In this Issue:

1&1 NEWS
	1&1 Announcements
	Spotlight Article
	eMarketing News & Events
TIPS
	Ad Creatives
	Secrets To Success
	Tool Tips
	Affiliate Bonuses

January offers

1&1 is celebrating its 20th anniversary with our best special offer promotion yet!

We are offering 50% off everything!*

Yes, you read that correctly. All domains, hosting, and servers are 50% off! Over 30 products in all will cost half as much as what they normally do with our already low prices.

Affiliates who promote our special offers always see bigger commissions. Why? Because the consumers’ choices are made easier. It’s that simple.

Take 5 minutes and think about where you can place 1&1 banners or your tracking link. With a special offer this strong, the earlier you promote it, the more you can earn.

*Promotional 50% discount applies to first 3 months of a 12 month contract. After which regular prices will apply.

The Importance of Optimizing Your 404 Pages
Reprinted from searchmarketingstandard.com - original post from Joe Whyte

One of the most overlooked SEO techniques is optimizing your 404 error pages. It's a very simple process, especially if you have a formula or a template you build your sites in. Many SEOs today are unfamiliar with optimizing 404 pages or have not put the time and effort into developing these pages properly.

A 404 error message is a response delivered via an HTML document indicating that the request was unable to communicate with the server. Usually this is caused by a request not being able to locate a file or a link is broken on a site. Let's say you put up a site and when a spider crawls it, for some reason, the page is not loaded, requested or the link is broken. The unoptimized 404 error page will KILL the potential site spidering, causing a site to not rank in the search engines. This can also cause a novice user to get frustrated and abandon your site.

One of the best 404 error pages I have seen created is Searchenginewatch.com's 404 error page. The searchenginewatch.com error page implements its entire navigation, search box, RSS feed, advertisers, links to popular posts, news links and more. This means if a spider finds a 404 error page the spider will continue crawling and indexing the entire site without getting stopped by an unoptimized 404 page.

Some of the ways 404 pages are reached are:

• Bookmarked sites that have since been moved
• Made an error when typing in a url
• An moved page is still indexed in the SERPS
• Broken links in your link structure

What are some tips when customizing your 404 error pages?

1. Put a link to your FAQ page
2. Put a link to your top level categories
3. Put a link to your sitemap
4. Create a templated 404 page that blends with your site
5. Add a search box
6. Make your 404 pages look as close to your site theme as possible
7. Add a true navigation to your site.

Optimizing your 404 error page is one of the most overlooked SEO techniques I have seen in the industry. When doing SEO it is easy to become overwhelmed with doing your on-page and off-page optimization but failure to optimize this can lead to problems down the road and more importantly a tarnished reputation.

About Search Marketing Standard
Search Marketing Standard is the leading print publication covering the search marketing industry. It was launched in early 2006 with the goal to provide readers with practical, relevant and easy-to-understand information that they could apply to directly improve their search engine marketing campaigns.
Free 1-year subscription

All the news that's fit for affiliates and online marketers to read. Stay up to date with the latest news about affiliate marketing, search engines, e-mail and other issues which can affect your online marketing success.

News:
AffiliateTip.com - From affiliate marketer Shawn Collins
www.affiliatetip.com/affiliate_newsletter.php

ReveNews - Affiliate portal and newsletter
www./revenews.com/newsletter.html

MarketingSherpa.com - Premium Internet Marketing studies and research
www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters.html

SEO news - Weekly search engine optimization news
www.free-seo-news.com/index.php

Marketingnewz - Assorted marketing headlines
www.marketingnewz.com

Searchenginewatch - Top search engine news
www.searchenginewatch.com

MediaPost - Professional online marketers news and resources
www.mediapost.com

Events:

January 21 – January 23, 2008
DOMAINfest Global
Hollywood, CA

January 22 – January 23, 2008
Digital Media Measurement and Pricing Summit
New York, NY

February 24 – February 26, 2008
Affiliate Summit West 2008
Las Vegas, NV

February 26 – February 28, 2008
SMX Search Marketing Expo
Santa Clara, CA

A lot of attention is paid to banner ads. However even well designed, well placed banners are often ignored by your visitors. A targeted text link with your affiliate ID (?k_id=xxxxxx) contained can be much more effective in generating traffic to your advertiser's sites.
Here are some good examples:

• I have been with a few web hosts and none has offered the combination of value and great service quite like 1&1.
  
• This website was easy to make with 1&1’s Website Builder.
• You have to check out the great deals at 1&1. They are taking 50% off everything!

If you combine a good text link with one of our banners available in your 1&1 control panel you are more than doubling your chance for conversion.

Our current banner - If you don't have it yet, make sure to get it from your control panel: 1&1 Control Panel

TIP: Adding a line of text under or above the banner helps your visitors nderstand what you can do with 1&1 for example:

You have to check out the great deals at 1&1. They are taking 50% off everything!

Since our last eNews a few questions came up:

Q: I just found out about your affiliate program, but I have referred people in the past. Is there a way I can be paid commissions for these referrals?
A: Unfortunately, we can only credit referrals that are made through your affiliate tracking link. Our tracking and payout system is completely automated so that is the only way that we can grant commissions.

Q. I am concerned that when customers mouse over my text links and banners they will see that they are affiliate links and intentionally make a purchase without using my link. What can I do?
A: There are a lot of good tools that you can use to “cloak” you link so that when potential customers mouse over your ad, they will see a designated message. Here is a good link cloaker you can use.

Q. I just got an email from 1&1 stating that my commission has been credited, but I do not see it on my credit card statement. Where is my commission?
A. 1&1 automatically sends you an email when we credit a sale on our end. However, it usually takes the credit card companies or PayPal a couple of days to process a transaction on their end. You should see your commission credit in no more than 3 days.

These tools and newsletters are completely FREE. Hint: Add these goodies to your web favorites and grab them today.

NEW! Edit your picturs online for free!
http://snipshot.com

NEW! Design your logo FOR FREE with LogoMaker by HP.
http://www.logomaker.com/

Free widgets for your blog
http://www.widgetbox.com

Free CSS website templates:
http://www.opendesigns.org

Web Master Tools
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/

Search Engine Marketing Tools
http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex

Create a Googlerankings account
http://googlerankings.com/positiontracking/

Free website templates
http://www.oswd.org/

Free PDFmaker (great for making newsletters or eBooks that you can imbed your affiliate link into)
http://www.pdf995.com/

Affiliate marketing news and opinion from Shawn Collins
http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

NEW! 20% Off any order with Text-Link-Ads!
http://www.text-link-ads.com/1and1 (use promo code 1and1)

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Thanks again for your continued support of 1&1 and for your interest and participation in our affiliate program. We hope you were able to take a few valuable things away from this newsletter.
Feel free to share this newsletter with others and the value it creates for you and your site. We will continue to bring you the latest product and affiliate tips to help you increase your traffic and your 1&1 affiliate commissions.

Sincerely,