Here is the whole of it. Between June 2025 and August 2026 this site earned nothing. Not a small amount. Zero confirmed commissions, zero conversions, across fifteen months of an affiliate programme we had been approved for and had linked from live articles the entire time.
That number is easy to explain away. New site, hard niche, not enough articles. All of those were true, and all of them were beside the point, because when we finally audited the site properly in September we found something worse than failure. The experiment had never been running.
What the dashboard said
Search Console, for the five weeks to September 10: fourteen impressions. Zero clicks. Average position 52.6, which is page five or six of the results. Nine pages indexed, twenty not.
Read quickly, that is a story about quality. The articles are not good enough to rank, so they sit on page six, so nobody clicks. Write better articles, wait longer.
We read it that way for months.
What was actually true
Three things, all found in a single afternoon of looking at the plumbing rather than the numbers.
The sitemap had been frozen since June 9. Three months. It was still advertising pages we had deleted — eleven URLs returning 404 — while listing none of the articles published since. Of the twenty pages Google had not indexed, eleven were pages that no longer existed. We had been feeding a crawler a map of a site that was not there.
An article published on August 14 had never been crawled. Not ranked badly. Not crawled at all. URL inspection returned no record of a visit, three and a half weeks after publication.
There were no internal links. Zero, across every article on the site. No path from any page to any other page. Each article sat alone with nothing pointing at it and nothing leading away.
Any one of these would depress the numbers. Together they mean the fourteen impressions were not a measurement of anything. They were the reading you get from an instrument that is unplugged.
The part that is uncomfortable to write
All three failures were silent. No error, no alert, no red number on a dashboard. The sitemap plugin did not announce that it had stopped. Search Console does not tell you that an article is uncrawled unless you inspect that specific URL by hand. Nothing anywhere reports “this site has no internal links.”
And all three were visible to anyone who looked. Not one required special tooling. Opening the sitemap in a browser takes four seconds and would have shown a file with a June date and eleven dead URLs in it.
Nobody looked, because the numbers were being reported every week and the numbers looked like a story we already understood. A bad number that fits your theory is more dangerous than no number at all. It closes the question.
The arithmetic we should have done first
Once the plumbing was fixed, we finally did the sum we had been avoiding for over a year.
The affiliate programme pays roughly ¥100 per click on the products we were approved for, measured from our own account. Conversion runs near 0.8%. So one confirmed sale needs about 125 clicks on an affiliate link. At a 7% click-through from article to link, that is about 1,800 sessions for a single sale.
The original goal was ¥1,000,000 a month. Run the same numbers forward and that requires roughly 135,000 sessions a month, every month, for a payout model that resets to zero on the first of each month. We had six articles.
This is not a stretch target. It is a different business, and no amount of writing better articles was going to close a gap of that size.
The useful thing about doing the arithmetic is that it is cheap and it is final. Fifteen months of effort could not tell us the plan was unreachable. Twenty minutes with a calculator did.
What changed as a result
We stopped chasing the volume model. A payout that resets monthly means every month starts at zero no matter how much you published last month; the only way up is more traffic, forever. The alternative is recurring commission, where each referral keeps paying while the customer stays subscribed, so the work accumulates instead of evaporating.
Under the recurring model the traffic requirement drops by more than an order of magnitude, because you are adding to a base rather than replacing it. Choosing which recurring programme turned out to be its own problem: our first application was rejected six minutes after we sent it. That is the business we are now building, in English, on this site. Whether it works is an open question. What is no longer open is whether the previous plan could have worked.
We also changed how we measure. Two rules now:
Check the instrument before reading it. Before any monthly number goes into a report, someone confirms the sitemap is current, spot-checks that recent articles have been crawled, and confirms internal links exist. Under a minute. It would have caught all three failures in June.
A bad number gets audited, not explained. The temptation with a disappointing metric is to reach for a reason. The reason is usually available and usually plausible. The rule now is that an unexpected number is treated as a possible instrument fault until the instrument has been checked.
If you run a small site
The failure here was not strategic. We did not pick the wrong niche and lose fifteen months to it, although we did also pick a hard niche. The failure was that we spent fifteen months collecting readings from equipment nobody had verified was connected, and then reasoning carefully about those readings.
Three checks, none longer than a minute:
Open your sitemap in a browser. Look at the date. Look at whether the URLs in it still resolve.
Take your most recent article and inspect the URL in Search Console. Not “how is it ranking” — has it been crawled at all.
Pick any article and try to click your way to another one. If you cannot, neither can a crawler.
We have described the gates that now run before anything publishes. Those catch problems inside an article. None of them would have caught any of the three failures above, which lived between the articles rather than inside them. That gap is the next thing we are building for. It turned out to be wider than we thought: the same gates later passed three articles that reached readers as raw markup.
Editorial note. Written and edited by the operator of this site. Every figure here is from our own affiliate account, our own Search Console property, or our own audit notes of 2026-09-10. The revenue figure is not rounded.
Disclosure. This article contains no affiliate or sponsored links. This site may earn commissions from links in other articles, and those articles carry their own disclosure at the top. Nothing here is professional advice.
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