Participation is easy. All you need to do is promote 1&1 products through your affiliate links during February and March. This earns you money and gives you the chance to win this amazing award!

The three affiliates with the highest aggregate sales commission earned during February-March will get a fantastic opportunity to watch the famous America’s Cup yacht race and meet the 1&1 team in person. The race will take place in Valencia, on Spain’s Mediterranean coastline from June 21-24th.

“3 Easy Steps to Owning a Content-Driven Affiliate Marketing Website”

By Joshua Sloan

It is probably no secret that many of the best affiliate marketers drive lots of sales through paid PPC search marketing. The inherent problems with this marketing strategy are three-fold:

1. Depending on the niche or industry vertical, this can be an expensive option. Often affiliate marketers will invest from 10% to 60% of their commissions just to pay for the clicks. Ouch!
2. Some months you win and get a good ROI (return on investment), some months you may lose or just break even. Unless you have a long-term outlook, a losing or break-even month may make you want to pull out of PPC. In some ways PPC for affiliate marketers is like the stock market – lucrative if you know what you are doing and can afford to play the game.
3. The "inefficiency margin". Because affiliates are often competing with each other, or even the company for which they are trying to drive sales, for the inefficiency margin of PPC can result from: affiliates that don't know how to pick good keywords or phrases, crazy bidding strategies aka "bid wars" which drive everyone's costs up and text ads which are poorly written or even borderline deceptive.

As a holistic marketer, I always counsel people to take a diversified approach to their online marketing efforts, much as a stockbroker would recommend a diversified stock portfolio. Why? The answer is simple - when one marketing strategy takes a "hit" and fails to break even, other strategies can help to offset the loss until you can regain the lost ground.

Common Strategies of a Diversified Online Marketing Portfolio

There are many techniques that an affiliate can use to promote a company. Some of the most popular (and profitable) are:

1. Pay-Per-Click search engines. The techniques for optimizing this strategy can be time consuming and expensive. Keyword research tools and bid management software is available to help. Results can fluctuate as search behavior varies and depending on your budget. However, results (visits/sales) can be quick! Venture into PPC at your own risk.

2. Viral Marketing. This can be relatively low-cost. It includes such things as adding affiliate links to the signature portion of all of your emails and using newsletters which encourage their reader to "spread the word", using free reports or give-aways to encourage people to get others to your site. Note: spreading your affiliate link to friends, family and colleagues offline can be considered to be "viral" as well if they in turn tell others.

3. Natural Search. This involves placing affiliate ads (banners or text links) into a website- preferably. With proper optimization, a website that gets listed in the search engines can bring a little or a lot of no-cost traffic to the affiliate programs being promoted. The fact is most "review sites" are really just affiliate sites, though due to link encryption, it might not appear that way at first. The advantages of natural search traffic cannot be understated. However, it can take from several weeks to several months to get a new site listed in the engines. Its a longer-term strategy to be sure, but in my opinion, one of the most valuable ones. The true difficulty is having good, rich content that both the search bots and human visitors will like.

Content is Still King Even for Affiliates

The difficulties of building a content-driven website in which an affiliate can imbed their links or banners are as follows:

1. Unless you have at least a basic knowledge of HTML, making a site which is search engine friendly can present a steep learning curve.
2. There is a small cost involved in obtaining a domain name and hosting. However, companies such as1&1 Internet can take the "sting" out of hosting costs.
3. Since content is king in the world of search engines, time is needed to keep content on your site fresh and to grow it overtime.

There are several content management tools, some of which help you to build your site/page structure as well. However, many are search engine "spam"-type site builders. That is they create numerous low-value doorway pages of content, which is of little value to an actual person! Search engine (affiliate) content spammers are indeed a growing problem, but the engines are catching on fast. It’s getting easier to spot a million pages on different domains all using the same template. A good web designer (and marketer for that matter) should build sites that focus first on people, then secondly on bots. Doing it the other way around is considered borderline search engine spamming. After all, what good is a lot of search traffic, unless your site converts the visitors, or gets them to click on your affiliate link?

So What's an Affiliate to Do?

Although your investment in building a content-driven website will be mostly one of time (depending on the way you code or program it,) it can be an excellent way to reduce paid advertising you might be doing like PPC, CPM banners, etc. A good content site needs time to be built (and is really always being expanded). It also takes time to get links from other sites, and traffic that can be converted into sales. Fortunately, nowadays you can put up a basic site in just one weekend or less with very low expense.

One of the more interesting tools, which only recently become available, is called 'SenseSites' from www.SenseSites.com. First let me say that 1&1 is not affiliated with SenseSites, in fact SenseSites was created BY a 1&1 affiliate! This review is only made so you will have a starting point for building content focused sites to promote 1&1 with (as the creator does). Originally built for site owners to place Google Adsense ads on, it has great potential for affiliates who wish to promote affiliate banner ads and content with imbedded affiliate links. What make SenseSites so impressive?

1. Easy Installation Instructions. This script is designed to run on almost any Linux-based web host.

2. Template driven, with custom template capabilities (highly recommended for any good sitebuilder tool.) You can choose from several built-in templates, but I highly recommend using the customization features. The built-in page editor will let you easily create and insert new pages.

3. Article-based content managed with a free, super easy content management system. Article resources/collections from the software maker are available to help you target the right keyword "theme" to attract not only the search engines, but also REAL PEOPLE. You control the articles placed on the site. You get to choose the ones that your audience will be most interested in. In addition to the CMS system giving you the ability to add, edit, remove content, the author of SenseSites offers an article subscription service for very low cost. This service can be used to help grow your site over time in addition the manual articles you will want to write or insert. NOTE: you must respect copyrights. Articles provided by other authors should not be altered and must always be credited! Importantly the ones provided by SenseSites do both things.

4. Easy insertion of your 1&1 affiliate banner code and affiliate text links.

5. Search engine friendliness. SenseSites contain:

+ Self updating Google SiteMap and Yahoo URLs list files (though you still need to upload am .html verification file from Google)
+ Static URLs which can be read by search engines easily. Good page titles. Keyword rich article content.
+RSS feed system to ensure some portion of your pages is unique and still targeted to your visitors.
+Random Article snippet rotator. Lets your visitors see even more article tidbits - and different ones each time they visit.
+And much, much more!

6. Low-cost. SenseSites can save you dollars and cents! The maker offers the following pricing:

CMS article management script: FREE
113 Topic Specific Article Collections: $14.95 - $19.95 each
SenseSite Article Site Installation Service (optional): $29.95

In this issue we want to discuss a "non-ad" technique for you to use to refer people - while still using your affiliate link.

The technique is called redirection. Essentially you can redirect a domain to a destination URL (which contains your affiliate tracking ID) or you can redirect a page to you affiliate link.

Domain redirection for affiliates: Redirecting a domain can work best if the domain you use is either very short (and gets some 'type-in' traffic) or if the domain already has established traffic, but you do not intend to build an actual website. So for example unused domain www.abcdhosting.com when typed or clicked in old search engine results will land on http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=7543750 - this sets your affiliate tracking cookie, and allows you to get credit for a sale. Most every domain registrar will allow you to do domain forwarding, so this is pretty easy!

Page or directory redirection for affiliates: Say you want your friends to buy through your affiliate link, but you don't want to give them a long tracking URL. Redirecting a page from your current domain allows you to send people to your domain/pagename.html but lands the visitor on http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=7543750 There is no requirement that this special page be seen by your site's visitors (or be part of your site navigation) unless you want to link to it. Obviously you do need to get traffic to the page in order to get the affiliate cookie (which is set when your referred visitor lands on our site having come through your tracking URL.) So for example, you might tell people go to mysite.com/hosting then the index page in that directory could use a Meta Refresh tag to push them to 1&1.) This technique can also be used with subdomains like hosting.mydomain.com as long as the default page (usually index .html) redirects using your tracking link. So how to insert an affiliate link into a Meta Refresh tag?

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=7543750">

Note: This line of code should be placed in between <head> and the </head> tags

Since the last Affiliate eNews, a few questions have come up:

Tools in this edition of 1&1 Affiliate eNews are completely FREE!