I’ve worked in the web industry for 15 years. I’ve been talking about SEO and ROI for as long as I can remember. But what I often don’t remember is that most people don’t know exactly what those acronyms mean.
With that in mind, here are the translations of a wealth of abbreviations you might hear as you talk about building and maintaining your author website (and why it’s important to understand them).
- B2B – Business to business
(If you wrote a book for businesses, you’d build a B2B site) - B2C – Business to consumer
(The large majority of books are for general readers; those authors build B2C sites) - CMS – Content management system
(We use WordPress, but there are a variety of CMSs used to house website content and allow authors to make their own updates) - CTR – Click-thru rate
(Let’s say you send out a newsletter to promote your website. The percentage of people who actually click on the link from that newsletter to your site is your click-thru rate.) - FTP – File Transfer Protocol
(Changes are often made to your site via FTP. It’s basically a way to upload and download files from the web to your computer)
- HTML – HyperText Markup Language
(Many of our older sites — pre WordPress — were built in HTML, or straight web code) - PPC – Pay per click
(If you were to run a paid ad campaign, you would do so on a pay-per-click basis) - RSS – Really simple syndication
(This refers to a simple way for people to sign up and receive notification every time you post a new blog entry) - ROI- Return on investment
(How do you know if your PPC campaign is working? That’s based on how much money you’ve made off of it, or your return on investment) - SEM – Search engine marketing
(That paid ad campaign I just mentioned? It would be part of a search engine marketing campaign) - SEO – Search engine optimization
(This is the organic — i.e. free — way to get your site to appear near the top of Google search results) - SMM – Social media marketing
(This refers to your efforts to market your book and your site through Facebook, Twitter, etc…) - URL – Uniform Resource Locator
(This is your website address. Every site must have a unique URL) - WYSIWYG – What you see is what you get
(Have you ever made an update in WordPress, and been able to make changes without having to adjust code? That’s WYSIWYG)
Whew! Are you lettered out yet?
If you’ve heard other terms and aren’t sure what they mean, feel free to post a question in the “comments” section below! I’ll do my best to help!