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Ah, the elusive affiliate marketing sales you always hear about. If you’re a newbie, they seem like a fantasy.

The harsh reality is most affiliates never make even one sale, let alone figure out how to make thousands of them.

Even less have mastered the game to the point where they can make a full time income — or even more than most doctors or lawyers make — and have it come in on a recurring, passive basis.

Truthfully, if you told me I could make affiliate marketing sales at that volume and rate when I first started, I wouldn’t have believed it either.

It’s OK to be skeptical. I was once, too. Just don’t be cynical. You see a skeptic will still move ahead, cautiously and carefully. Cynics are paralyzed by their world-view.

So, if you have a healthy dose of skepticism, or are already convinced about the merits of affiliate marketing, then this article is for you.

There’s one line I always tell the students in my affiliate marketing training service: If you can get one sale, you can get 10; and if you can get 10, you can get 100; and if you can get 100 you can get thousands of them.

You see, the process that allows you to start pulling your first sales are the same exact steps that allow you to continually pull more and more sales.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, if you are getting the desired result, then I would say insanity in this context is changing what you are doing!

So, how do you get that first sale?

Rule #1: don’t go chasing bright, shiny objects. The biggest mistake newbies make is they try to bite off more than they can chew. Find one strategy you like and stick to it. Rinse and repeat. You will beat the pants off all the other would-be affiliates who try to master pay-per-click, SEO, blogging, social media, and article marketing all at once.

I practicually guarantee it.

Once you pick your basic traffic generation strategy — my favorite is article marketing because it’s free, the results come fast, and the traffic is targeted — you decide on a niche.

You could decide on the niche before you pick which traffic generation strategy you want to use, too. There is no rule when it comes to which order those two must happen.

Once you pick a good affiliate program and have selected your traffic generation strategy that you are going to commit to, you need to build a web site.

I can already hear the groans. Look, all super affiliates or even successful ones realize that you can’t make many affiliate marketing sales if you don’t own your own domain and web site. It’s just not going to happen.

Controlling your own web site (or blog, or whatever you decide to use) allows you to do the single most valuable thing you can do online: create valuable, unique content.

People use the search engines to get information, not so they can get hit over the head with your sales pitch.

So, ironically, if you want to sell a lot, don’t come across as a sales person! Come across as someone who is imparting useful information that helps your visitor make a purchasing decision.

If you do this, and then contextually weave in your links into your content, the affiliate marketing sales will virtually be guaranteed to happen.

It’s never not worked for me. So I consider it an axiom.

Targeted traffic to the right niche, going to your web site with useful content, with your affiliate links in the content, creates affiliate sales. It’s as simple as that. Then rinse and repeat.

Yes, there are many more advanced strategies, but master this simple process first and you can be on the road to an exciting career as your own boss as an affiliate marketer.

The internet marketing lifestyle is achievable by almost anyone with some determination. And it all starts with learning the process of making those first affiliate marketing sales.