Markers

You may have heard the term marker before in regards to training a dog and, if not, then you’ve almost certainly heard of clicker training. Well, a clicker is a marker. It’s a sound (or word if you decide on using a verbal marker) we can use to ‘mark’ or ‘time-stamp’ a behaviour that our dog has done in order to let them know they’ve done something good that we would like to see more of.
Next question, how do we make this word or sound mean something to the dog? Answer, we use classical conditioning. We say the word or make the sound that will predict to the dog that something good is about to follow, the most obvious thing to use here is food.
The process:
Sound-> Food
Sound-> Food
Sound-> Food
The sound MUST ALWAYS come BEFORE the food because it is the sound that PREDICTS the delivery of food. The more repetitions of this then the stronger the response will become.
An important note here is that the word or sound must GARAUNTEE a reward (in this case food) every time its said or used.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

For those wishing to use a verbal marker, the following are good choices:
Yes
Chip (said with a high inflexion on the ’i’ making the word sound more like ‘cheep’)
Ultimately the word or sound doesn’t matter however it must be something that doesn’t just become background noise to the dog. It must hold weight and meaning and something you’re not likely to just randomly say to your dog