I was listening to one of my favorite talk radio shows this afternoon on the way to the grocery store and the topic of the day was young people during this day and age expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.

The radio host was taking phone calls from listeners asking them to describe how much they had to bust their butts to get where they are today. People in younger generations may have thought these calls sounded like "When I was your age I had to walk to school uphill both ways" type of conversations, but I really could relate to some of the stories that were being told.

Then as I was pulling into the grocery store parking lot, a caller came on with his story. He showed up one day at a brokerage firm in his suit and tie proceeding to tell the owner of the company that he wanted to sell stocks for a living.The owner of the company quipped back with a fast reply of "I hope you have thick skin because you will be rejected 98% of the time".

After asking this particular young man if he had thick skin, the brokerage owner also proceeded to tell him that the 2% who say yes will be the cornerstone of his business.

That was all I heard of this person's story because I had to get out of the car. I'm going to assume that the young man became successful at either selling stocks because of the 2% that said yes or he was successful at his next job because he developed think skin during his first year as a stock broker.

This small story on a radio call in show made me think about how typical this story is to many that are starting to build their affiliate marketing business online. It doesn't matter if you use PPC, article marketing, AdSense, Hubpages, or any combination of these, you need to have thick skin to take the rejection of the 98%.

I think if you know what you are doing, your odds of making a sale with Internet marketing are greater than 2%, but my point is that you need to be persistent if you want to be successful online. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying to spam the crap out of everyone or nag your friends to buy something from your website. The persistence I'm talking about is learning from your mistakes, picking yourself up and moving on with your new found knowledge.

The main reason that people fail at making money online is they give up.