General

Internet money jargon


FYI—Some of the lingo of the Internet marketing crowd.

Those’re the folks who make their living selling stuff online, especially how to make money online. Hat tip for these to online marketing man Marlon Sanders.

“Continuity: This means something that people are charged for regularly, typically monthly or quarterly. In the biz, we call this “continuity income” or recurring billing.
Newsletters are usually paid for monthly as are membership sites. The reason you see a lot of emphasis on continuity offers is it provides steady income and gives you a way to pay your bills. The classic example is the book club of the month programs. (Or NM auto-ship orders…KK)

“Forced Continuity: Forced means you don’t have a choice. The way this works is when you buy one product, you’re given a free trial of a newsletter, membership site or CD of the month club. The trial is usually 14 to 30 days. Sometimes as long as two months. At the end of that time period, if you don’t cancel, you’re charged monthly for whatever it is. (Do not do this without being up front -KK)

“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. (To find one, Google say, ‘bird watching forum’ without the quote marks-do not start selling there. Contribute your knowledge first, then start adding a link under your name. -KK)

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.

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 they’re 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. (Of course you now know that traffic means zip unless they include real buyers.

Marlon Sanders has been marketing online for 15 years. He’s helped some of the biggest names in Internet Marketing get started. Yet he focuses entirely on Internet newbies. See for yourself.

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Kim Klaver

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