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Side Hustle & Affiliate Glossary

28 terms explained in plain English. Type a term below to jump straight to its definition — or to the post that goes deeper.

Affiliate Marketing

Getting paid a commission for referring a customer to someone else's product.

Affiliate marketing is promoting another company's product with a tracked link and earning a commission when someone you referred buys. You never handle the product, the fulfilment, or the support — the merchant does. It is the model behind the Side Hustle Summit partner program, where partners earn up to $1,031 per customer.

EPC (Earnings Per Click)

Average commission earned for every click you send to an offer.

EPC is total commissions divided by total clicks. A $2.00 EPC means every 100 clicks you send is worth about $200 in commissions on average. It is the fastest way to compare two offers, because it folds conversion rate and payout into one number.

Sales Funnel

A short, focused series of pages designed to produce one action.

A funnel strips away the navigation of a normal website and walks a visitor through a single path: attention, offer, checkout, upsell. Russell Brunson built ClickFunnels around this idea and covers it in DotCom Secrets.

Bridge Page

A page between your traffic and the offer that pre-sells the click.

A bridge page warms up a visitor in your own voice before handing them to the merchant's registration or checkout page. It usually explains why you recommend the offer, what the visitor will get, and what to do next.

Lead Magnet

A free, specific resource traded for an email address.

A lead magnet is a checklist, template, swipe file, mini-course or guide given away in exchange for contact details. The best ones solve one narrow problem in under ten minutes so the promise is instantly believable.

Opt-In

The moment a visitor gives you permission to email them.

An opt-in is a form submission where someone gives their name, email and sometimes phone number in exchange for something. Opt-in rate — opt-ins divided by page visitors — is the main metric for a squeeze page or registration page.

JV Partner

A joint-venture partner who promotes a launch to their audience.

A JV (joint venture) partner promotes someone else's launch in exchange for commissions, prizes and reciprocal promotion. Virtual summits like the Side Hustle Summit are built on JV partners driving registrations during a launch window.

Virtual Summit

A free multi-day online event built around expert sessions.

A virtual summit gathers several experts for a series of free live or pre-recorded sessions over a set window, usually to build an email list and sell a paid offer at the end. The Side Hustle Summit runs five live sessions on September 6, 7, 8, 9 & 13, 2026 at 1 PM ET.

Faceless Business

An online business that never requires you to appear on camera.

A faceless business uses written content, voiceovers, stock and AI-generated visuals, or automated systems instead of a personal on-camera brand. It is the core promise of the Side Hustle Summit: going from zero to launch without showing your face.

AI Side Hustle

A part-time income stream where AI does most of the production work.

An AI side hustle uses tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to produce the deliverable — content, design, research, automation — so one person can run an offer that used to need a team. The work shifts from making things to choosing the offer, the traffic source and the quality bar.

Prize Pool

Cash and prizes paid on top of commissions during a launch contest.

A prize pool rewards top-performing partners during a promotion window, usually via leaderboards for opt-ins and sales. The Side Hustle Summit partner program advertises a $127,500 total prize pool alongside per-customer commissions.

Leaderboard

A public ranking of partners by opt-ins or sales during a contest.

Leaderboards rank affiliates by a chosen metric across a contest window. Opt-in leaderboards reward volume of registrations; sales leaderboards reward revenue driven, and are usually where the largest prizes sit.

Conversion Rate

The share of visitors who take the action you wanted.

Conversion rate is actions divided by visitors, expressed as a percentage. Track it separately for each step — registration page, attendance, purchase — because one weak step is usually responsible for a disappointing campaign.

UTM Parameters

Query tags that tell analytics where a visitor came from.

UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content) are appended to a URL so analytics tools can group traffic by source and campaign. They do not pay you — the affiliate ID does that — but they tell you which post or email actually worked.

Evergreen vs. Launch

Always-on promotion versus a concentrated push around a date.

Evergreen promotion runs continuously through content and search traffic. Launch promotion concentrates effort into a short window with deadlines, contests and bonuses. Most partners do best combining both: evergreen content that ranks all year, pointed at a launch when the window opens.

Warm vs. Cold Traffic

People who already know you versus people who never heard of you.

Warm traffic (your list, community or followers) converts several times better because trust already exists. Cold traffic from ads or search needs a bridge page or a piece of content to build that trust before the offer.

Email Sequence

A pre-written series of emails sent automatically after opt-in.

A sequence delivers the lead magnet, tells a relevant story, handles objections and makes the offer over several days. For a summit, the sequence typically drives registration, then reminds people to actually show up for each live session.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — how Google judges quality.

E-E-A-T is the framework Google's raters use to assess whether content deserves visibility, especially for money topics. In practice it means a real named author, first-hand experience, verifiable claims, and clear affiliate disclosure.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Optimizing so AI answer engines cite your page.

AEO structures a page so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and AI Overviews can lift a clean answer from it: a direct answer in the first lines, clear headings, FAQ blocks, structured data, and crawler access for AI bots in robots.txt.

Backend Offer

The paid product sold after the free front-end event.

The front end (a free summit, webinar or challenge) collects registrations; the backend offer is where revenue is made. Affiliate commissions on a summit are usually paid on backend purchases, not on the free registration itself.

Commission Per Customer

Total payout a partner can earn from one referred buyer.

Commission per customer sums every commissionable purchase a single referred person makes across the funnel. The Side Hustle Summit partner program advertises up to $1,031 per customer, which assumes the buyer takes the highest-value path — it is a maximum, not an average.

Replay

A recording of a live session available for a limited time.

Replays let registrants who missed the live broadcast catch up, usually within a 24-hour window to preserve urgency. Summit replays are one of the strongest reasons to still register after a session has already aired.

Squeeze Page

A one-purpose page whose only job is capturing an email.

A squeeze page removes navigation and offers one clear trade: a specific promise for a name and email. Registration pages for free events are squeeze pages with a date attached.

Niche

The specific audience and problem your hustle serves.

A niche is the intersection of a defined audience and a problem they already spend money solving. Narrow niches win early because the content, the offer and the traffic source can all be tightly matched.

Traffic Secrets

Russell Brunson's framework for finding where your audience already is.

Traffic Secrets is the third book in Russell Brunson's trilogy (after DotCom Secrets and Expert Secrets). Its central idea is the Dream 100: identify the places your ideal customers already gather, then earn or buy your way in.

Agency Navigator

Iman Gadzhi's program on building a service-based agency.

Agency Navigator is Iman Gadzhi's flagship training on starting and scaling a digital marketing agency — client acquisition, service delivery and pricing. It is the work he is best known for and the background he brings to the Side Hustle Summit sessions.

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