1&1 is constantly working to give our customers even more than they expect, more than any other hosting company and at prices lower than any other major company.

This continuous improvement makes it even easier for affiliates like you to promote us. There are so many reasons why millions of people have trusted 1&1 that you are sure to find one which can motivate your referrals to join us as well. We will try to highlight how some of these improvements can help you market your site and your 1&1 affiliate ads.

NEW 1&1 Product News Brief

SEO tools - Optimize & build traffic and learn from your competition.

1&1 Blog - Build search engine friendly content and easily integrate your affiliate link, for a detailed description on how to do this, visit: http://faq.1and1.com/applications/blog/14.html

RSS feed builder - RSS allows you to create content that can be picked up by thousands of other websites, if this content is found valuable your content and affiliate link will not only be viewed by your visitors but also by the visitors from the sites that use your content.

"It's not a matter of putting up a few ads and grabbing a paycheck" Derek Gehl, owner, Internet Marketing Center.

Traffic and Targeting -

Say you have a beautiful site, but no traffic. What if you have an absolutely great email newsletter, but nobody reads it. This is a broad marketing issue, but it applies to your promotion of your 1&1 affiliate text or banner ads. Generating additional site traffic will of course increase the chances of revenue from your affiliate link by increasing the number of people who click on it. Traffic is often a webmaster's primary challenge. While we will touch on some general traffic building topics in every issue of this newsletter, but the subject is too broad for a single newsletter. Search engines, offline marketing, online community participation are usually the first strategies used to jump start traffic. The mix of strategies may be different for different sites, so each webmaster should test and measure several to find what works best for their site. Paid ads? Incoming link building? There are many strategies you can and should test.

Targeting your referrals means explaining to the viewers of your affiliate ad/link "WHY" you are showing it to them in the first place. The same reasons you chose to use 1&1 are likely to be the same reasons your audience will choose us as well. Personal observations or testimonials to your audience about 1&1 can motivate them to visit and buy though your link. This seems simple, but many affiliates still think that a simple banner or link is all that is required to target the audience you want to click on it. Sometimes it is (for example if you have a web page about hosting and domains) but most sites topics are not 100% relevant to hosting and domains, so you need to give the viewer of your 1&1 ad a reason to click! Even if your site or page has nothing to do with hosting, if you give the readers some context as to why you placed the ad/link it will increase your clicks (and sales).

Next we will give a couple tactics to help target and increase the clicks you can send to 1&1 using you tracking link.

Placing text descriptions near your 1&1 ads/links explaining why you recommend 1&1 usually works well. Your visitors will trust your recommendation if they know that you are using the ones that you recommend your self. It is also great for those who have image disabling activated in their browser, with description text, they are still able to view your ads.

Another widely used method by our affiliates is to embed the affiliate link in their email signature tag like in the example below:

Kind regards,

Your Name
Your Company name

www.yourwebsite.com
------------------------
My Web Site and email are hosted by 1&1 Internet Inc. (Make "1&1 Internet Inc." a link using your affiliate link)
------------------------

We have seen hundreds of variations on this one, please contact us if you need feedback on your own custom signature, or if you need ideas for original signature tags.

How can I deep link to a specific product page?

In order to "deep link" to a specific product page, navigate to that specific page, copy the url from the address bar, then you need to strip the url just after the product name and add "?k_id=xxxxxxx" (without the quotation marks - this is your affiliate ID)

Here is how a deep link to our MS exchange page would look like:

http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/MailExchange?k_id=xxxxxxx (where xxxxxxx is your affiliate ID - same as customer ID)

Keep in mind that you always have to test your link when making it custom, here is how you can do this:

- clear the cookies and cache from your internet browser,
- place a test order using your custom link,
- continue all the way to the credit step.

You know that your custom link works when you have reached the credit card step without getting the referral step where we ask you were you did hear about us.

A customer would only have the referral question when he comes directly to the website typing www.1and1.com

Deep linking is very useful when you want to send out our free software offer or one of our other offers to friends or to a mailing list with a little intro text.

We suggest when using deep linking to send us the link to check it for you to make sure it works.

We'd love to hear what you think of this issue!

Are there special questions about how to best position or promote your 1&1 ads (and tracking link?)

Would you like to share your own success with other 1&1 affiliates?

Please send your comments, questions, and ideas for upcoming issues to us at: