No area of expertise is complete without lots of jargon and a sprinkling of TLA's, Marketing is no exception. Here is a small glossary for beginners to get started with, some you will probably have heard of already, or can guess the meaning.
Lead
Someone you have in your marketing sights. Someone who, with your help will soon be reaching your 'Goal'.
Goal
The target you have assigned to your Leads.
Lip care might be to buy a photo, get them to signup to a mailing list, navigate your site to reach a certain page, click an affiliate link etc.
Conversion
What happens when one of your leads reaches your goal, normally applied to the end of the sales process i.e. a sale rather than one of the 'funnel' steps on the way there. A conversion ratio is the percentage of your leads that convert into a goal.
Funnel
A series of steps which your leads pass through in order to reach goal. e.g. See your Ad > Click it > Read Web Page > Subscribe for Updates > Click on a link in an email > Buy a product. You can analyze the funnel to see where your leads are dropping out of the process. For affiliate marketing there is a dead-end where you lose track the buyer when they leave your site via an affiliate link, so you can only track people so far.
CTR
click through ratio, the percentage of people who when visiting a page click on a link or a banner of your choosing.
CRM
customer relationship management. The method (usually a software tool) by which you keep track of your leads and previous customers. It's quite common not to keep track of individuals at all when dealing with microstock. CRM software is employed by the sales teams in big business to convert the leads generated by the marketing department into paying customers.
CLV
customer lifetime value, how much you (estimate) that someone you have snared with your marketing hook with generate over the time they buy from you. Most of them (IMHO) will buy just the one image from you and never return, but the ones that you can turn into repeat customers (with reminder emails etc) are very valuable.
CAC
customer acquisition cost, how much you spend on advertising to gain one new 'average' customer. Say for example you market with email lists, the CAC may be the cost to get one person to signup. And the CLV is the value that the average customer brings you before they leave your list. This gets very hard to track when you apply it to anonymous things like RSS subscriptions. The same does apply, each RSS subscriber has a value.
SEM
Search engine marketing. Using paid placements and SEO methods to generate traffic to your website from a search engine.
SEO
Search engine optimization. Making your site understandable by search engine robots and creating strategic links. If you are not in the first page of results on Google then you are not really in business!
SES
Search Engine Submission - the 'art' of getting your website listed at a search engine, mostly comprises of the previous two
SERP
(or SERPs) Search Engine Results Page. Where your images should be. It's hard work as you face competition from all the microstock agencies who also want their images to be there.
MLM
stands for "multilevel marketing" and is a way to describe "pyramid schemes" without ringing alarm bells - steer clear!
Drip or Autoresponder Series, getting people to subscribe (usually with an incentive of information, or a freebie) to receive a sequence of predefined messages from you. The message being carefully tailored to be useful to the reader with a subtle marketing message on the side (that includes just keeping the viewer aware of your brand, and making regular visits to your site).