If you are part of an affiliate marketing or an Internet marketing forum, be sure to make a post telling everyone about your first sale if it is allowed.  Your first affiliate marketing sale really is a big deal and it should be celebrated.

Why is your first sale such a big deal? Because affiliate marketing is so unlike off-line business and it really does take a special understanding of the way people buy online in order to be able to make it work.

All of this is such new technology and it changes all the time so anyone who figures it out really is special. Affiliate marketing is not for the lazy, weak, or for people who can’t focus.

Now that you have made your first sale, now what? Do you just sit back and wait for another one? No! Absolutely not – now is the time to step up your efforts.  Now is the time to look very closely at the sale you made and where it came from or where you think it came from if you’re not sure and figure out how to do more of that.

Obviously something that you did worked and if you can do it again and again and in more places or on more websites you will be in a better position tomorrow to make even more sales.

Some affiliate programs let you track your links so that you can figure out exactly where your sales came from. This may be a good time to get into your affiliate program’s documentation and figure out if you can track your links if you aren’t already.

Hopefully the excitement from your first sale will motivate you to double your efforts. It takes a wide net and a lot of work to make sales online. But the 80/20 principle does apply here. 80% of your results will calm from 20% of your efforts – so always be watching your sales to see what you believe that 20% is.

If your first sale came from a specific page on your website, then perhaps you can put up another page like that that just takes a slightly different angle. Or perhaps you should start trying to get more links to that page or send more traffic to that page. Where exactly is that page ranking in Google? Is there any way for you to get it to rank higher?  These are the kinds of questions you want to ask yourself once you have gotten that first sale and hence proven to yourself that what you are doing is working.

The more you can do things that work over and over, the more sales you are going to get. Here’s to many more sales – and soon!