Congratulations on venturing into the exciting world of Internet Marketing. Confused yet? Internet Marketing has thrown old-school marketers off their game with its fancy new online marketing terms.
Never fear, Marketing Resource Index is here! And we’ve put together an easy-to-scan glossary of the newly-invented Internet Marketing terms:
Affiliate Marketing: A method of making money online by sending users to a specific website. An example of this is if you have a blog about surfing, there might be an ad for surf board rentals in your area. If you refer traffic to another site that pays you for that traffic then you are an affiliate marketer. This can include SEO, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and email marketing.
Algorithm: this is a scientific or mathematical formula used by sites like Facebook and Google to bring up the most relevant search results.
For more info on Affiliate Marketing, click here.
Analytics: Analytics, also known as Web Analytics, are tools to measure internet data like traffic, social sharing, and the general buzz around you, your products, and your brand. Several tools are available on the market to help you learn how traffic comes your way and how to increase it. A popular tool is Google Analytics.
Application Programing Interface (API): APIs allow one application to interact with another. For example you (meaning someone you hire to do this complex creation for you) can create an application to add-on to another application, or to use as a connector between two other platforms.
Blog: An abbreviation between web and log that signifies an online website that caters towards self-publishing. The most popular blogging sites to create a blog are WordPress, Blogger and Joomla (more advanced). Blogs can contain text, photos, videos, social sharing buttons, and other web content.
For more info on blogging, click here.
Bookmarking: This is a digital term for the narrow pieces of paper we used to mark our space in—you know, back when people read books. Bookmarking a digital continuation of this where you place a digital bookmark at a place on the web that you would like to return to and explore further.
Email Marketing: A method of online marketing that is replacing direct mail marketing. It involves sending email messages, newsletters, updates and other sales and marketing materials to a list of email subscribers. Your list can be bought, or built naturally by placing a “subscribe to _____” button on your website.
For more info on Email Marketing, click here.
Facebook: This likely needs no description as it is the most popular social networking site and has hundreds of millions of users.
Forums: A forum is any online meeting place where people virtually meet to discuss a topic.
Hashtag: Hashtags are something you use on Twitter (or now on Facebook to denote a message you posted on Twitter) to annotate a specific topic or event. For example #SocialMarketingConvention would note that you are at a convention focused on social media marketing techniques.
HTML: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a language used for programming and creating web pages. Wikipedia uses this, as do WordPress and other blogging platforms. It can be confusing but you can often turn on a visual browser that writes the HTML code for you.
Inbound Marketing: This is a method of online marketing that companies use to funnel users/potential customers to their site. This includes: SEO, blogging, social media marketing, email marketing, analytics, and the like. Think of these as online marketing opportunities to replace the more out-dated methods of cold calling, snail mail, and traditional print, TV and radio advertising.
Internet Marketing: Methods of advertising online, that are replacing more traditional print- and media-based marketing methods. This encompasses SEO, email marketing, mobile advertising, banner ads, website ads, social media ads, etc.
For more info on Internet Marketing, click here.
Keywords: These are used in blogging and other methods of SEO that allow you to connect your site with someone searching for similar content. For example, if your site is about fantasy football then you need fantasy football-related terms all over your site.
Klout: Klout is a somewhat controversial way of measuring your online influence across various social networks. It gives you a score out of 100 as to how effective your social marketing is—based on your current social media profiles (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, etc.). The higher the better. - Klout is a measure of social influence. The service allows users to connect various social accounts such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc., and then provides every user with his or her Klout score. The score is out of 100–the higher the score, the more inlfuence you have on the social world.
Like: A ‘Like’ is an action from Facebook that someone can do to indicate their approval of something posted on Facebook. Similarly, ‘Dislike’ shows their disapproval of social network content.
Link Building: Link building is part of SEO (see below) that focuses on building your reputation and page rank with Google by posting links to and from reputable sites. To create a link-building campaign you need to get your link (ex. www.yourlink.com) posted on other websites. Blogging is a popular method of link building.
LinkedIn: This started as an online resume-style site used for building professional networks. Companies and individuals use this to post their resume and to network with colleagues, suppliers, manufacturer, marketers, etc. The site has over 70 million business-minded users. It is far less social than Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the others.
Meme: This is a term used to describe specific content, text, joke, picture or concept being shared and reshared on the internet. An example of this is LOLcats, a popular photo series of cute kitten/cat pictures with cute subtitles. Memes are usually spread quickly over the internet.
News Feed: This is the part of Facebook that displays your friends’ new content, photos, updates, etc. Twitter also has a news feed.
Real-Time Search: This describes the process of content being posted and indexed on the web, super quick so that it is in real time.
Retweet: A retweet is what happens when someone shares your content with their ‘friends’ on Twitter. A Retweet button is a small button you put on your site to allow them to ‘tweet’ about your product/company/content, without copying your link and pasting it into their Twitter account.
RSS Feed: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a type of bookmarking that allows you to syndicate your feed to your users who want to subscribe to your content.
RSS Reader: This is a tool used by users to take all of their RSS Feed bookmarks, and put it into one easy-to-read newsfeed. The idea is that people can consume more information if the updates to their favorite sites are all put in one handy place.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO a practice of trying to increase the traffic to your website (and increase your sales and conversions) by using paid search engine services,
For more info on SEO click here.
Social Media: Social Media describes the social networking, sharing and marketing taking place on social networking sites like Facebook an Twitter.
For more info on Social Media Marketing, click here.
Social Media Monitoring: A method of keeping track of how many people are buzzing about your company online. This can measure social mentions, shares and retweets.
Twitter: Twitter is a social networking platform that allows its user to make regular posts about whats going on in their lives and business. You can ‘follow’ others on Twitter, and people can ‘follow’ you. ‘Follow’ing means you subscribe to their feed in order to receive their status updates. If you have seen @someones-name, that is a Twitter address. Updates are limited in size to just 140 characters, making them scanable and easy-to-read.
Viral Marketing: Viral content is web content that spreads over the internet like wildfire. The process is self-replicating and builds momentum and exposure as it goes. The most popular viral content can get millions of hits in a single day.
WordPress: WordPress began as a blogging platform but has now turned into a Content Management System (CMS) that can be used to create blogs and content-based websites.
YouTube: This is the world’s most popular video-sharing platform. It is owned by Google. It is a free service that allows you to watch videos, and users often spend lots of time on it due to their recommended viewing tab. Most viral video content is posted on YouTube.
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Robin Wilding is a professionally trained Canadian journalist striving to bring journalistic-era intergity to online media. She has a second degree in Political Science--with a focus on International Relations and the developing world. Currently Robin is a contributor to several technology publications, including Brajeshwar.com, SocialTechnologyReview.com, HostingIndustryWatch.com, AnimationCareerReview.com and CompareBusinessProducts.com. She also works for several web developers; and does ghost writing for several high level executives within the technology sector. Robin's work is showcased in her portfolio: http://shownd.com/robinwilding
