A lot of people want to start their own home based business, but have little or no knowledge of how to do it. A quick and easy way to get started is article marketing. It works, and has been proven over and over again for 10 years without fail. Here is a step-by-step approach to making money with articles and affiliate marketing.

Step 1: Find a hot selling product in a niche market, that constantly buys new products. Yes, you will need to do some research or find websites that have this research done for you. A lot of times you can go to ClickBank and figure out what to sell based on the gravity and amount of affiliates that have sold copies of the product.

Step 2: Create a simple blog or landing page that promotes that product using a review. The review should be unbiased and point on benefits of the product, as well as show the user why they need it to solve their problem. Basically, you want to make sure they feel you are doing them a favor and recommending the product as a friend.

Step 3: Write articles based on keyword research. Find low hanging fruit keywords that have 3-4 words in them. The search volume should be as high as possible and the competition as low as possible. Try to use 'buyer type' keywords, because this will help increase the probability of making sales from the keyword. Some keywords that are buyer type keywords are things such as "coupon", "discount", "bonus", "buy" and many similar words.

Step 4: Write 30 articles for each product to makes sure you are absolutely dominating that product. Keep writing until you stick in Google with your articles.

Step 5: Submit your articles to popular article directories as well as on your blog. Update it 1-2 times per week, and keep the fresh content consistent. If you do once a week, do once a week. If you do once a day, do once a day.

Secret rule: Stick to one product until it makes you 1-3 sales per day at least. Focus on the same product/site until you have enough traffic to make consistent sales, then you can move to another product and repeat the process until you reach your desired income level.

As you can see it's not that hard to get started with successful article marketing. It's just a matter of getting started and keep going until you make the amount of money you want to make. Do it for 60 days and see how many sales you make. It might surprise you.