Ch. 18: I Spent $4,000 on Links and Ranked Anyway — Without Them Convinced links were my bottleneck, I dropped $4,000 over five months on my drone site: guest posts, a few niche edits, one shady packa…
Ch. 17: The AI-Written Half of My Site Got Deindexed I ran an honest experiment on my cookware site: 25 posts written by me, 25 generated and lightly edited, same publish cadence, randomized topics so…
Ch. 15: The Niche That Pays for 4 Months and Sleeps for 8 I built a site around Christmas-light installation and holiday decor. Genius in November. By February my 38k peak sessions collapsed to 3k and…
Ch. 14: My Second Site Got to $1k in Half the Time First site: 14 months to $1k/mo. Second site, same niche family: 7 months. Not because I worked harder — because I'd stopped doing the dumb stuff. Wh…
Ch. 13: I Deleted 30% of My Site and Traffic Went Up My travel-gear site had 140 posts and felt impressive. It also felt stuck — 24k sessions for nine months straight. I pulled GSC data and sorted by …
Ch. 12: I Killed the Affiliate Model on My Own Site My macro-photography site pulled 35k sessions at a humiliating affiliate conversion — camera gear has 90-day research cycles and 2-4% commissions. I…
