ROI): How much profit you made relative to what you put in, expressed as a percentage of your original investment.

S

Sales Funnel: The path a visitor moves through from first contact to purchase, usually a series of pages designed to lead to a sale.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The practice of making your pages more likely to show up, and rank well, in unpaid search results so you earn free traffic over time.
SPF (SPF): An email setting that lists which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain, helping prove your emails are really from you.
Split Test (A/B Test): Showing two versions of a page or email to different visitors at the same time to see which one performs better, based on real results rather than opinion.

T

Tracking Link: A special link that identifies who sent a visitor, so clicks and sales can be attributed to the right person.

U

Upsell: An extra, usually higher-priced offer shown right after a purchase to increase how much each buyer spends.
UTM Parameters (UTM): Small tags added to the end of a link so your analytics can tell where a visitor came from, which campaign sent them, and which ad or email they clicked.

V

Video Sales Letter (VSL): A video that pitches a product from start to finish, doing the job a long written sales page used to do.