Affiliate marketing business is based on professional and long term plans and strategies. The reason 95% of all new entrepreneurs fail in affiliate marketing sector is that they don't have a solid plan updated regularly with the latest ideas with a mechanism to grab hot products.

Here is a list of 5 essential strategies every successful affiliate marketer applies in common.

1. Cloak Your Affiliate Links : Many new affiliate marketers either don't know how to hide affiliate links or lazy to implement it. It is essential. People don't like to see other people earning money from their own purchases. There are several free tools will help you organize and hide affiliate links easily. This affiliate marketing strategy also protects affiliate link hijackers stealing your hardly earned commissions by replacing their affiliate IDs.
2. Testing Products : Finding a hot selling product is not an easy task and it needs regular testing of new potential products. Start promoting a product for a limited time. If you see statistically reasonable profitable sales continue promoting it. After you develop your promoting strategy for a specific product, concentrate on a related product as well. They tend to be successful to some degree as well. If there is no hope, just leave it, do not waste your time on a dead product.
3. Increasing Website Traffic : Unless you don't increase the traffic, especially targeted visitors to your blogs, websites and affiliate proxy pages you can't increase your affiliate commissions. The best way to increase traffic is to have target. Let's say, you put 5% increase on traffic as a target for each month. Be desperate to reach it. Write more articles, create interesting videos, use social networks like StumbleUpon, Twitter and Digg etc. This will also help your traffic increasing natural SEO.
4. Build an Email List : We are not tired to tell you how important to have your own email list where you can cash like a cow just by sending regular auto-emails with affiliate coupons, promotions embedded. Read the best email marketing software Aweber Review here to learn how it works. It is the base strategy which most of the make money online gurus use.
5. Unique Material : Do not just copy and paste a banner or text link. Use videos for product reviews especially since many people don't use this powerful technique. Write very quality articles and blog posts about individual hot products.