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Internet Marketing Terms

A lot of times Internet marketers throw terms around and assumeeveryone knows what they mean. To help you out, I'm providing a list here written in layman's terms. Some of these aren't the "precise" technical definition.But they're what I call working definitions that are easy tounderstand.

KEY TERMS AND VOCABULARY

Continuity: The means something that people are chargedfor regularly, typically monthly or quarterly. In the biz,we call this "continuity income" or recurring billing.Newsletters are usually paid for monthly as are membershipsites. The reason you see a lot of emphasis on continuityoffers is it provides steady income and gives you a way topay your bills. The classic example is the book club ofthe month programs.

Forced Continuity: Forced means you don't have a choice.The way this works is when you buy one product, you'regiven a free trial of a newsletter, membership site or CDof the month club. The trial is usually 14 to 30 days.Sometimes as long as two months. At the end of that timeperiod, if you don't cancel, you're charged monthly forwhatever it is. Some marketers get people in continuity billing then NEVER send emails or communications hoping people will FORGET about the purchase and let the billing continue forever. I find this to be legally risky. If you do forced continuity, make sure people know they're being chargeda nd can cancel without jumping through hoops.

Back End: The back end of the business is everything AFTER the initial sale. In other words, it's the follow up business. In the ideal world, you break even or make a small profit on the initial sale (or what we call the"front end." And you make your profits on the upsells, downsells and subsequent sales.

Upsells: Additional products or services offered at the point of the sale. As crazy as it sounds, the EASIEST time to make another sale to the customer is when they already have their credit card out! Any additional product offered is an upsell.

Downsell: If the upsell is declined, another offer for a lower price than the upsell is made. This is called a downsell.

Target market: A market is a group of people who are in the MARKET for a product or service. A target market is the market you're targeting. For example, males online between the ages of 35 and 65 who want to start a home-based business would be a target market. Stated differently, it's the people who are the potential buyers of what you sell.

Sales letters: In this business, we often use very long sales letters similar to the direct mail letters you receive in the mail. We call these sales letters because they're me-to-you letters that SELL something. These are different from a brochure, which is an impersonal communication. Sales letters are written as though you're talking to the person directly. They're more personal and persuasive.

Membership site: These are password protected sites that have content delivered regularly and often have a forum or other way to interact with members.

Forum: These are places you go to talk to others who share a common interest.

Opt ins: When someone joins your email list, they "opt in"to receive emails from you.

Double opt in: When someone joins your email list, they receive an email asking them to click a confirmation link to PROVE they subscribed to the email list. This is an anti-spam feature and is now standard practice.

Autoresponder: This is a software program that lets you send email broadcasts to everyone on your list. It will also send a sequence of emails any number of days apart that you specify.

Shopping cart: The ordering mechanism you use to get people's name, address and credit card or check info and process their order.

Affiliate program: A program where you promote a vendor's product or service and receive a commission when there's a sale. The classic example is Amazon.com. You can link to books on Amazon. And if a visitor to your web site buys one of them, you get a small commission.

Associate program: Same as affiliate program

Banner ads: Those square or horizontal ads on web sites.

Ebook: Basically the same as a printed book but delivered online, quite often as a PDF.

PDF: Portable Delivery Format. This is a uniform format for delivering digital information. A standard of method of delivering documents on the web.

White paper: A research paper or report delivered as a PDF.

Name Squeeze: A term trademarked by Jonathan Mizel. See Squeeze page.

Squeeze page: A page with only one purpose to obtain or"squeeze" a name and email address, or email address alone, from the web visitor.

Lead capture page: Same as a squeeze page.

Power Squeeze page: See squeeze page

Hits: Some stats programs measure web site traffic by hits. This is not a particularly accurate way to measure visitors.

Unique visitors: Stat programs attempt to identify actual visitors and eliminate duplicate visitors in a 24-hour period.

Cookies: The way things get tracked on the Internet. These are little text files put on your computer. They contain tidbits of information that allow stuff to be tracked. In the case of affiliate programs, the way we track sales and credit the correct reseller with the commissions is through the use of cookies. The cookie simply contains that affiliate's ID number.

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising. Google made PPC a dominant advertising method. As a ppc advertiser, you run ads on Google and ONLY pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Monetize: When you find a way to make money with something, you monetize it. So you'll hear people talk about monetizing their traffic. All their talking about is finding a way to make money off of their web site visitors.

Traffic: Visitors to your web site or web page are traffic.

Product launch: When a number of affiliates promote one product o one day or one week. Typically last for one or two weeks and often involve heavy promotions by affiliates who are trying to win cash and prizes.

Aweber: One of the main autoresponder services.

One Shopping Cart: Another autoresponder service that also contains a shopping cart, ad tracker, affiliate software and other bells and whistles.

Ad tracker: A program that lets you create links that track when people click on them and then also count actions or sales that follow the click.

Affiliate software: Software that allows you to run your own affiliate program and pay affiliates commissions when they sell your product or service.

Clickbank: A marketplace for ebooks sold by affiliates.

This list by Marlon Sanders from MarlonSanders.com. You have permission to re-publish this list as long as you leave this part in tact. Visit Marlon's blog at: http://www.marlonsnews.com

Guaranteeing Page 1 Rankings is SEO Malpractice and "SEO" Trademark?

An SEO firm in Washington state has been sued over it's practices and may face thousands in penalties and fees according to Search Engine Watch. The core issue had been that their services were not clear, that they made inaccurate guarantees, and if their competitor's post is true, called this service a "scam to avoid".

read the full article by Scott Goodyear

http://www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2008/04/guaranteeing_pa.html

District 60 Toastmasters Spring Conference

I am away this weekend at the District 60 Toastmasters Spring Conference. What an event! The schedule was packed to the point of hectic so I had to pick and choose what to do and see.

Of course, I attended both contests. As you may have already read on my site at http://www.speakersandtrainers.net the International Speech Contest was fantastic. James Ng from Brampton won with his speech "25 and some months" an original, inspiring and instructive look on how to not grow old but not die young.

Today though was even better! At the Sunday brunch we had the pleasure of meeting last year's World Champion of Public Speaking: Vikas Jhingran. Now, I had heard prior to this that sometimes when the world champion comes to a Toastmaster's conference they can be convinced to deliver their winning speech from World's.

Vikas was confronted by a very enthusiastic audience this morning. When given the choice of his regional or world speech, we asked for both... and he not only delivered, he explained how he developed the speeches and what made them International contest level speeches from an engineered standpoint.

In addition when time came for questions, he was asked to perform the speech that won him through district (it takes three unique speeches to win all the way to world level). We were thrilled when he complied.

All this in addition to his keynote on how to rise to the top in speaking. What an inspiring morning.... my first time hearing a world champion in person and the high point of a great conference.

Customer Relationship Management Solutions???

I have spent the last year casually looking for a replacement to my Goldmine Contact Management software.

Goldmine is just not designed to be easily set up to accommodate multiple email addresses, lists and opt-in forms.

I use aweber and I do love it. Unlimited lists, messages and autoresponders, integration with Google Analytics and PayPal. Great product! However - I want to be able to add offline opt-ins easily. Not at the rate of 10 a day. And not at a double-opt-in level.
I also want to be able to store my own template. I am a graphic designer and it seems a shame to have to pick away at code every time I want to send a newsletter.

I have looked at http://www.salesforce.com and do love them too.... except you are limited to 1000 emails a day. Not useful for sending to a list of 10,000 when your offer is time sensitive. Granted I could buckle on another email sender like Vertical Response but then I am charged by the email. I already pay for hosting and ISP, I do not see what value is provided.

So I have just purchased MailLoop - after contemplating it for years. What I appreciate is that it has all the features of aweber plus list import, template creation, my own email addresses AND no monthly fees. I bought the pro version for $379 - the tutorials that come with it are worth that!

Now I just need to implement it - another learning curve to climb! Oh well - this version has a lot of built in wizards to speed up the task. I will be using this software to manage my site http://www.speakersandtrainers.net launching in May.

Last Week's Seminar

Last week I was given an opportunity to deliver a Coaching Corner at the Barrie Business Enterprise Resource Network.
The topic was: Taking Your Website to the Next Level

I had never delivered a seminar on this topic so I was pretty excited - the group was to be small, pre-screened for people who had existing websites AND I was to review participant websites during the session... something else I had NEVER done.

I was actually more nervous than excited. The first time doing a seminar it can be tricky to know if you have the right amount of material. And you usually get a very mixed bag of interests at this type of event.

It went really well.
We checked with participants at the start to determine what they hoped to learn and I went through some prepared slides - encouraging the plethora of questions all during the first 2 hours. The last hour was spent on specific techniques to attract the ideal client through building targeted traffic, then build a relationship based on understanding their needs and personalizing the type of messages sent to them.

This portion was delivered with the real world examples of what I would do if I was upgrading participant websites. Rather than feeling on the spot, I felt a great opportunity to know I was helping in both broad and specific ways.

If you are interested in a free marketing consultation, you can get started by filling out the form here.

What do you wish you didn't have to do?

In business there are some necessary evils.

Things you never want to do.

Things that you tell yourself - "as soon as I have the cashflow, I will pay someone to do this for me."

In my case that is bookkeeping. I always used to say, if only people could pay me in produce and chickens like the old time rural doctor, life would be much simpler.... oddly enough just last week Mr bob from http://www.mrbob.ca/ actually paid me with an incredible prime rib roast that he was paid with from one on his customers.

Now that I actually have a predictable cash flow and some great free time tracking software: Timestamp from http://www.syntap.com/ this dream can come true.

That got me thinking about what I can offer clients to ease their stress.

In my clients' businesses, the answer is more often - I wish I didn't have to do PR and marketing. I never seem to find the time, the energy or the creativity so it keeps getting pushed to the back burner.

I love to work with solopreneurs that are struggling due to a growth phase in their business. We now follow a new 6 step process to really focus their technology marketing and then I implement it, track it, tweak it and report back.

I have three clients that I have mentioned this to. All three are thrilled with the prospect of off-loading a large portion of their marketing efforts while keeping firm tabs on the actions and results. Over the next six months I will be documenting our progress, learning and accomplishments - and yes probably a few "boo-boos" as we work together. It will be an exciting time for me as usually I sporadically give away these services for free. To be able to provide a planned concerted (paid for) effort to build on each month will let me create incredible results for these clients.