Still, the fact is that only about 5 percent of affiliate marketers ever earn real income with their businesses, while the other 95 percent struggle to even make enough sales to cover their advertising costs, let alone compensate them for their time and effort.

So how do you become part of the 5 percent of affiliate marketing entrepreneurs who prosper?

The secret lies in effective marketing and planning. The vast majority of people who try affiliate marketing fail because they don't know how to advertise effectively, and because they don't take the time to develop a systematic strategy.

Here are the techniques that successful affiliate marketers use to build lucrative and profitable businesses:

1)Effective research. Before you sign up for an affiliate program, find out everything you can about the company you will be promoting. A little research will tell you how many sales the company's affiliates make per month, the number of returns requested by customers (these negatively affect your commissions), and how many customers return to buy from the company again.

You will also want to find out the average sale amount, the commission percentage the company pays its affiliates, whether the company pays affiliates for repeat sales, and how long cookies (snippets of code that identify you as the referring affiliate) remain active on visitors' computers.

2)Niche marketing. Too many affiliate marketers promote tons of products in multiple categories, hoping to gain revenue from several niche markets. But trying to cater to multiple niches dilutes your efforts, and makes your affiliate marketing strategy weak and ineffective.

You can't become an expert in every niche, and you'll need to become an expert to effectively promote your products and cater to your buyers' needs. You'll have far greater success if you focus on a single niche market (e.g., buyers who need left handed golf clubs) than if you use the shotgun approach and try to sell many different types of affiliate products.

3)Article marketing. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is one of the most cost effective ways to gain wide exposure for your business. Website owners continually scour article directories for fresh content, and will post your articles on their sites, complete with links to your affiliate marketing website.

Compelling content establishes you as an expert in your niche, and makes readers want to visit your website. Your articles should give readers useful information that they can use to immediately improve their lives, while leaving them wanting more.

Article marketing is also useful for your affiliate marketing business because every time an article is published by a directory or website, a link is created to your affiliate marketing website. Google and other search engines partially base your website's rank on the number of links that point to your site. Article marketing is a good way to get your website into the coveted first page of search engine listings.

To minimize the time you spend submitting articles to directories, use an article submission service like Article Marketer or Article United. By using a submission service, you can upload an article once, and it will be available to thousands of article directories and websites within a day or two.