I remember the first time I saw an email notification pop up with the subject line: “You made a sale.”
It was a tiny commission, something like $9.37. A digital product I’d linked in a buried blog post months earlier. Honestly, I’d forgotten it was even there. But when I saw it? My heart skipped. Not like in the metaphorical way people write about in self-help books, I mean it literally startled me. Like a jolt of electricity. Like the universe had just whispered, “Hey, it works.”
I stared at it for a long time. That email. That number. That proof. It felt like magic, like I had cheated the system, like I had cracked a code only the internet gods understood. I remember pacing my apartment barefoot, mumbling, “Holy sh*t… it actually worked.”
What no one told me is how rare that moment would feel later. Not rare in that I wouldn’t make more sales. I did. But rare in the purity of it. That first sale wasn’t about money. It was about belief. Belief that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t wasting my time. Belief that this dream, vague and pixelated as it was, had legs.
Of course, that belief wavered. A lot.
Because right after the miracle? Silence.
Nothing came the next day. Or the day after. And I kept checking, refreshing dashboards, opening email reports with the hopefulness of a kid checking a mailbox in summer. I started wondering if that one sale had been a glitch. Or pity. Or a fluke. The doubt settled in like fog, quiet, low to the ground, hard to shake.
The truth is, making that first sale didn’t change my life. What changed my life was staying in the game long enough to make the hundredth.
And here’s the part most people never say out loud: you have to survive the space between the first and the hundredth.
That space is messy. It’s unsexy. It’s where your excitement meets resistance, where your patience is tested not in days but in droughts. It’s when you watch other people soar past you and wonder what you’re doing wrong. It’s when you question if you were just lucky that once. If maybe you’re not built for this.
I almost quit during that space.
Several times.
There were nights I closed my laptop mid-draft because I convinced myself no one would care. Days I’d watch my traffic flatline and think, “What’s the point?” I’d get caught in the algorithm game, trying to please SEO gods or social media trends, until I’d scroll too long and feel small. So damn small.
But then, quietly, another sale would come in. Then two more. Then nothing again. But eventually, somewhere in that foggy middle, I realized something was building, slowly, underneath my awareness. Trust. Skill. Voice. Consistency.
I started writing differently. Recommending with more clarity. Showing up without as much drama. Not because I was suddenly confident, but because I’d already tried quitting and it hadn’t made me feel better.
So I stayed. Not always inspired, not always certain, but present.
And then, one day, I crossed a hundred sales.
Not with a bang. No confetti. No viral success story. Just another email. Another notification. But this time, the miracle wasn’t in the sale, it was in the fact that I was still around to receive it.
That I hadn’t let the silence in the middle convince me to disappear.
I think about this a lot when people ask me how to start. Or when they say things like, “I’ve been doing this for two months and haven’t made anything.” And I get it. I do. The waiting hurts. The ambiguity is brutal. We’re wired to want feedback fast, to want proof of effort. And when affiliate marketing doesn’t hand you that proof on a silver platter, it’s easy to assume the worst.
But here’s what I wish someone had told me: the delay is the curriculum. The time between miracles is where you’re becoming the kind of person who can earn them on purpose.
And maybe that sounds poetic. Maybe it even sounds like something written for effect. But I promise you, no formula, no system, no guru can guarantee you the hundredth sale unless you hang around long enough to catch it.
You don’t need to be the smartest. Or the fastest. You just need to not disappear.
Somewhere in your future, there’s a hundredth sale with your name on it. But it doesn’t care how excited you were in the beginning. It only cares if you’re still there when it shows up.
So if you’re in that space right now, between the miracle and the momentum, I see you. It sucks. It’s boring. It’s lonely. It feels like everyone else got a shortcut you didn’t.
But please, keep going.
Because the first sale whispers, “It’s possible.”
And the hundredth sale? It says, “You’ve changed.”
And damn… that’s the real win, isn’t it?
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