It may seem like a very basic suggestion, but you would be surprised how many people upload affiliate code that is accidentally corrupted.
Case in point – one of my top ten ‘super affiliates’ was recently running bad links.
It’s essential for you to test, because you deserve to be paid for every referral you make to affiliate programs. And the tracking is erased when the links are corrupt.
The biggest culprit is when gremlins in HTML editors mangle the code.
Sometimes, various HTML editors will attempt to correct or beautify your code, and the result can be a big mess that sends traffic minus tracking. Or the click goes right to a dead link.