There are many problems that can occur at the merchant end of commission tracking. Many people are a bit nervous about clicking on a long URL coded with an affiliate link.

I dont really know why people are afraid of this but they do likely not know of the fact that if a site owner has gone to the trouble of providing valuable information on their site for free, that there is nothing wrong with them receiving money for that effort.

Even if they turn up at the site directly from a search engine search, the cost of product or service is still the same. It makes some people irritated and thinking they are getting money off me!

You have to create revenue with banners, pop unders and in-vue advertising networks whether you like it or not when using affiliate marketing. Advertisers on average pay by impression on the equivalent of 1000 exposures (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). Sounds great doesnt it? Prompt payments, control over ads, stable revenue stream is highly recommended.

The fact of the matter is that some people will have a tendency to move their mouse over an external link and then view the URL that is in the status bar of their browser. If an affiliate code or URL is in your view.

Your visitors will simply mark the top level of the domain and manually type that into their browser address bar on their own, or if you've mentioned the company name they may just carry out a search to locate the home page of the company.

There are like a million different premium software products on the market that are ranging in price from US$15 - $50 for special software that will assist you in protecting your affiliate commissions.

Their effectiveness and ease of use ranges just as much, so before you pay for one of these software applications, you should try out a few of these suggestions. I've listed the strategies from least effective to most effective.

Install a banner server: Banner servers just don't serve banners; many of the newer ad servers will also display text links as well. The link coding that is often associated with served ads is usually so long, that your visitors wouldn't be able to see the status bar where it was directing them to.

However, when you think about how hard it is and how much time that installing an ad server takes, this is probably the least effective means if you just have a few associations.

Click tracking software and scripts: Nowadays, you can get a click-counting software application will not show the target URL as the links point inwards to the software which is usually installed on your own site.

After you have clicked on the link, the click tracking application then redirects the visitor to the URL you specify within the script. Click tracking software also provides a great way to monitor how effective your ads are and not just having to rely on the reports provided by merchants which can be false.

You have to be able to see it in the first part your affiliate link, the second part shows you what will be displayed in the browser status bar and the last part is the link text. The link is set to open in a new window, so that you will not lose any visitors from your site.

This method isnt foolproof and depending on the affiliate software being used by the merchant, the affiliate link may still show in the address bar once the merchants page has loaded.

However the visitor would have arrived on the merchant site and the cookie from the merchant with your ID in it should have set. Using this kind of link, you can usually see an improvement in the conversion rates.