There are those who, once noticing that a link is for an affiliate, will determine that the website they are on has a vested interest in selling rather than providing honest information. Others will merely copy out the site and buy directly rather than use the affiliate link mistakenly thinking they will get it cheaper that way.

Why potential customers do such things is irrational but still loses you a sale and commission. There are several ways to circumvent this dilemma.

There are various programs and processes that can disguise or encrypt the affiliate identifier url address. Some programs will replace the link with ascii straight code and produce the address in a block of seemingly random characters.

Its only major drawback is that the browser status bar will often translate it back into its original readable form.

Creating a redirect page is another way to mask an affiliate hyperlink. There are programs that will generate an encrypted code of your affiliate information.

You would then load this page onto your website and instead of the affiliate link address, you would use a hyperlink to the page you created for your advertisement link. When the customer clicks the link it would take them to your encrypted page that would connect them with the product or sales page without your customer knowing they had been rerouted.

The only potential downside to this method is that you will have to create a new page for each of your affiliate links which is somewhat time consuming and subsequently your website's allotted space might be filled with a multitude of these small but accumulative files.

It is still cheaper to buy more hosting space than to lose the extra sales from people who don't want to deal with affiliates.

There are also solutions that can be written directly into the html code on your webpage. It is not a safe practice to frame any of your merchants webpages.

Most of them have strict rules against this as the address bar would show your site's name and not theirs. They feel it is misrepresentation and that it could be mistaken as an endorsement on their part of anything you have on your site.

You can, however, create a fake status bar message. This rather simple piece of code will still send the user to the appropriate page with your affiliate ID intact but will cause the status bar to show only what you enter in for it to say.

In this example note the "[" and "]" brackets need to be replaced with proper "less than" and "greater than" symbols for html tagging.

[a href="affiliate link url here" onmouseover="window.status='information for status bar here';return true;" onmouseout="window.status='';return true;"]what shows on the page here[/a]

With a few of these necessary variations protecting your affiliate link information, you should soon see an increase in sales and commissions from your efforts.