Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors and various types of affiliates/publishers who utilize a number of different methods to advertise the products and services of their merchant/advertiser partners.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates are using the same methods as most of the merchants themselves do. Those methods include organic Search Engine optimization, paid Search Engine marketing, email marketing and to some degree display advertising.
Affiliate marketing - using one site to drive Traffic to another - is the stepchild of online marketing. While search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing, despite lineage that goes back almost to the beginning of online retailing, carries a much lower profile. Yet affiliates continue to play a fundamental role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.[
Ajax, or Ajax, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.
The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is asynchronous in that loading does not interfere with normal page loading. JavaScript is the programming language in which Ajax function calls are made. Data retrieved using the technique is commonly formatted using XML, as reflected in the naming of the XMLHttpRequest object from which Ajax is derived.
Ajax is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and Web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and XML, together with open source implementations of other required technologies.
A Web Browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. Text and images on a Web page can contain hyperlinks to other Web pages at the same or different website. Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many Web pages at many websites by traversing these links. Web browsers format HTML information for display, so the appearance of a Web page may differ between browsers.
Some of the Web browsers available for personal computers include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape in order of descending popularity (in August 2006).[1] Web browsers are the most commonly used type of HTTP user agent. Although browsers are typically used to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by Web servers in private networks or content in file systems.
In Internet marketing the Conversion Rate is the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting the website. The desired action may be submitting a sales lead, making a purchase, viewing a key page of the site, downloading a whitepaper, or some other measureable action.
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright and is the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.
Copyleft is a form of licensing and may be used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. In general, copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may, through a Copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same Copyleft licensing scheme. A widely used and originating Copyleft license is the GNU General Public License (GPL). Similar licenses are available through Creative Commons - called Share-alike.
Copyleft may also be characterized as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no copyright restrictions are imposed), Copyleft allows an author to impose some but not all copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Under copyleft, copyright infringement may be avoided if the would-be infringer perpetuates the same Copyleft scheme. For this reason Copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses.
In computing, Cron is a time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name is derived from Greek chronos (??????), meaning time.
Cron has been recreated several times in its history.
Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web Browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator Browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform Browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems, including FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, RISC OS, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Firefox's source code is available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license (MPL/GPL/LGPL) as free and open source software. The current stable release of Firefox is version 2.0.0.6, released on July 30, 2007.
According to Market Share by Net Applications, 14.55% of the world's Web browsers used Firefox in June 2007, with 13.92% using version 1.5 or higher.
Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both the Adobe Flash Player, and to the Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program. Adobe Flash Professional is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices). The Flash Player, developed and distributed by Adobe Systems (which acquired Macromedia in a merger that was finalized in December 2005), is a client application available in most common web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript and bi-directional streaming of audio and video. There are also versions of the Flash Player for mobile phones and other non-PC devices.
Strictly speaking, Adobe Flash Professional is an integrated development environment (IDE) while Flash Player is a virtual machine used to run, or parse, the Flash files. But in contemporary colloquial terms "Flash" can refer to the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.
Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web-page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.
The Flash files, traditionally called "Flash movies" or "Flash games", have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie with the .exe extension in Windows. Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are utilized from within .swf files.
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.
The format uses a palette of up to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.
GIF images are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. Though the relevant patents have all since expired, the controversy over the licensing agreement between the patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 led to the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard.
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. It is the license used by the Linux operating system. The GPL is the most popular and well known example of the type of strong Copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL is said to grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses Copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to. This is in distinction to permissive free software licences, of which the BSD licenses are the standard examples.
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a modified, more permissive, version of the GPL, intended for some software libraries. There is also a GNU Free Documentation License, which was originally intended for use with documentation for GNU software, but has also been adopted for other uses, such as the Wikipedia project.
HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of labels (known as tags), surrounded by less-than (<) and greater-than signs (>). HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded scripting language code which can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.
HTML is also often used to refer to content of the MIME type text/HTML or even more broadly as a generic term for HTML whether in its XML-descended form (such as XHTML 1.0 and later) or its form descended directly from SGML (such as HTML 4.01 and earlier).
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a communications protocol used to transfer or convey information on the World Wide Web. Its original purpose was to provide a way to publish and retrieve HTML hypertext pages. Development of HTTP was coordinated by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), culminating in the publication of a series of RFCs, most notably RFC 2616 (1999), which defines HTTP/1.1, the version of HTTP in common use today.
HTTP is a request/response protocol between clients and servers. The client making an HTTP request - such as a web Browser, spider, or other end-user tool - is referred to as the user agent. The responding server - which stores or creates resources such as HTML files and images - is called the origin server. In between the user agent and origin server may be several intermediaries, such as proxies, gateways, and tunnels. It is useful to remember that HTTP does not need to use TCP/IP or its supporting layers. Indeed HTTP can be "implemented on top of any other protocol on the Internet, or on other networks. HTTP only presumes a reliable transport; any protocol that provides such guarantees can be used."
An HTTP client initiates a request by establishing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to a particular port on a host (port 80 by default; see List of TCP and UDP port numbers). An HTTP server listening on that port waits for the client to send a request message.
Upon receiving the request, the server sends back a status line, such as "HTTP/1.1 200 OK", and a message of its own, the body of which is perhaps the requested file, an error message, or some other information.
Resources to be accessed by HTTP are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) (or, more specifically, URLs) using the HTTP: or HTTPS URI schemes.
HTTPS is a URI scheme used to indicate a secure HTTP connection. It is syntactically identical to the http:// scheme normally used for accessing resources using HTTP. Using an HTTPS: URL indicates that HTTP is to be used, but with a different default TCP port (443) and an additional encryption/authentication layer between the HTTP and TCP. This system was designed by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authentication and encrypted communication and is widely used on the World Wide Web for security-sensitive communication such as payment transactions and corporate logons.
A hyperlink (often referred to as simply a link), is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document, another document, or a specified section of another document, that automatically brings the referred information to the user when the navigation element is selected by the user. Combined with a data network and suitable access protocol, a computer can be instructed to fetch the resource referenced.
Hyperlinks are part of the foundation of the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee, but are not limited to HTML or the web. Hyperlinks may be used in almost any electronic media.
Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a way to allow online retailers to handle real-time purchase confirmation and server-to-server communication. This allows the retailer to store transaction or order information in its own database to track its own sales data internally.
PayPal notifies a specified URL by an HTTP POST method, the URL should point to an IPN script that should process payment notifications. The first thing that must be done in the script is to validate the notification with PayPal.
Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of proprietary graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995.
After the first release for Windows 95, additional versions of Internet Explorer were developed for other operating systems: Internet Explorer for Mac and Internet Explorer for UNIX (the latter for use through the X Window System on Solaris and HP-UX). Only the Windows version remains in active development; the Mac OS X version is no longer supported.
It has been the most widely used web Browser since 1999, peaking at nearly 90% market share with IE6 in the early 2000s—corresponding to over 900 million users worldwide by 2006.[1][2]
Though released in 1995 as part of the initial OEM release of Windows 95, Internet Explorer was not included in the first retail, or shrink-wrap, release of Windows 95. The most recent release is version 7.0, which is available as a free update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, and Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or later, and is included with Windows Vista. Versions of Internet Explorer prior to 6.0 SP2 are also available as a separate download for versions of Windows prior to Windows XP. An embedded OEM version called Internet Explorer for Windows CE (IE CE) is also available for WinCE based platforms and is currently based on IE6. Another Windows CE/ Windows Mobile Browser known as Internet Explorer Mobile is from a different codebase and should not be confused with desktop versions of the Browser.
JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. "JavaScript" is an implementation of the ECMAScript standard.
JavaScript is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions. JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to have a similar look to Java, but be easier for non-programmers to work with. The language is best known for its use in websites (as client-side JavaScript), but is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications.
Despite the name, JavaScript is unrelated to the Java programming language; though both have a common debt to C syntax. The language was renamed from LiveScript in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with their Browser, which was dominant at the time. JavaScript semantics is much more similar to the Self programming language.
"JavaScript" is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. It was used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape Communications and current entities such as the Mozilla Foundation.
The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software programs, commonly open source programs, used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers. The original expansion is as follows:
* Linux, referring to the operating system;
* Apache, the Web server;
* MySQL, the database management system (or database server);
* PHP, the programming language.
The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server infrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package. More recently, the P has come to refer frequently to Perl or Python as alternate programming languages.
MySQL (pronounced (IPA) /m?? ?s kju? ?l/, "my S-Q-L") is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS)[1] which has, according to MySQL AB, more than 10 million installations.[2]
MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. This is similar to the JBoss model and how the Free Software Foundation handles copyright in its projects. It is dissimilar to the Apache project, where the software is developed by a public community and the copyright to the codebase is owned by its individual authors.
The company develops and maintains the system, selling support and service contracts, as well as proprietary-licensed copies of MySQL, and employing people all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. MySQL AB was founded by David Axmark, Allan Larsson, and Michael "Monty" Widenius. The CEO is Mårten Mickos.
The MySQL company also sells another DBMS, MaxDB, which is from an unrelated codebase.
Netscape Navigator, also known as Netscape, was a proprietary web Browser that was popular during the 1990s. Once the flagship product of Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant Browser in usage share, its user base had almost completely evaporated by 2002, partly due to the inclusion of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web Browser with the Windows operating system, but also due to lack of significant innovation after the late 1990s. Netscape's demise was a central component of Microsoft's antitrust trial, where the court ruled that (among other things) bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was an illegal monopolistic business practice.
The Navigator Browser was succeeded by the Netscape Communicator internet suite, followed by later releases Netscape 6, Netscape 7 and Netscape Browser 8.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of Search Engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google Search Engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools.
The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.
PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as cheques and money orders. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other corporate users, for which it charges a fee. On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay.[1] Its corporate headquarters are in San Jose, California, at eBay's North First Street satellite office campus. The company also has significant operations in Omaha, Nebraska; Dublin, Ireland; and Berlin, Germany.
Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. It has been described as "an industry standard for graphics professionals."[1] Although originally designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop can also be used for a wide range of other professional and amateur purposes.
The current (10th) iteration of the program, Photoshop CS3, was released on 16 April 2007. "CS" reflects its integration with other Creative Suite products, and the number "3" represents it as the third version released since Adobe re-branded its products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS3 features additions such as the ability to apply non-destructive filters, as well as new selection tools named Quick Selection and Refine Edge that make selection more streamlined. On April 30th, Adobe released Photoshop CS3 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users.
PHP is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications. Textual User Interfaces can also be created using ncurses. PHP is a recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".
The main implementation is produced by The PHP Group and released under the PHP License. It is considered to be free software by the Free Software Foundation. This implementation serves to define a de facto standard for PHP, as there is no formal specification.
Currently, two major versions of PHP are being actively developed: 5.x and 4.4.x; on July 13, 2007, the PHP group announced that active development on PHP4 will cease by December 31, 2007, however, critical security updates will be provided until August 8, 2008.
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel", contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.
RSS content can be read using software called a "feed reader" or an "aggregator." The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a Browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.
The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats:
* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats.
