You will see a lot of abbreviated terms thrown around on the site and in the forums in particular. Heres a rundown of some of these terms and some more used Affiliate Terminology :-

Payment Methods

Sale % (Pay Per Sale) - You are paid a percentage of the sale which you generate. So if you link to say a CD site and you get 10% commission, you'd get $1.50 for every $15.00 CD sold.

Lead (Pay Per Lead) - A lead is when you link to a site and a visitor goes through your site to theirs and generates some sort of action. This usually requires the visitor to sign up for something, be it a newsletter or forum or whatever. It could even be for a sale. Leads where the person has to sign up for a newsletter are usually around 50 cents where leads to credit card sites can be as much as $30.00 per lead.

Click Throughs (Pay Per Click) - This is self explanatory. You get paid per click for every visitor you generate for your affiliated site. Click throughs are not as common as they were a few years ago with most bigger affiliate networks using sale % and lead payment methods.

CPM (Pay Per thousand Impressions) - An impression is one display of a banner. So 10,000 page views of a banner would be equal to 10,000 impressions. CPM is a term used to determine the rate you get paid for every 1000 impressions of a banner. So a CPM of $3.00 means that you would get paid $3.00 for every 1000 impressions displayed. This method of payment is usually implemented on Ad Based Affiliate Networks.

CTR (Click Through Rate) - This is shown as a percentage. If a link is clicked 5 times on average of every 100 impressions the link would have a CTR of 5%.

Types of Affiliates

Advertiser - An advertiser is some one who is paying to have their site advertised. In Merchant based affiliate networks they are the merchants.

Publisher - The publisher is the webmaster who is advertising other companies sites and products in return for revenue. In relation to Advertisers, publishers are their affiliates.

2-Tier - The 2-Tier affiliate can be an advertiser, publisher or both. Is a term referred to those that signed up through you. You make a percent or fee of the sales of advertisers or affiliates that sign up through you. Usually these sales last for the life of the program. 2 Tier programs offer webmasters an excellent avenue to earn repeat revenue and are the most desired types of affiliate programs..