Terms You Need To Know For Affiliate Marketing

The terminology for affiliate marketing, or really any marketing terms, can be quite confusing and tricky in the beginning when you are first starting off with your promotions and postings online. I personally just jumped right in when I first began affiliation partnerships in order to learn what everything meant and I had to double check every step I took to make sure I was using the correct terms so I could understand my contracts and what all I was assigned to do each day, week, month and year while working with these companies 10 years ago. It would have been nice and a more smoother ride for me to have a guide as to what everything meant at my disposal, like a printout of some sort. This is the reason for today’s post for our marketing blog series of Delux Designs (DE), LLC.

Today I want to touch basis on a couple terms to get you started that you will see along your journey of becoming a marketing affiliate soon.

We already touched on what exactly affiliate marketing is in our previous post. If you missed it, just click here catch up and come back to this post to continue. Don’t worry about losing this page, when you click the link it will open a new tab so you can easily come back to this post. If you’ve already read it, continue reading below.

Affiliate Link

An affiliate link is how an affiliate, or publisher, would promote services or products. It is a unique URL, given to the affiliate by the merchant being promoted. Through this link, each affiliate’s sales are tracked when someone either clicks on it, or when someone actually buys something after clicking on the affiliate’s promotional link.

Affiliate Manager

A term used for the company or brand that each affiliate, or publisher, promotes for is an affiliate manager. They manage your link accounts and provide links and promotional graphics to share with your audience. This is another term for a merchant.

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate Networks are when an affiliate manager, or merchant, uses a third party to manage each affiliate, or publisher’s, account which is different from an affiliate program. Networks hold more than one brand or company and manage everything and everyone all at one time. For example Shareasale would be one of these.

Affiliate

An actual affiliate is you, the person who is working with a company or brand to promote their services, products, or merchandise through a website, blog and/or social media account. Another term that is often used for an affiliate is publisher.

Audience

Your audience would be your subscribers to your blog, visitors to your website, or your followers on social media.

Channel

A channel is a medium for communication or the passage of information.

Commission

You will hear about commissions a lot as an affiliate marketer, or publisher. This is what you are paid to promote each merchant or affiliate manager.

Earnings Per Click (EPC)

In most contracts, you will run into the initials EPC, or Earnings Per Click. That is how much an affiliate or publisher will be paid, or have earned, everytime their audience clicks on their affiliate links.

In-House Affiliate Program

An in-house affiliate program is when an individual program is used to manage each affiliate or publisher’s account directly and no third party is used. An example here would be Styled Stock Society or Pixistock.

Merchant

A merchant is who an affiliate, or publisher, is working for and whose products and services they are promoting. This is another term for an affiliate manager.

Platform

Now, I mentioned platforms in our previous post on what affiliate marketing is and broke it down a bit further there as well, so again if you missed that post click here and catch up with it and return to this one to continue. Don’t worry if you click the link it will open a new tab so you don’t lose this one. An affiliate platform in general is the website or site in which an affiliate, or publisher, is signed up with to promote and advertise for their affiliate manager, or merchant.

Publisher

Sometimes you may see the term publisher being used. It is another term for an affiliate.

There are a ton of other terms that align with affiliate marketing that you will see and grow to learn, and we have highlighted them all in our latest printable with our affiliate partner Creative Market. But these basics are to get you started on what you immediately need to know starting off on your new marketing journey. If you would like the print out of full terms click the image below to download it.

Check out our next post of our Affiliate Marketing series on Staying Productive here!

Disclaimer: Affiliate links have been included in this post in which Delux Designs (DE), LLC receives a commission from any sales made through this post. We assure you, the products featured through DE from product reviews are products that we recommend based off of our own personal experiences from using them. The information given in this post is from a Certified Digital Marketer. Results may vary.