Ad Design What I have found that works best when it comes to how your adsense ad looks is not making it stand out from rest of your pages. Try to blend ads in with rest of your pages. The ads should look like text links within your page. I feel that giving them fancy backgrounds, borders, text colors, etc will draw attention away from your ads. This is because they start to look like banner ads and most people have become immune to seeing banner ads. But if ads look like they are a part of your site then visitors will not ignore them.

Merchant Site Has Traffic Leaks Probably most common thing I see with affiliate programs. Mostly from newbie merchants that just got their affiliate program started. Most don't realize what they are doing and usually will correct problem once I explain to them how traffic leaks are hurting their business and their affiliate program. Traffic leaks are links on affiliate program site that potential customers can click on and go to other sites... sites that affiliate won't get credit for if visitor buys something. Leaks can consist of third-party banner ads, Google AdSense ads, popups, popunders, text links, etc...

No Phone Sale Tracking With internet market growing so rapidly every year this means more customers are shopping online. Alot of them will call merchants 800 number to call in their order instead of submitting it online. Where does this leave you? The merchant gets cash on sale while you get stiffed. So when evaluating an affiliate program be sure to check to see if merchant has measures set up to track phone orders for affiliates. It is simple to set up and it puts affiliates ID number next to phone number. So when customers call in they are asked for that number so they can manually credit appropriate affiliate for sale.