Every field has its own vocabulary, and this one has more than its share. None of it is complicated once somebody says it plainly. That's all this page does - definitions, with no strategy attached.
You don't have to read it in order, or at all. Come back whenever a word trips you up.
You recommend somebody else's product. If the person you sent goes on to buy it, the company pays you a share of the sale.
You don't make the product. You don't hold inventory, take the payment, ship anything, or handle the refund when somebody changes their mind. The company does all of that. Your part is the recommendation and the link.
The link is what makes it work. It's an ordinary web address with an identifier attached to it - yours. When somebody clicks that version of the address and buys, the company's system knows which account to credit.
That's the entire mechanism. Everything else you'll ever read about affiliate marketing is a method for getting more of the right people to see the link.
The names and email addresses of people who asked to hear from you.
The word "list" makes it sound like a spreadsheet you could buy somewhere. It isn't. Every person on a real list typed their own address into a form and clicked a button. That permission is the whole point, and it's also the law in most places.
Why would anyone hand over an address? Because you offered something specific they wanted, and the address was the price.
A list is yours in a way a social media following isn't. You can write to those people without paying anyone for the privilege, and without a platform deciding how many of them get to see it.
Software that sends email for you, on a schedule you set in advance.
You write five emails once. You decide that email one goes out the day somebody joins, email two the next day, email three three days later, and so on. Then you stop thinking about it. Every new subscriber starts on their own day one - somebody who joins on a Tuesday in March gets email one that Tuesday, and somebody who joins next year gets the same email on their own first day.
Most autoresponders also let you write a one-off email to everybody at once. That's called a broadcast.
Underneath the name, it's a scheduler with a mailing list attached to it.
A single web page with one job: collect an email address.
No menu across the top. No sidebar. No links going anywhere else. A headline, a short promise, one field to type an address into, and one button.
You'll also see it called a capture page, a squeeze page, or an opt-in page. Same thing.
The difference between a landing page and a website is what you're asking the visitor to do. A website invites people to wander around. A landing page asks one question and waits for the answer.
Currency inside an advertising network. You earn credits by viewing other members' ads, and you spend credits to have your own ad shown to them.
No money changes hands. Time is the payment. This is how a free account on a platform like LeadsLeap gets traffic - you sit down, you look at other people's ads for a while, and the credits you earn buy views on yours.
Paid accounts on most of these platforms are structured so you do less of that, or none of it. That trade - your time against a monthly fee - is a real decision, and it's one worth making later, with your own numbers in front of you, rather than now.
The money you're paid for a sale you referred.
It's either a flat amount per sale or a percentage of the price. Both are common.
The distinction worth knowing is one-time versus recurring. A one-time commission is paid once, when the person buys. A recurring commission is paid every month the person stays subscribed to whatever they bought. That's why so many people promote software - the sale keeps paying as long as the customer sticks around.
Commissions are paid after the refund window closes, not the moment somebody clicks. And nobody owes you anything until a sale actually happens. That's the honest shape of the arrangement, and it cuts both ways.
The small useful thing you give away in exchange for an email address.
A checklist, a short guide, a template, a list of the tools you use. It doesn't have to be big. It has to be finished, and it has to solve one small problem completely.
The name is unfortunate - it makes people sound like filings being pulled toward a magnet. You'll see it everywhere, so it's worth knowing, but nothing bad happens if you just call it the thing you give away.
Someone choosing to join your list.
They type their email address into a box, click the button, and they have opted in. The word simply means they asked to be there rather than being added by you.
You'll also see it used as a description of things: an opt-in page is a page whose job is collecting addresses, and an opt-in form is the box and button that collect them.
The opposite matters more than it sounds. Adding people who never asked - from a contact list, a business card, a purchased file - is not opting in, and it's the difference between an email list and a spam complaint.
One person on your email list.
That's the whole definition. Not a customer, not a lead, not a prospect. Somebody who gave you an address and can now hear from you.
They stay a subscriber until they unsubscribe, which they're free to do at any time, from any email you send.
A single web page with one job: offering something and asking for an email address in return.
It's a landing page - see above - narrowed to one purpose. Where a landing page is any page somebody lands on, a capture page is specifically the one that captures the address.
You'll also hear it called an opt-in page, a squeeze page, or a lead capture page. Same thing, four names. LeadsLeap calls it an opt-in page inside its page builder.
What makes it different from a normal web page is what's been taken away. No menu, no links to elsewhere, nothing to click except one button.
The extra step where a new subscriber has to click a link in an email before they properly join your list.
Someone types their address into your page. Before they're really on your list, the system sends them an email that says, in effect, "was this you?" They click the link, and only then are they a subscriber you can write to.
You'll also see it called double opt-in. Same thing.
It costs you some signups, because not everybody clicks. What it gives you is a list of people who definitely wanted to be there and definitely typed their own address. LeadsLeap works this way, and it isn't optional there.
One consequence worth knowing: an address that never gets confirmed doesn't sit around waiting. In LeadsLeap it's deleted after 30 days.
The United States law covering commercial email. It's an acronym, and not a very good one.
For a one-person list, it comes down to a short list of things you must do:
- Put a real postal address in your emails. A PO box or a mailbox service counts.
- Give people a working way to unsubscribe, and honor it promptly.
- Don't lie in your subject line or your "from" name about who you are or what's inside.
Most email tools handle the unsubscribe link for you automatically. The postal address is the part you have to supply yourself, which is why the setup form asks for it.
The penalties are real, and this is the one piece of admin in the course that isn't optional.
The name LeadsLeap uses for its email side - the part that stores your subscribers and sends your emails.
Same account, same login, different name. You'll be working inside LeadsLeap, click something about your list, and suddenly see the word SendSteed with no explanation.
Nothing has gone wrong and you haven't missed a signup. It's the same company's autoresponder, wearing its own name. It confuses everybody exactly once.
The short identifier that tells a page which list to send addresses to.
Every list you create gets one. When you connect a capture page to a list, you're really telling the page that list's ID.
The reason it's worth knowing the term: it's how you check the connection worked. If the ID is showing in your page settings, the page and the list are joined up. If it's blank, they aren't - and any address somebody enters goes nowhere at all, while the page carries on looking perfectly fine.
A short code that copies a finished page from one LeadsLeap account into another.
Somebody builds a page, generates a code for it, and gives you the code. You paste it in, and their page appears in your account, where you can change the words to yours.
It's a shortcut past the design work rather than a shortcut past the thinking. The words on the page still have to be yours, and the page still has to be connected to your own list before it does anything for you.
What LeadsLeap calls a page you've created.
The word "campaign" suggests something bigger and more marketing-sounding than it is. In practice a page campaign is one web address, which can hold one or more designs.
If the menu offers you "add a new page campaign" and you were looking for "add a new page" - that's the one.
Sending somebody automatically to a different web page.
You'll meet it as an optional setting: after someone signs up, you can send them straight on to another page - a thank-you page, or whatever you were recommending.
If you leave the setting empty, nothing is broken. The person simply stays where they are and sees the normal after-signup message.
That's all the word means. "Getting traffic" is getting people to look at something of yours, and one visitor is one person arriving on one page.
It sounds like a bigger, more technical thing than it is, and it borrows the language of roads and volume in a way that quietly turns people into a substance. Worth remembering that every unit of traffic is somebody with a phone in their hand, deciding within a second or two whether to stay.
An ad you pay for with credits instead of money.
You post the ad, and every time somebody visits your page through it, one credit comes off your balance. Earn credits by viewing other members' ads; spend them getting people to look at yours.
On a free LeadsLeap account you can run three of them at once, and they expire after 14 days, so they need updating every couple of weeks or they quietly stop.
The ad itself is very small: a title of up to 25 characters and a line of text between 40 and 60. Spaces count toward both.
An ad available to paying LeadsLeap members, which runs without needing credits.
It's the paid alternative to a credit ad. Where a credit ad costs you a credit per visitor - and credits cost you time - a pro ad runs as part of the membership.
Worth knowing the term because you'll see it in menus and in other people's advice. Nothing in this course needs one.
Viewing other people's ads to earn credits.
An old word from the early internet that has stuck around in this corner of it. "Surf ten ads" means open ten ads and look at them.
At LeadsLeap a view has to last at least five seconds to count for anything, and the longer you look, the more credits it earns, up to one minute.
The separate window an ad opens in when you click it.
Rather than sending you off to the advertiser's website and losing you, the system opens the ad in its own window with a strip along the edge that tracks your viewing time. Close it when you're done and the next ad appears.
The practical consequence: if pop-up windows are blocked in your browser, ads may not open at all.
Two ways of deciding how much of your credit balance an ad is allowed to spend.
Auto Mode lets the ad run whenever there are credits in your account. It's the normal setting.
Preload Mode sets aside a fixed number of credits for that one ad. When they're used up the ad stops, even if there are credits sitting in your account.
Preload matters when you're running several ads and want to keep one from eating everything. With one ad, Auto is simpler.
Paying somebody to email their list about your offer.
You pay a fee, they send an email to their subscribers with your link in it, and you hope some of them join your list. The name comes from your offer being the only thing in the email.
It's one of the most common ways beginners spend money online, and one of the easiest places to be sold something worthless - a list of addresses that never opens anything, or clicks that were never people. Judging one takes numbers you won't have for a while.
One dot on a screen. It's the unit images are measured in.
An image described as 300 x 250 pixels is 300 dots across and 250 down - a small, slightly wide rectangle, about the size of a credit card on most screens. A photo from your phone is far bigger, often 4,000 dots across or more.
The number matters when something asks for an exact size. A picture bigger than the space it's going into doesn't always shrink to fit - often you just see a piece of it at full size, which is how you end up with an ad showing somebody's shoulder.
Sometimes shortened to "px", which is what you'll see in the size boxes of design tools.
The particular group of people you write for, and the subject you write to them about.
That's the whole thing. A niche isn't a business category or a market sector - it's the answer to two questions. Who is this for, and what is it about.
The word causes more trouble than it's worth for anybody starting out. "Pick a niche" sounds like choosing from a list somebody else already wrote, which is exactly why people sit looking at a blank page. In practice you rarely pick one. You notice which one you have been standing in for years.
Narrower is usually better, which feels backwards. "Gardening" is a subject. "Getting a first raised bed through its first summer" is a niche, and the person in that situation recognizes themselves in it.
Nothing on this page is a strategy. It's just the vocabulary. When you're ready to start, Module 1 is where the course begins.
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Module 4 - Your first twenty visitors
Module 5 - What to say to new subscribers
Module 6 - The sequence that runs without you
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