Working online for many years and being involved in affiliate marketing, which is an amazing business model, I have seen many people fail and the great majority of them never found out why they failed. Now, some may say that mindset is important and I agree, but the truth of the matter is really, really simple. To make money with affiliate marketing, you need to keep things simple.

By sticking to a few basic steps, and repeating them over and over again, I have created a substantial passive income online. The point here is that I didn't go running after every new affiliate marketing course or try out every single new on-the-edge tactic. I kept it simple.

Keyword research

The only thing I use for keyword research is Google's keyword tool. It's free and it's simple. I get most of my keyword ideas from Amazon and Yahoo's business directory. I plugged the keywords in Google's tool and almost instantly, I have the foundation for a new niche website.

Building a website

I use Fantastico, which is a free program that can be found with most hosting services, inside the CPanel. It has a one-click install feature that basically gives you a website within 10 seconds.

Creating content

Most often, I go to the Warrior forum and get 3-4 quality articles for $25. That takes care of my content. If I decide not to use a ghostwriter, I go over to Yahoo Answers to see what kind of questions are people asking in my niche. It takes me half an hour to write a solid quality article.

Promoting the site

I bookmark the site to a dozen social bookmarking sites, write 2-3 articles and submit them to the biggest article directories and that's about it.

I hope this shows you how simple making money with affiliate marketing can be. There's no need to complicate things, you can build one site per day if you can keep things simple. After that, it's rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Dave Carravann has several hundred small niche websites that make him a nice passive income. You can check some of them, like internet marketing programs or swiffer wetjet. If you need affiliate marketing resources, just visit his main website.