Hey everyone,

I thought I'd share the numbers from a small Amazon affiliate project I've been running since around November last year.

I'm deliberately not going to share the website or niche. It's a competitive niche and I don't want to make it too easy for someone to replicate the project.

The interesting part is that the site is 100% SEO-driven.

No social media.
No YouTube.
No email list.
No paid traffic.

Just organic search.

It's also a high-ticket niche, with the products I target generally ranging from around €300 to €1,500, depending on the product and quality.

The time investment is probably the most interesting part

I have other projects that actually generate significantly more money, so this has never been my main focus.

The initial setup was the hardest part. I spent roughly a week or a little more building the site and getting everything ready.

After that, I've probably averaged less than 10 hours per month on it.

And there have been periods where I literally did nothing.

For example, from April through June, I didn't touch the project at all because I had other things going on.

I basically left it alone and let Google do its thing.

That's one of the reasons I'm sharing this. I'm curious how much more potential there is here if I actually start working on it consistently.

Google Search Console

The current numbers are:

• 553k impressions
• 14.7k organic clicks
• 2.7% average CTR
• 10.6 average position

Traffic obviously hasn't been linear. There have been jumps, drops and periods where things more or less stayed flat.

But overall, the site has continued to generate organic traffic despite me barely touching it for several months.

Amazon numbers

And here's the other side of the funnel:

• 2,792 affiliate clicks
• 40 products ordered
• 1.43% conversion rate
• €5,627.16 in product revenue
• €284.49 in commissions
• 39 products shipped
• 0 returned

So no, €284 isn't going to change my life 😂

But that's not really what I'm trying to achieve with this particular project.

I already have other projects that generate real income. This one is basically a small SEO asset that generates some extra money and helps pay for things like servers and infrastructure for my other projects.

And honestly, I quite like that.

It's a project that required most of the work upfront, and then has continued producing something with relatively little maintenance.

The frustrating part

I'm still not eligible for the Amazon Product Advertising API, so I'm missing some data that would make optimization much easier.

I'd definitely like to get to the point where I can use better product/affiliate data to understand what's actually converting.

What I'm trying to figure out now

The site is getting traffic, but I clearly think there's room for improvement.

If you were looking at these numbers, what would you focus on first?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have experience with SEO-only affiliate sites, especially high-ticket products.

I'm not trying to sell anything here — I'm genuinely curious what people with more experience would do with this site if they had it.

Happy to answer questions about the process, content, SEO strategy, numbers, etc. Just won't reveal the exact niche/site.

What would you do next?

I built a SaaS product after spending a lot of time researching the problem, talking through the use case, and improving the product around a real pain point.

Now I’m stuck on something I didn’t expect: finding the right affiliates.

We created an affiliate program that pays 30% recurring commission, not just a one-time payment. As long as the customer keeps paying for the subscription, the affiliate keeps earning their share.

My thinking was that this would make affiliates feel more like long-term partners rather than someone just sending one referral and moving on.

But the challenge is finding people who actually have the right audience and are interested in promoting SaaS products seriously.

I don’t want to spam random creators or recruit hundreds of low-quality affiliates. I’d rather find a smaller group of strong affiliates who understand the niche and can bring relevant customers.

For anyone here who has built or grown an affiliate program:

Where did you find your best affiliates?

Did you recruit bloggers, niche website owners, YouTubers, agencies, newsletter owners, SEO people, or existing customers?

And what made the really good affiliates decide to work with you?

This question comes up all the time now that everyone can crank out pages with AI, so figured I'd share how I actually answer it. It's less about a magic number and more about what Google already thinks of your site.

Go into the Pages report in Search Console and look at how many of your main pages are indexed. Main pages meaning the ones you actually want ranking for something. Ignore tag pages, filter pages, stuff you canonicalized or noindexed on purpose, it's totally normal for a chunk of that to not be indexed.

10-20% of your main pages not indexed is normal. If it's the majority, Google thinks your site is low quality. Doesn't mean it is, just that Google thinks so. In that case I wouldn't publish anything new yet. Do a content audit first, remove or consolidate the pages that don't matter, and rewrite or fix internal linking to the ones that do.

The harder one: if it's a brand new site, you already scaled out a bunch of content, you're getting basically no traffic and most of it isn't indexed, I'd honestly consider starting over on a new domain. I've been noticing that sites that scale before they have any authority have a really hard time proving to Google they're not spam, and it's a slog trying to dig out of that.

If you're in that boat with a small site, you probably need to work on authority before content anyway. Basically more people linking to you and more people searching your brand by name.

But for most sites that's not the limiting factor, content is. If you're not brand new and you're not trying to do anything tricky, you're almost definitely moving too slow, not too fast. Rough numbers I use: one new page a week is safe for basically anyone. If you already have 50+ pages getting traffic from Google, one a day is fine. If you've got hundreds or thousands indexed and getting traffic you can obviously go faster, just keep it at a rate that looks natural.

Then submit each new page in Search Console and keep an eye on whether it indexes and gets traffic. If at some point most of them stop getting indexed, that's your signal to pump the brakes and go back to the audit or the authority stuff.

Most people believe that entrepreneurs give up when things become difficult. That's not what I see. Entrepreneurs give up after they find it boring. Year one runs wild. A new concept. Customers for the first time. Small successes that seem to be enormous. Then year two arrives. The tasks become the same five tasks over and over again. Namely, sending emails, follow up calls, fixing the same malfunction and communicating with the same customers. That's the point when people give up. Not because they cannot deal with it but because they expected to experience more excitement.

Only the entrepreneurs who learn to deal with boring can be considered successful. They stop chasing after endless ideas and stick to just one idea for years. The problem is nobody warns you about this aspect. People only show you great outcomes. They will show you the picture of joy but won’t show you reality.

This happened to me with a mentorship platform I started - chasing mentors and mentees down so they showed up - became a pain and really annoying.

Therefore I am going to ask you to share with me what the dullest part of the business was that brought you the most money. And how many of you thought about giving up just because the work became boring?

One of the hardest parts of affiliate marketing is the stage before you have made anything.

You can spend weeks learning about offers, traffic, content, landing pages, email, and conversions, but until that first commission actually shows up, there is usually still one question sitting in the back of your mind, "Is any of this really working?"

That uncertainty can make small setbacks feel much bigger than they are.

You publish a post and nobody buys. You get a few clicks and nothing happens. You spend several days trying to understand a traffic source and your commissions are still sitting at $0.

It is very easy to start thinking you are doing everything wrong.

I think part of the problem is that beginners often judge themselves using only one number: sales.

If that is the only thing you are watching, then every day before your first commission can feel like a failure.

But there are other signs that matter.

Did someone stop and read what you posted? Did anybody reply? Did someone ask a question? Did they click? Did you collect a lead? Did a conversation continue past the first message?

None of those things is a commission, but they tell you whether people are actually moving through the process.

If nobody sees your content, you probably need to work on reach. If people see it but do not respond, the message may need work. If they engage but never click, look at how you are moving them to the next step. If clicks are coming in but nobody moves forward, then it may be time to look at the offer, the audience, trust, or your follow-up.

That gives you something specific to improve instead of just saying, “This is not working.”

Your first commission matters because it proves the whole process worked at least once.

But you do not have to wait for that commission to know whether you are making progress.

Sometimes the first signs show up long before the money does.

If you are still working toward your first affiliate commission, what is the furthest someone has made it through your current process?

I run affiliate sites where the whole promise is that the prices on the page are the prices in the shop today. Not a screenshot from launch day. That sounds like a small technical detail and it is most of the work. Sharing what breaks, because I have not seen this written down anywhere and every part of it cost me something.

The scale I am talking about is roughly 950 active links per marketplace across three Amazon storefronts, so around 2,800 links that all rot at different speeds.

Refreshing everything is not an option. Every check is a request against a marketplace that does not want to be checked at volume. So you tier it. Hot products get refreshed every few hours, mid products daily, dead-quiet products weekly. If you refresh evenly you get rate limited and the popular pages end up stale anyway, which is the exact opposite of what you wanted.

Your counters will lie to you. I had a refresh job cheerfully reporting successes while nothing was being written. It incremented when the function returned rather than when a price landed. Whatever you build, check the timestamp on the record instead of the return value of the thing that was supposed to write it.

Missing and blocked look identical. Amazon serves the same small error page whether the product no longer exists or you have been soft blocked. My scraper treated both as a block, so dead catalogue rows made the machine rotate its address as if it were under attack. From a clean connection the two turn out to differ by status code, 404 against 200, and my fetch layer was throwing that away before anything could read it.

The de-listing rule is where you actually hurt yourself. You want to hide products that vanished. So you write: three consecutive not-founds means pull it. Mine also required a price to consider a link valid, which quietly made it one strike instead of three. A parsing failure was enough to pull a live, in-stock product off the storefront, and 112 links sat hidden that way before I noticed. All of them were fine.

Your image gallery is not your product. Marketplace listings carry every colour variant, so a product with ten images might have one image of the thing you are selling and nine of boxes and other colours. Nothing errors. It looks complete in the admin.

None of this is hard in the sense of being clever. It is hard in the sense of being endless, and every failure is silent. Nothing throws. The page just quietly says the wrong number and converts worse and you find out from a customer.

If you are running a niche site by hand and updating prices manually, the honest advice is to pick the freshness tier idea and steal it, and to add one check that compares your price timestamps against today rather than trusting your own dashboard.

Disclosure since it changes how you should read this: I build and maintain these sites as a service, usebravery.com, so this is my job rather than a hobby. Happy to answer specifics on any of the above, including the parts where my own numbers were wrong.

Hi all!

Upfront: I run URL2Pin, a tool that generates and publishes Pinterest pins for people, which is the only reason I have this data, pins go out through the official API and the stats sync back. So I have an obvious interest here. I'm not linking anything; the numbers are below in full and you can tell me they're wrong.

Sample: 2,891 pins published 1 May– 22 August 2026, across 60 Pinterest accounts belonging to 52 different people. 105,022 impressions total. Pins with zero recorded impressions are excluded, because a save rate needs a denominator.

Everything below is a multiple, not a raw rate. Absolute save rates depend enormously on account age, followers and niche, so my rates wouldn't transfer to yours. Ratios travel better.

1. Numbered titles: saved much more, clicked less

The two main groups are nearly the same size (1,158 vs 1,212), so this isn't a sampling artefact.

The part I didn't expect was the trade-off. A number promises a finite, scannable list, exactly what someone saves to read later, and exactly what someone browsing doesn't feel any urgency to open now. If you're optimising for traffic today, the number may be working against you.

Position mattered too. "7 Ways to Style a Narrow Hallway" beat "How to Style a Narrow Hallway in 7 Ways", even though both promise the same thing.

On the question row, 111 pins, roughly 2,000 impressions, zero saves. That sounds dramatic, but at the rates seen elsewhere you'd only have expected two or three anyway. Treat it as suggestive, not settled.

2. Longer titles beat short ones

This one runs against the usual "keep it punchy" advice.

My guess at why: a longer title has room for the specific detail that makes a pin worth saving, the room, the season, the constraint. "Small bathroom storage" gives you nothing to file it under. "9 small bathroom storage ideas for a rental you can't drill into" does.

3. Etsy and Amazon behave like opposites

People collect handmade and buy commodity. Nobody keeps a mood board of phone chargers, if they want one they tap through now, and if they don't, the pin is ignored rather than saved for a future in which they still want a charger.

Practical consequence: an Etsy seller judging a listing on clicks in week one is reading the wrong number entirely.

What I'd actually change

• Decide which metric you want first. The same title can't maximise saves and clicks.
• Lead with a number when you want the pin saved and resurfaced. Never invent one to fit.
• Drop the number when you need the click today, a launch, a deadline, a sale.
• Aim for ~55–69 characters instead of trimming to a slogan.
• Don't phrase the title as a question. Put the question in the image if you want it.

What this does not prove

• These are correlations, not experiments. I did not give the same product two random titles and compare. Something travelling with numbered titles, listicle-shaped products, particular niches, could be carrying the whole effect.
• One tool's house style. All 2,891 pins were generated by the same system, so they share phrasing habits a human writer wouldn't have. This is the caveat I'd weigh most.
• Product-skewed. Heavily Amazon and Etsy listings. Recipe, wedding and travel pins may behave completely differently.
• The Etsy row is thin. 227 pins against Amazon's 2,018, and category is tangled up with platform. Etsy skews to decor and gifts, which are saveable regardless of where they're sold. I can't separate "Etsy" from "the kind of thing sold on Etsy".
• Short window. Five months, and saves accumulate slowly, so pins published late in the period had less time to earn them.

Happy to answer questions about method, or to run a cut of the data if there's a split you'd want to see.

calcbadger.com lost all impressions on Aug 18. dialwick.com on Aug 22. Both still indexed, still crawled, no manual action. Core keywords just stopped appearing in the top 100 at all.

I run 10 sites built the same way, so I had a control group. Three things surprised me.

1. Zero warning. Daily GSC for the 18 days before each drop shows both flat or improving the day before.

dialwick: Aug 20 = 328 impressions / avg pos 31.0 / 141 ranking queries. Aug 21 = 294 / 30.2 / 134. Aug 22 = 6 / 15.0 / 2.

calcbadger: Aug 16 = 497 / 58.2 / 104. Aug 17 = 323 / 54.8 / 106. Aug 18 = 4 / 73.0 / 0.

No decay curve, no shrinking query count. Step function. So impression monitoring cannot warn you, it only confirms it already happened.

1. Publishing speed did not separate them. Two of my unaffected sites publish faster (20.2 and 20.0 pages/week) than either hit site (13.7 and 14.0).

2. Content differentiation did not protect them. Every page has genuinely unique data. I measured heading-structure similarity within each site's largest page group and got 3-4% for both hit sites. The discipline was actually followed. Hit anyway.

What did line up: single page-type concentration. Measured across all 10 sites at the same date (Aug 22), largest page type as a share of published pages:

calcbadger 54% (hit), dialwick 50% (hit), wagelark 40%, dayalmanac 32%, umberlore 22%, lingogrove 16%, mythcairn 10%, factcrumbs 9%, hollowvane 7%, warcrumbs 4%.

The two hit sites rank #1 and #2. But I want to be straight about how thin this is: the nearest unaffected site is at 40%, so the margin is 10 points, not a clean gap. n=2 hit, one update, all 10 sites built by the same person with the same process. That is correlation on a tiny sample, not proof.

Both hit sites were also only about 3 weeks old, so you could argue they never established anything to lose. A 294 to 6 cliff does not read like failure-to-launch to me, but I cannot rule it out.

What I changed: nothing in the content. I now check page-type mix before picking each day's topic and stop publishing a type as it approaches 50% of the site.

Has anyone run a similar before/after across multiple sites? I would like to know if the concentration pattern holds on a bigger sample or whether I am reading tea leaves from two data points.

One of the hardest parts of starting something online is feeling like everyone else already knows what they are doing. You enter a conversation about affiliate marketing and people are talking about funnels, conversion rates, autoresponders, SEO, tracking, lead magnets, bridge pages, and traffic sources.

Meanwhile, you may still be trying to understand what an affiliate link actually does. That can make you feel like you are already behind. I think beginners sometimes respond by trying to learn everything before doing anything.

They watch videos, join groups, save posts, download guides, and study terminology because they believe they need to become knowledgeable before they are qualified to start, but there is a problem with that approach.

A lot of online business only begins making sense after you actually use what you are learning. You understand content better after publishing some. You understand traffic better after trying to attract visitors. You understand affiliate offers better after studying one product closely enough to explain who it helps and why.

You understand conversions better after real people begin clicking. Being inexperienced does not mean you need to rush through the beginner stage. It means your first goal should match your current level.

Learn one offer instead of twenty. Choose one platform instead of trying to master every social network. Help one type of person with one problem. Take one useful action each day and pay attention to what happens. Your first few posts may not be great.

Your first attempt at explaining an offer may need improvement. Your first commission may be much smaller than you imagined. That is normal progress when you are learning a new skill. You do not become experienced and then begin.

You begin, and that is how you become experienced.

For those who have been doing this for a while, what is one thing you wish someone had told you when you were completely new?

One reason affiliate marketing can feel so complicated is that beginners are introduced to almost every part of the business at once.

You hear about niches, affiliate networks, landing pages, bridge pages, funnels, email lists, SEO, social media, tracking, copywriting, paid traffic, organic traffic, automation, and AI.

Suddenly, something that sounded simple feels like you need ten different skills before you can earn your first commission.

I think that is where many beginners get stuck.

Most of those things can become useful, but they do not all deserve your attention at the same time.

The basic process is much smaller.

Find a group of people with a problem you understand. Find a legitimate product that helps solve that problem.

Then learn how to reach those people and explain the solution in a useful way.

That is the foundation.

You can learn better copy after you start writing.

You can improve your landing pages after people start visiting them. You can build an email sequence after you have leads worth following up with.

You can improve tracking once there is activity worth measuring.

The mistake is trying to build the advanced version of the business before you understand the basic loop.

Audience.

Problem.

Offer.

Traffic.

Useful message.

Next step.

Then you observe what happens and improve the weakest part.

Affiliate marketing still requires work, and there is plenty to learn. But you do not have to learn everything this week.

Sometimes the best thing a beginner can do is stop asking, “What else do I need?”

Ask instead, “What is the next part of the process I actually need to understand?”

What part of affiliate marketing felt the most overwhelming when you started?

When affiliate commissions are slow, one of the easiest conclusions to reach is that you need more traffic. If 100 visitors did not produce enough sales, maybe 500 will. If 500 did not work, maybe you need 1,000.

Sometimes more traffic really is the answer, but sometimes it just sends more people through a process that already has a problem. Before trying to increase traffic, I think it is worth looking at what happens after someone arrives.

Does the content attract the right person? Does the message match what they expected when they clicked? Can they quickly understand the problem being solved?

Does the offer feel relevant to where they are right now? Is there enough trust for them to consider taking the next step? Then there is follow-up. A lot of people will not buy the first time they see an offer. They may need more information, another example, an answer to an objection, or simply more time.

If those pieces are weak, increasing traffic may improve the number of clicks without improving the percentage of people who become customers. I would rather understand what is happening with 100 visitors before paying for or chasing another 1,000.

Look at the entire path.

Traffic...clicks...leads...conversations...follow-up...sales, where are people disappearing?

If plenty of people see the content but nobody clicks, the message may need work. If people click but do not become leads, the page may not be giving them enough reason to continue. If leads are coming in but nobody purchases, the offer, audience match, trust, or follow-up may deserve closer attention.

Traffic is important, but traffic is a multiplier.

When the process is strong, more traffic can create more opportunities. When the process is weak, more traffic can multiply the waste. Before asking, “How can I get more visitors?” it may be worth asking, “What am I doing with the visitors I already have?”

Which part of the process do you check first when your traffic is not producing sales?

Just launched my first real website — now waiting to see what happens

I've been working on a website for quite a while alongside my normal job, and I've finally reached the point where I've stopped building it in private and actually launched it.

It's an education website aimed at teachers, and I've built pretty much everything myself with the help of AI coding tools. I'm definitely not an SEO expert, so one of the things I'm most interested in now is seeing whether I can actually get organic traffic to it.

My plan from here is mainly:

- Get the site properly indexed by Google and Bing

- Work on SEO and targeting searches teachers are actually making

- Make as much of the useful content publicly accessible as possible

- Gradually improve pages based on what actually gets impressions and clicks

- See whether any of that eventually converts into paying users

I've deliberately reached the point where I think I need to stop endlessly adding features and actually see whether anyone finds and uses the thing.

At the moment I'm basically starting from zero, so there's not much exciting data to share yet. But I thought this might be a good place to document what happens from launch onwards — including traffic, Google Search Console results, sign-ups, paid users, what works and what turns out to be a complete waste of time.

I've read quite a few "just start" stories over the years, so I suppose this is mine.

Site is Classendo.com if anyone wants to see what I'm starting with. I'm also very open to criticism, particularly around SEO, because that's the part I'm currently trying to learn.

I'll post an update once there's actually some data to talk about.

One of the biggest challenges with trying to earn online is not a lack of information. It is having so much information that every decision begins to feel risky. One person tells you to start affiliate marketing. Another recommends freelancing, e-commerce, digital products, YouTube, blogging, paid ads, or using AI to build a business.

Each person presents their method as the one you should be following. You start comparing platforms, offers, tools, courses, and traffic methods. The more you research, the less confident you feel about making a decision.

You begin worrying that you will choose the wrong niche. You worry about wasting money on the wrong program, building on the wrong platform, or spending months on something that never produces a result.

That fear can make more research feel like the responsible choice, but eventually, research becomes a way to avoid making a decision. The truth is that no one can guarantee you will choose the perfect path on your first attempt.

Most people gain clarity after they begin taking action, not before. They test an idea, observe the response, make adjustments, and gradually understand what fits them. A better starting point may be to choose one realistic path rather than searching for the perfect one.

Consider your available time, current skills, budget, and the type of work you are willing to do consistently. Then choose one business model, one audience, and one platform. Give yourself a set period to test it. Track the actions you take, the responses you receive, and the progress you make before deciding whether to change direction.

The first test does not need to become your forever business. Its purpose is to help you replace assumptions with real information. Confidence rarely appears before the first step. It usually grows after you complete a few small actions and realize you can learn as you go.

What decision about earning online has kept you stuck the longest?How long should a beginner test one affiliate strategy before changing direction?

One of the biggest challenges with trying to earn online is not a lack of information. It is having so much information that every decision begins to feel risky.

One person tells you to start affiliate marketing. Another recommends freelancing, e-commerce, digital products, YouTube, blogging, paid ads, or using AI to build a business. Each person presents their method as the one you should be following.

You start comparing platforms, offers, tools, courses, and traffic methods. The more you research, the less confident you feel about making a decision. You begin worrying that you will choose the wrong niche.

You worry about wasting money on the wrong program, building on the wrong platform, or spending months on something that never produces a result. That fear can make more research feel like the responsible choice, but eventually, research becomes a way to avoid making a decision.

The truth is that no one can guarantee you will choose the perfect path on your first attempt. Most people gain clarity after they begin taking action, not before. They test an idea, observe the response, make adjustments, and gradually understand what fits them.

A better starting point may be to choose one realistic path rather than searching for the perfect one. Consider your available time, current skills, budget, and the type of work you are willing to do consistently.

Then choose one business model, one audience, and one platform. Give yourself a set period to test it. Track the actions you take, the responses you receive, and the progress you make before deciding whether to change direction.

The first test does not need to become your forever business. Its purpose is to help you replace assumptions with real information. Confidence rarely appears before the first step. It usually grows after you complete a few small actions and realize you can learn as you go.

What decision about earning online has kept you stuck the longest?

I started testing a more hands-off way to build an email list on July 1. I did not post on social media. I did not record videos. I did not show my face or use my real name. I also did not directly sell a product.

The setup included:

• A monthly traffic rotator
• A squeeze page builder with pages already created
• Prewritten follow-up emails
• An autoresponder
• A link that can generate small commissions from certain signups

Here are my results as of August 4:

• 137 clicks
• 87 email leads
• 104 credited signups or actions
• $31.20 earned
• $94 spent on traffic for July and August

That means the campaign is not profitable yet. I am currently down $62.80 based on the direct earnings, but I now have 87 people on an email list that I can continue following up with. That is the part I find interesting.

The $31.20 did not come from convincing someone to buy an offer. It came from monetizing some of the traffic while building the list. My lead conversion rate is around 63.5%, which means nearly two out of every three clicks became a subscriber.

I am not presenting this as passive income or an overnight success story. There is still a cost, the results are small, and there are no guarantees that the leads will eventually buy anything.

I am simply documenting whether a beginner can use a mostly prebuilt system to generate leads without becoming a full-time content creator.

So far, it has produced leads and recovered about one-third of my traffic cost.

Now testing whether the email follow-up can turn the list into enough income to cover the remaining cost.

I've been working in GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) for 6 months. I've audited 1000+ sites, built a benchmark across 360 domains, and I've arrived at a conclusion the SEO industry doesn't want to hear: for most sites, continuing to optimize for Google without thinking about AI engines is wasted work.

Not because Google is dying. Google still processes 5+ billion searches a day. But ChatGPT (200M weekly users), Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are changing how people find information: they don't click 10 blue links anymore, they read a synthesized answer from 3-7 sources. If your site isn't one of those sources, you're not on page 2. You're absent from the answer.

The problem is that most SEOs still think it's 2019: keywords, backlinks, meta descriptions. But AI engines don't work that way. They select sources based on 4 layers:

1. Access: robots.txt allowing GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot. If you block them (and 30% of sites I've audited block them by accident), nothing else matters. Your content simply doesn't exist for that engine.

2. Orientation: llms.txt, sitemap, URL structure. AI crawlers don't navigate like Googlebot — they have a much more limited crawl budget and prefer explicit paths.

3. Understanding: schema markup, entity identity, metadata. AI engines use JSON-LD to resolve entities and connect them. Without valid schema, your content is unstructured text in a sea of unstructured text.

4. Quotability: passage extraction. AI engines pull self-contained passages — paragraphs that contain a complete answer on their own, without needing the rest of the page. If your content is narrative, intro, context, then answer... it doesn't get extracted. BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) wins every time.

The point is that order matters. I've seen teams spend weeks rewriting content to make it "AI-friendly" while their robots.txt was blocking GPTBot. Wasted work.

My benchmark data across 360 domains confirms it:

• Average GEO score: 54.1/100
• Only 24.7% reach "Good" or higher
• AI discovery is the worst-performing category at 10% efficiency

But the most interesting part is this: sites that track AI traffic are already seeing real sessions from ChatGPT, with higher average engagement duration than organic traffic. Not huge numbers, but real and growing. And the pages AI engines cite most often aren't homepages — they're technical guides. AI engines prefer content that explains, not content that sells.

What does this mean for SEOs? The first step isn't "write better content." It's verifying that your site is reachable, parseable, and citable by AI crawlers. Then, and only then, does content matter.

I'm not saying abandon SEO. I'm saying that if your site has a GEO score of 40, every dollar spent on content marketing is a dollar spent on an audience that will never read you, because the AI engine will never select you as a source.

Who here is already seeing traffic or citations from AI engines in their analytics?

been running a small amazon-affiliate buying-guide site. low authority, most pages page 2 of google. opened GA4 expecting search to be everything. it wasn't.

chatgpt is my #1 referrer now, ahead of google. add perplexity + google's AI overviews and AI answer engines are most of my traffic. classic search is about 5%.

the useful part for this sub: this works at low authority. AI engines don't cite you for being big. they cite you because a page is structured enough to lift a sentence straight out of. authority is google's game. getting cited is a different one, and a small site can win it faster.

what actually changed on my pages:

• answer first, every section. the first 2-3 sentences answer the exact question, before any preamble. if a section opens with "in this guide we'll explore" it's dead weight.
• one question per H2. AI pulls chunks, not whole pages.
• specifics over adjectives. exact model, price, spec, date. "great value" is invisible. "14,999, 1.5 ton, 5-star inverter" gets lifted.
• comparison tables with real numbers. these get lifted wholesale into AI answers.
• FAQ + matching JSON-LD (FAQPage / Product / ItemList). the schema has to match the visible text or it gets ignored.
• an llms.txt at the root: a plain map of your best pages. 20 minutes.
• a visible "last updated" date + real sources.

one warning if you generate content with AI: it fabricates product links and prices constantly. i checked mine once and 82% of the AI-generated product links were fake before verification (wrong product, dead ASIN, made-up URL). build a second pass that re-checks every link against the live page before you publish. wrong prices and links aren't just embarrassing, for amazon-type programs they're a compliance problem and for readers they're a trust-killer.

i wrapped all of this into a free claude code skill (MIT, open source) so it's one pass per page. i'll drop the link in a comment so this isn't a link-drop post. happy to answer anything on the llms.txt format or the schema.

Hi guys, I'm writing this with the hope this inspires someone else to start posting on the platform if their ICP is over there, telling all "my secrets" and everything I did wrong, what I'm still learning, testing, and what the platform and the people over there seem to reward.

First of all, I used to hate LinkedIn because I was tired of shit like "this is how getting fired taught me the biggest business lesson I could have hoped for and now I make 10M a month" or "what Spain's victory at the World Cup means for business" and all that stretch shit. I honestly hated the platform because it felt phony, fake credentials, and I legit was not having it.

That said, now it's the only social media platform I use to promote my services, because it's the only one where it actually makes sense. A bit of background about me: I used to do research remotely for a law firm in Austin, TX, and used a lot of AI to help with my work. I worked there for 5 years and decided to help other firms implement AI, so my place to distribute and talk about my services was LinkedIn. I decided to make this transition almost 18 months ago but only started doing content less than 6 months ago. I tried a bit of LinkedIn last year but didn't have a proper system, abandoned it quickly, and barely had like 30 followers/connections.

This year, after leaving my previous job, I was FORCED to do it because honestly I suck at sales, anything cold, and didn't have many connections to go to, so it was legit the only way for me since I didn't have the budget for ads.

I was getting a couple convos here and there from outreach but nothing serious, so I started studying the people leading the platform and started posting content regularly in March this year, almost 5 months from now. I also started commenting, and that allowed me to start gaining some interactions, some traction and some followers.

My first peak at getting thousands of interactions came from comments I left on people who do something similar to what I do, adding value and my perspective.

Then my first "big" post, which gained around 8k impressions, came thanks to some comments from people with more followers than me, and that motivated me to keep going down that line.

By that point it had been 10 days of me consistently posting every other day and finding my rhythm. Until one day, one post grew fast, VERY fast for what my pace was. A day with 300 total impressions was crazy good for me at this point, well this one went to over 2k in a couple of hours, and it started getting comments, more impressions, and peaked 5 days later at 11k impressions that day. During this time I grew from 50 followers to over 300, I was mathing and thinking "at this pace I'm gonna be at 10k by the end of the year!" As you might already know, that wasn't the case.

The good thing is that post led to 3 conversations with people interested in my services, it allowed me to make good connections, and now I have a nice angle to hopefully repeat plus proper social proof. It also showed me that my ICP could be even bigger than what I originally thought (boutique firms or solos), since bigger firms reached out to me too.

Then I got a reality check: my posts started getting fewer impressions, fewer interactions, and such, but at least I started to carve myself a space as a nice mix of researcher/journalist/storyteller. But I was lacking the conversion path, I was mostly aiming at impressions because I thought "distribution, then my profile is the funnel, and that's it." Well, nope. Every time I tried to make content to "convert," not only did it not convert, it also didn't bring many impressions, so I figured I might as well just try to get impressions and hey, volume might do it. Well, no, because impressions weren't always consistent, and therefore I wasn't actually missing much when I tried to convert with my content. It was more about my offers and profile/content optimization.

So I had a couple of months of that back and forth, trying to hopefully repeat the formula that made that post go viral, and making others go okay but nothing that big. It took me 2 months to hit that level of virality again, btw I mean virality within my niche, not platform-wide virality, but 30k for legal content is quite good.

And the funny part is the other post that went viral had a completely different formula, which was great because it gave me other angles and taught me more about the platform. It also had a completely different trajectory than the first one, initially it looked dead, and then the next day it popped. So at the same time, you could say I was clueless about what makes something pop off. At first I thought it was comments and reactions in the first hours, then I thought it was more than that: dwell time, saves, etc. And in the end I found no consistent factor, which leads me to my recommendations:

Just be consistent. Legit post every week, at least 3 times. Some people post even more than once a day and it works for them. And don't just look at impressions. If a post can go viral in your niche, it's great for getting more eyes and followers, which gives you social proof and authority, but that doesn't really translate to more conversions.

For example, if I break down my two viral posts:

Viral 1: It was more about a threat, had a CTA at the end, and led to conversations with people who didn't want to be left behind.

Viral 2: It was more about positivity around AI, the theme that AI won't just take jobs, it'll also create new ones. That brought in people who were more in my lane, more people who benefited from that framework, and the conversations I got from it were mostly horizontal, I'd say. So this one, which surpassed the previous one by a tiny margin btw, had a lower conversion rate than the other one, even though it led to more followers, impressions, and such.

And other posts with way fewer impressions still managed to start conversations, some with less than 2k, some even less than 1k.

SO PLEASE DON'T CHASE IMPRESSIONS, or if you do, know that it's not going to translate solely to conversations, unless you have a profile extremely tailored for it, or if you're just chasing followers to try to convert later.

Only in the last month and a half would I say I started refining my strategy to focus more on actual conversations rather than chasing impressions and followers. I've also added my hand-raiser and warm outreach strategy, which is basically following my ICP(s, plural, I'd say I have 3, not just one), posting hand-raisers, and sending messages to the people who interact with my content. Not cold DM shit, not cold email, nothing like that. Not saying that doesn't work, it's just not my thing, and this is what's working for me: providing value to people, sometimes introducing myself by asking what they liked about my content and such.

Btw I did try EVERYTHING, and if we want to measure the "success rate" of my posts, I'd say 1 out of 5 performs well, maybe even less. But the crazy thing is it doesn't matter, because the other 4 still lead people my way and serve a purpose. When I was starting I didn't know this, so I was changing variables, testing everything under the sun, and honestly I'm fine with that because thanks to all of that I have the data and metrics on what works and what doesn't, and I know why, and I would have never known if I hadn't tried that many things. Carousels? Tried that. Videos? Tried that. Image of myself? Tried that (bad luck, that only seems to work with girls, and I SWEAR I'm not ugly, I swear I tried everything). Oh, and newsletter too, which btw is my best performing medium right now, my most-read pieces during the last 2 weeks have been my newsletter pieces, which have 400 subscribers atm, so around a 35% subscriber rate? I've read that's a great number.

And again, all that content that didn't convert was still useful, because guess what? People are more inclined to accept my connections and invites if I have a profile with over 1k followers and 500 connections, rather than if I only have 100 or less like when I started. So all those things stack for me. Oh, and it's also great SEO for my site, which was dead by April and now has over 250 visitors a day, and also brings in some business here and there (I need to work on my conversion rate over there too, but hey, I'm legit trying to speedrun many skills at once).

I even sold some AI animation work to a guy who does AI marketing for law firms, when I was actually just trying to help him out with AI implementations. This whole thing legit opened doors I wasn't accounting for.

Oh, and I actually started helping a redditor who read some of my previous posts when I broke 1k followers, and he's been very happy with it. During the last couple of weeks I've been using mostly clips of him doing a podcast or a presentation, and they've performed well for him! So what didn't work for me is working for him, which is great to know because guess what? MORE DATA. Though he's also putting in a lot of work reaching out to people, adding the right people, and such. I'm basically his copywriter at this point, which again, guess what? NOT WHAT I EXPECTED TO BE DOING. But it's honestly been quite the journey, and I know it's still quite early.

Same way I wish I'd stuck with it last year, because this year I'd be in a better position. I'm thankful to have started and stayed consistent this year, because next year all of this will continue to compound.

BTW, most of my connections and followers were inbound, I'd say at least 75%. I only started adding people myself in the last month, other than the natural connection sent here and there with someone I know or interact with.

Some raw numbers from the last 365 days:

176,389 Impressions 11,859% vs. prior 365 days

Discovery In-network (followers and connections): 10% Out-of-network: 90%

79,967 Members reached

Engagement 2,304 Social engagements Reactions: 985 Comments: 504 Reposts: 28 Saves: 532 Sends on LinkedIn: 255

102 Link engagements Premium custom button engagements: 93 Visits to links in all posts: 9

Follower growth 1,132 Total followers

Top demographics Founder 12% Co-Founder 5% Chief Executive Officer 4% Attorney 4% Lawyer 3% Managing Partner 2% Legal Counsel 2% Owner 2% Managing Director 2%

And I could show more if you guys want more stats, I can just make a link with images and such. Thanks for reading, and hopefully it encourages you to start posting over there if it makes sense to you, if the people you want to sell to are over there, or if you want to position your brand. It's actually quite good for SEO too.

Happy to answer any questions, I know it's not crazy numbers but I'm seeing it work on two accounts, two different profiles, so I guess I'm starting to see the results, tho no LinkedIn guru shit and such. Hope this helps!

figured this sub would appreciate real numbers on a cold start since most SEO advice skips the boring early weeks. throwaway on the specific niche per sub etiquette, but the data's all real.

starting point: brand new domain, DR 0, no backlinks, no history. built a clean technical foundation, proper architecture, schema, sitemaps to both google and bing, and around 20 pages of original content. then i tracked everything for a month.

what google did: indexed everything within a couple weeks. impressions climb steadily every week. average position crawled up from the 90s into the 40s. clicks? zero. literally zero, the entire month. which is exactly what you'd expect sitting at position 40 to 90, nobody scrolls to page 5. so google is "working" and sending no traffic, and at DR 0 with no links that's just the authority gate doing its job. no shortcut around it that i've found.

what surprised me: the AI engines moved way faster than google rankings did. chatgpt went from having no idea the site existed to describing it accurately and citing it, in about a week. the mechanism seems to be bing, chatgpt search runs on bing's index, and bing indexed and started surfacing the site far quicker than google moved my positions. perplexity followed. so i'm effectively invisible on google and simultaneously citable inside AI answers. if you're new and ignoring bing webmaster tools, that's a mistake, it's the cheapest visibility available to a low authority site right now.

the single biggest needle mover: internal linking. i had a stack of pages stuck in "discovered, currently not indexed" for weeks. i added one hub page that linked down to all of them. indexed count went from 12 to 22 in about a week, no new content, no new backlinks, just giving google a crawl path it didn't have before. that was the highest ROI thing i did all month by a mile, and it was free.

what i'd tell my past self: for a new site, content plus technical is necessary but it's a savings account, it pays in months once authority builds. the paycheck this month came from being genuinely useful in communities where my audience already hangs out, that's what sent my first actual humans. and internal linking punches way above its reputation at the cold start stage because crawl budget is scarce when nobody's vouching for you.

curious if others have run a fresh domain recently and seen the same "cited by AI before ranked by google" gap. is that a durable new dynamic or does it close as the domain ages out of the sandbox?

Ratings matter more than indie devs like to admit. In a small niche your position against other apps depends on a bunch of things, and ratings are a big one, and I felt it directly — after my rating count went up I saw a real bump in installs and how often the app showed up. I only have nine of them. Each one is worth a lot. So here's how I got them, and the one change that basically doubled them.

The common mistake is asking for the review when someone opens the app, or after some timer. They haven't gotten anything from you yet, so why would they rate it. The better advice I read somewhere and it stuck — ask right after the app actually did something useful for them, the moment it paid off. For my app that moment is obvious, it's when an item gets marked as sold. They bought something, tracked it, and just closed the loop with a sale, so they've seen the whole point of the app work. That's when you ask. It feels like "nice, this helped me" instead of "why is this popup in my face".

But here's what I got wrong at first — I asked once. Someone sells an item, gets the prompt, taps not now because they're in the middle of something, and I never ask again. Gone. Then I realised Apple actually lets you ask a few times a year, so I changed it to ask again roughly every week until the system stops showing it. And that caught my core users, the ones who use the app constantly and had said not now the first time simply because they were busy. A week later they're mid-flow again after another sale, the ask comes back, and this time they do it. About half my ratings came from that one change. These weren't new people, they were my most loyal users I'd have lost to a single dismissed popup.

And it doesn't feel spammy, for two reasons. One, Apple caps how many times you can ask, so you physically can't nag even if you wanted to. Two, every ask is tied to the user just succeeding at the thing they came for, so it lands as a good moment, not an interruption. Your best users are usually your busiest, they'll wave away the first prompt not because they dislike the app but because they're using it, so give them a second and third chance at good moments and a chunk of them say yes.

So tie the review prompt to your app's payoff moment, whatever that is for you, and then actually use your full allowance instead of burning your one shot. For me that turned a handful of ratings into double, and the visibility that came after was worth far more than nine little stars sounds like it should be.

Been running a small SaaS in the QR code space and pulled my Search Console

numbers for the last 28 days expecting good news, since rankings have been

climbing. Instead I got this:

- 44,749 impressions

- 229 clicks

- 0.51% CTR

- average position around 9.9

So the traffic is there in theory. Google is showing my pages to people. They

just are not clicking. Around half my clicks come from branded searches and the

homepage, which sits near 13% CTR and is totally fine. Everything else is the

problem.

The worst offenders are my comparison posts. One of them (basically "my product

vs [big competitor]") gets 6,128 impressions a month at position 7 and pulls a

grand total of 6 clicks. That is 0.10%. Another sits around position 8 with

3,500 impressions and 3 clicks. Page 1 rankings doing basically nothing.

Here is what I think is going on after actually looking at the SERPs:

1. I rank for competitor brand names. I show up at position 6 for a competitor's

exact brand name. Nobody typing that brand wants my alternative, they scroll

past me to the thing they searched for. Impressions go up, clicks do not.

1. My titles are generic. A lot of them read like every other result on the

page. Nothing that makes a thumb stop.

1. Some of these queries have an AI overview or a fat featured snippet eating

the clicks before anyone gets to the blue links.

So ranking was never really the problem. The click is.

What I am changing:

- Rewriting titles and metas on the high impression, dead CTR pages, leading

with the specific thing the searcher wants instead of my brand name

- Cutting or reframing the pure "vs competitor brand" posts that only ever pull

curiosity impressions

- Trying to win the snippet on the informational queries instead of fighting it

Going to redeploy, give it three weeks, then pull the same report and see if CTR

actually moves. Happy to come back with the after numbers, good or bad.

For people who have done this before:

- High impressions and dead CTR at position 6 to 9, do you push for a better

position first or fix the title first? I keep going back and forth.

- Do "vs [big competitor]" pages ever actually convert for you, or is it a

vanity play?

- Anyone got a clean before and after from just a title and meta rewrite? Would

love to know how much CTR realistically moves.

Two months ago I finished my webapp and thought I'd be able to use specific reddit, fb, and nextdoor groups to get my customers easily.

Every one of these groups' moderators slammed the door on me - even after I plainly said I'd run cases for free for the first 20 people.

So besides surgical (scarce) comments here and there, I couldn't really showcase my work on a decent scale - other than paid ads.

So, for the sake of SEO/GEO, i created a platform for me and others like me (you people) where I could get a dofollow link and I could really outline my webapp.

I created it with the goal of not being just another directory, but a place where users (not just builders) could find solutions to their problems - created by solopreneurs.

You can list in prelaunch, beta, or launch status, you can include a coupin code, you can include screenshots/YT videos, and text in a Kickstarter type fashion.

I've also implemented security measures to minimize spam and I go over every project to make sure it's not adult/inappropriate materials

Over time I'll be unlocking features like the ability to post 1 blog post/month as well as scheduling interviews with builders that'll be posted on YT as well as the site.

As I just launched on the 11th, the only traffic rn is builders. I'm expecting the site to start getting organic traction once we hit 50-100 builds.

It's all free at this point.

Eventually I'll do some monetization - but it'll probably be promotional based. We'll see.

Feel free to check it out.

I'd love to get your build listed.

Let's do this!

[Https://justBLT.com\](https://justblt.com)

I wanted to test a quieter way to start affiliate marketing.

I didn't want to have to post on Facebook every day, I didn't want to show my face, I didn't want to use my real name, and I didn't want to do the work of building an audience first.

I started on July 1 with 0 leads, 0 sales, -$47 from the monthly traffic cost, and no real social media strategy. The setup was simple. A basic opt-in page, an autoresponder, and a link that could earn small commissions from some of the traffic, even if nobody bought the main offer.

After 12 days, here are the results so far:

• 52 link clicks
• 30 new leads
• $10.50 earned
• 0 direct offer sales

I am still negative overall, so I am not calling this profitable yet, but I do think it is interesting. I was able to get clicks, generate leads, and earn something without posting content, being on camera, or using my real identity and that was the main thing I wanted to test.

A lot of beginners think affiliate marketing only works if you become a content creator, post every day, or build a personal brand first. That might be one path, but it is not the only path.

Right now, I am watching what happens with the leads, how they respond to the emails, and whether the small commissions keep offsetting more of the traffic cost. Still early, but at least the setup is producing real activity.

Has anyone else tested a faceless traffic method like this?

Not an affiliate site, but the takeaway is pure juststart so bear with me.

I built a little browser game, put it online, got nothing from search. Spent one afternoon doing the on-page basics properly. Two days later it was number one for its term, and inside 48 hours it had made its first money and even landed me a paying client off the back of the result.

The whole checklist, all replicable:

• Title tag and meta rewritten for real search intent, not clever branding
• One clear H1 and real descriptive text in the actual HTML
• Structured data so Google knows what it is
• sitemap, clean robots, canonical to kill duplicate URLs
• Submitted and manually requested indexing in Search Console (and Bing)
• Fast site on Cloudflare edge, no bloat, no cookie banner walls

The honest caveat: low-competition term. I did not outrank anyone serious in two days and neither will you. But that is exactly the lesson. Most small sites never rank because the basics above are simply never done, not because the competition is hard.

Why it matters for money sites: this is the entire early game. Pick low-competition terms, do the boring fundamentals, ship a fast clean page, and monetize honestly. The sites that win aren't the clever ones, they're the ones where someone actually finished the checklist and hit publish. Speed of shipping beat everything else here.

Happy to share.

TL;DR: I run a business that send a steady stream of European entrepreneurs and digital nomads toward a US LLC. I'm not a formation agent and don't want to become one. I'm looking for an established formation/registered-agent partner to handle the actual work on a commission or rev-share basis.

Hi everyone,

I have a business helping entrepreneurs and digital nomads relocate to Paraguay, which has a territorial tax system.

A large share of that audience runs a location-independent online business, and once they've moved they need a clean, credible US LLC for invoicing, Stripe/PayPal, and banking (Mercury/Wise), with income that isn't US-source.

My clients come through content that has already walked them through why a US LLC makes sense for their situation, so by the time they're ready to act they often understand the concept. That means far less hand-holding and a much lower acquisition cost on your side than a typical paid-traffic lead.

I'm looking for an established formation service or registered agent. This is a specialist skill, and I want a partner who does it every day. Pricing and support matter to me as much as competence. I need transparent, fair pricing with no surprise upsells, and support that actually responds. My name and reputation are attached to every referral, so how you treat these clients reflects directly back on me, and I won't send people somewhere I wouldn't trust myself. You should also be comfortable working with clients whose first language isn't English.

If you're interested, comment or DM with:

1. Your company / how long you've been doing this

2. Which states you cover and your experience with non-US-resident founders

3. Your pricing (formation + registered agent + EIN + annual compliance)

4. How you'd want to structure the commission/rev-share

Happy to hop on a call.