Internet Marketing Basic Terms - Part 1

In this article, which will be the first of a 3 part series, we’re going to cover some basic Internet marketing terms
so that you don’t feel like you’re the new kid on the block, just in case you are the new kid on the block. When first
starting out, there are doing to be a lot of terms that are thrown at you that you will be unfamiliar with. Hopefully,
this series will help you get through the maze a bit.

One of the most common terms that you are going to see in the course of promoting your website is Add URL. Believe it
or not, many new people think that this is some kind of mathematical problem involving the addition of URLs. Actually
it’s nothing more than having your website’s URL included in a search engine listing. All search engines have an Add
URL function. You simply type in your URL with a brief description of your website and off it goes to hopefully be
indexed by the search engine. No, there is no guarantee that this is going to actually happen, especially with the
larger search engines.

Another term that you are going to run into a lot is the word “affiliate.” This is simply somebody who promotes a product
or service that is not his or her own. For example, let’s say that you saw a website on the Internet that had a link that
said “affiliate program” on it. By signing up with this program, you would be given your own unique link to promote this
program. You would then become an affiliate of the program and get paid for each signup under your affiliate link.
A popular affiliate script for example is Ecommerce Automations.
http://www.ecommerceautomations.com/

Another term that people may throw at you is ALT Text. I know a lot of people who aren’t familiar with web design who
think that this is a substitute text for a paragraph in an article or something like it. Well, it is a substitution, but
not for articles. Some browsers, for whatever reasons, do not display images correctly, or at all, though the more
popular ones like Internet Explorer do. In the case of a browser where an image won’t display, designating an ALT text
will put a text description in place of where the image would have been so the person viewing will at least have an idea
of what was supposed to be there.

Another term that you might get thrown at you is animated GIF. No, this isn’t a cartoon. Most images on websites are
static, meaning that they don’t move. Animated GIF images are a special kind made with a certain kind of software that
actually have movement to them. They’re not quite as in as they used to be before the days of Flash, but they’re still
used to some degree.

Finishing up our A’s, a very common term that you are going to see a lot is autoresponder. There are actually many uses
for autoresponders, but the most common and most simple is to send an email back to a person who has emailed you, letting
them know that you’ll be getting back to them shortly. This is an automated response by the autoresponder itself that you
need to set up when you get one. As I said, there are other uses, but this is the most common. A widely used autoresponder
script is Mail Master Pro http://www.mailmasterpro.com/

In our second part of this series, we’ll tackle another letter of the alphabet.