Glossary

The words, explained once

Most beginner confusion is vocabulary. Every term below is defined the way you would need it in your first ninety days, not the way a blog post uses it in passing.

Affiliate marketing: Earning a share of a sale by introducing a buyer to a seller's product through a tracked link. You do not own the product, set the price, or handle support.
Affiliate link: A URL that identifies you as the referrer, so the seller can credit the sale to you. Usually contains an affiliate id, and sometimes a tracking token.
Niche: A group of people with a shared, specific problem. Specific is the operative word: the narrower the group, the easier it is to answer their questions better than a large site will bother to.
Offer: The product you recommend. One offer at a time is the rule until you have a commission, because reading a product properly — including its refund terms — takes real attention.
Commission: Your share of a sale. Often a percentage of the price, sometimes a flat fee. It is paid by the seller, after their refund window, which is why affiliate income always arrives late.
Cookie duration: How long after a click the seller will still credit you if the buyer purchases. Thirty to ninety days is common for digital products; some are shorter, and shorter means less forgiving.
Gravity: ClickBank's measure of how many distinct affiliates sold an offer recently. It is evidence that buyers choose the offer, not evidence that it is any good. Read the sales page either way.
Search intent: What the person typing a phrase is trying to do. "What is affiliate marketing" wants an explanation; "best affiliate program for beginners" wants a shortlist. Matching the page to the intent matters more than the keywords in it.
Long-tail keyword: A specific phrase with low search volume and clear intent, such as a question in full. The easiest place for a new site to be useful, because the competition is often a page that half-answers it.
Organic traffic: Visitors from unpaid search results. Slow to arrive, free once it does, and the reason publishing compounds instead of resetting.
Impressions: How many times your page appeared in search results. Impressions without clicks means the title or the promise of the page is not doing its job — the cheapest problem to fix.
Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks divided by impressions. A low rate on a page that ranks well is usually a title problem, not a content problem.
Conversion rate: The share of visitors who take the action you wanted — clicking the offer, or joining the list. Small sites can live on modest rates: what matters is whether the visitors had the intent you assumed.
Email list: Addresses you collected with permission, and the only audience that is actually yours. Search and social decide who sees you; email does not.
Lead magnet: Something genuinely useful you give away to earn an address — a short guide, a checklist, a worksheet. Useful is the requirement: a thin PDF trains people to ignore you.
Internal link: A link from one of your pages to another. It helps a reader keep going and helps a search engine understand what the site is about. Two well-chosen links per page is enough.
Backlink: A link from someone else's site to yours. Valuable, slow to earn, and not something a beginner needs to chase in the first ninety days.
Recurring commission: A commission paid every month for as long as the customer stays subscribed. Worth checking for, because it changes the maths: one sale can pay repeatedly.
Disclosure: A clear statement that you may earn a commission from links on the page. Required in most places, and in practice it costs nothing — a reader who trusts the review trusts it more when the arrangement is stated.
Refund rate: The share of buyers who ask for their money back. A high rate on an offer you are recommending means you will spend your credibility introducing a product that disappoints people.

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