The honest builder who ships. Not a guru, not a course, just a maker who wrote the tools affiliates actually use and tells you the truth about what works in 2026.
A builder's notebook for WordPress and Amazon-affiliate sites, including the things I got wrong.
What breaks on affiliate sites, and why. Mostly it's the credential layer. Amazon's Creators API wants Associates enrolment plus at least ten qualifying sales in the last thirty days, so a brand-new site can't get API access at all.
The old 700-page Amazon review site is mostly dead. I show you exactly what I do: the stack, what broke, what I kept, and what I would skip.
I mostly talk about what actually works in 2026 and what I would skip.
No course, no passive-income pitch. I run this on about five hours a week, and there's nothing expensive to sell you.
The old niche-site playbook (700 thin Amazon-review pages ranked on tricks) is dead, and the people who sold you that course have quietly moved on. Anyone can say they run a niche site. What I can show you is the layer underneath: the API access wall a brand-new site can't get past, and the Amazon rules that get repeated confidently and wrong. I see that layer from the support queue of PaapiPlugin, the Amazon search plugin I build for other people's affiliate sites. I run this on about five hours a week, and there's nothing expensive to sell you.
A 53-point r/SEO warning about Cloudflare's managed robots.txt names ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. The block list reaches none of the three, and a separate Cloudflare default changes on 15 September 2026.
12 min read
The 24 hours everyone quotes attaches to the link, not to the image. The image file gets no storage window at all, and a proportional resize is the only edit the program permits.
14 min read
Amazon's own docs banner said April 30th, then said May 15th, then the page stopped resolving. No current Amazon page carries a date, and what actually stands in a new site's way is an eligibility rule instead.
11 min read
Two retrieval systems that read two different webs, about 12% overlap, and one widely cited study that measured AI Overviews, not Google rankings.
7 min read
I read the Operating Agreement and the Program Policies. The shortener clause is a manner test, the cloaking clause points at Amazon, not at your reader.
11 min read
Google turned batched re-evaluation off in 2016 and said so. The two Search Console statuses everyone reads as verdicts carry no quality language.
8 min readNo earnings-screenshot theater. No fabricated dashboards, income proof, or timelines.
No "passive income," no lifestyle flex, no Lambo-in-the-garage energy.
No high-ticket course funnel. There is nothing expensive to sell.
No guru persona. Peer to peer, always.
Affiliate sites break in ways their owners can't see, usually at the credential layer or on an Amazon rule that gets repeated wrong. That's what I write about here, and I see it from the support queue of PaapiPlugin, the Amazon search plugin I build for those sites.