[herbst]

I am no affiliate marketer by any means. However you just need to be the last click in the chain of a buying decision.

If you have any kind of expertise in a area, no matter how niche or weird, a simple knowledge website can easily be that last click for someone. AI can just fill the blanks of your existing expertise.

There are millions of ways to approach this. Sure it doesn't happen over night, and you need to find 'tricks' that work for you and your products and audience.

But I am certain that anyone with enough time can find their piece of the cake that is our world of constant consumption.

(Stupid Example:// I just bought a repair part for my coffee machine, nobody dominates the affiliate market here. However I needed to research which additional parts I would need to open the machine, etc. I googled like 5 related phrases in my research, any targeted blog post would have shown up catched my interest and maybe would have lead to a sale. Let's say there are 1 million machines of that type that need that part every 5 years or so, maybe 10k would repair it themself or at least try to. They Google, see your article and maybe 10% actually buys the parts. 10k, so 2k per year. 10% buying from your links so 200 people, 200 X 5% of 30$ = 300$ a year. Now repeat with the next machine type, then next brand. Etc)

[mewpmewp2]

How do you get any traffic to your site in the first place?

You are already competing with tons of SEO spamming websites trying to trick people into affiliate purchases, and they've been in business for much longer.

Google is almost useless in many cases because of all of those SEO hacking websites.

Especially now with AI, so many websites generated using AI tools to target SEO, and you would have to compete with their practices.

[herbst]

I agree to 100% that Google is nearly useless at this point because of SEO hacking.

However Google is not that stupid. If your site is the only one users don't leave after 10 seconds Google knows that.

AI content works well, but only if you input the right things and there is hours of work and expertise as well to get that right, even if it's automated in the end. Each problem needs to be tackled specifically no recipe just transports properly to another niche.

IMO organic traffic & SEO is still king. A few Reddit posts or well placed blog comments are enough to establish a new domain. If users spend time on your site, because you share actual knowledge, traffic grows from its own. Even more if you grow with content as well. Sure it takes time, but I still earn my few hundred dollars once and then from things I built years ago and never touched again. Each of them tackling a niche problem I had, researched and then shared in a accessible format. My sites don't look like affiliate spam because they bring value and I target the traffic trough SEO looking for that exact value.

[mejutoco]

Google might wait 6 months until they rank your site higher (same as you mention some old websites). I think for a new website it would take a while to rank properly. This matches my experience with own domains too.