Some Internet Marketing Terminology explained...........What are cookies?

What are cookies?

Affiliate Marketing gets even more interesting because some merchants work with Cookies: 2-days Cookies, 7-days Cookies, 14-days Cookies, sometimes even lifetime Cookies. A Cookie is a text file that contains a form of ID (Identification) and is placed on a computer by a website. I will explain it from an affiliate marketing view. You, as the affiliate, are driving traffic to the merchant’s website with your affiliate link. A visitor clicks on your link and so visits the merchant’s website. He might not buy anything and leave the site but the merchant has left a cookie on the visitor’s computer. If that visitor returns to the site within 7 days of his first visit, you will still receive commission because the merchant has left a 7-day cookie. If the same visitor returns to the site on the eighth day after his very first visit, you will not receive commission.

If the visitor decides to go directly to the merchant to purchase the product, without clicking the link on your website, you will still earn commission because the visitor has your cookie on his or her computer and your affiliate ID is remembered. Once a cookie expires, the memory of your affiliate ID information also expires.

Each cookie has an expiry period, starting when the visitor clicks on your link for the very first time, and ending after a certain time. When signing up with affiliate networks, try to find merchants with lifetime cookies. There are not many but try to focus on finding them, it is worth it. Quite a lot of affiliate merchants do not offer any Cookies at all.
If you ever want to clear your cookies, there are two easy ways to do it:
1) Go to Internet Properties on your computer, click Delete under browsing history and make sure to tick Cookies on the next screen
2) Run a Spyware program (I use Spybot.com) and it will find cookies. You can then instruct Spyboyt to remove them