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Online Business Language
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You can't really get involved in any new endeavor unless you know the language for it. The more of the "jargon" you learn the more you can learn and the better you can communicate. Working online is no different. There are many unique terms, words and phrases as well and an alphabet soup of abbreviations and acronyms.

Think back to school, sports, various types of work, they all had their own language and jargon. If you knew the words you "fit in" easier but more importantly you could communicate in those circles. If you never learned the slang and jargon for something you risk being the oddball and communicating is difficult.

Below are terms and phrases that are particularly useful for online business. Learning these is only the beginning of your language lessons. There are so many types of online business ventures that an exhaustive glossary would be beyond the scope of this introduction.

Affiliate Marketing - The act of marking a product by an affiliate for a sponsor. Often an entry point for people new to online businesses.

B2B and B2C - Business-2-business sell products and services to other businesses and Business-2-consumer are business that sell direct to consumers.

Banner - Banners are usually a graphic of various size and shape that acts like an advertisement. The object of banners is to have them placed in relevant website and use them to entice a surfer to click them.

Click-Through Rate - A click-through is the act of clicking on an online advertisement. The click-through rate is a calculation expressed as, click-through divided by impressions multiplied by 100.

CPC - Cost Per Click goes along with PPC. It is the price agreed to for each click on an advertisement. Usually a payment is made to the site hosting the advertisement for a specified amount of click-throughs to be delivered.

CPM - Cost Per Thousands is one way that banner and text ads impressions are calculated. For example 5 cents a word multiplied by 1,000 impressions is a $50.00 cost.

FFA - Free-For-All links page. A type of directory or links page that allows anyone to add their sites link. These links are considered to be of very little value.

Guerilla Marketing - Using unconventional marketing techniques that gain maximum results form small amounts of efforts or resources.

Impressions - Each time an advertisement is displayed it counts and one impression.

IBL - InBound Links are what make up link popularity. A link from one site pointing to another site is one inbound link. The more inbound links you have the more traffic you are likely to get.

Keyword and Key phrase - Terms that people use in search engines to find a specific product, service or type of information. This term is used a lot in search engine optimization (SEO) and is at the heart of understanding how to gain traffic directly from the major search engines.

Link - Links are code on one web page that links to a site, page, graphic or other type of media. In advertising links are how a surfer gets from one place to another just like a billboard with a phone number on it gets phone calls.

Link Popularity - Link popularity measures the number of sites that link to your site as well as the quality of those links. It is thought that the more links you have that point to your site the higher you will rank in searches performed in search engines.

PPC - Pay Per Click search engines are a method of getting surfers to you site by paying for each click on your add that they display on their site. Some companies offer honest programs that work for their clients and others are scams. Search for more information from search engines as well as forum post.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization is the process of selecting keywords to target and taking steps to ensure a website ranks well when a surfer searches for those keywords. SEO involves things like making sure there are certain keywords on the pages of a site, altering format to make some words or phrases stand out, developing IBLs (inbound links) and many other things that help a website rank higher for its keywords.

Text Link Ad - Text links ads are like newspaper ads and commercials but involve no graphics or partial graphics. The usual format of a text link advertisement is a short headline that links to the site being advertised and then a short text description of the site.

Conclusion

This is a very small introduction to the most common terms you will find in doing business online. It is strongly recommended that you explore these terms in depth. In doing further research into these terms you will quickly pick up the rest of the language from that topic as well as begin to build your skills as a professional eBusiness person.