I picked the wrong niche and killed it after four sessions

No affiliate links in this post. There is nothing here to sell you.

I bought the domain. I designed the whole site — palette, typography, logo, homepage, the lot. Four working sessions, spread over a couple of weeks.

Then I checked whether the affiliate programme paid recurring commissions.

It didn’t. One payment per customer, once, and that was it.

Why that single fact killed the whole plan

A recurring commission compounds. You sign up a customer this month, and if they stay, they are still paying you next month while you go and find another one. Your income is the sum of everyone who has ever stayed.

A one-time commission does not compound. Every month starts at zero.

To hit the target I had in mind, I would have needed roughly 167 brand-new sales every single month. Not 167 customers — 167 new ones, month after month, forever.

For a site with no traffic, no audience and a few hours a week, that is not ambitious. It is arithmetic that does not work.

The uncomfortable part

This check takes about ten minutes. Open the affiliate programme’s terms page, find the commission structure, and read whether it says recurring or one-time.

I did it after buying the domain and after four sessions of design work. There is no clever reason why. I was excited about the idea and I did the fun part first.

What it actually cost

The damage

Money lost

Sessions spent

Kept

Domain

Cheaper than it could have been. The hosting and domain carry over to any niche, and so does the design system. What I lost was time — and the lesson cost less now than it would have after six months of writing.

The four questions I now ask first

1. Is the commission recurring or one-time? Read the programme terms, not a blog post about them. If it is one-time, work out how many new sales per month you need to sustain your target, and decide honestly whether that number is reachable.

2. Can I actually sign up? Some programmes need a registered business, a local phone number, or a payout method that is not available everywhere. Check before building, not after.

3. Would an AI answer swallow this content? If the whole topic is generic how-to questions, search engines increasingly answer them on the results page and nobody clicks through. You need content that requires having actually done something.

4. Can I afford to use the tools? If honest reviews are the plan, and the tools cost more per month than the budget, the plan is already broken.

Why this is the first post

Because it is the most useful thing I know so far, and because a site that only publishes its wins is not worth reading.

The next posts are about what this site has cost to run — the real invoice, including the tax that never shows up in reviews written from the US. More about what I are doing here.