I Built Two Affiliate Sites in a Weekend
The Caddie's Den and Covetory: picking the niches, writing the lists, wiring the links, and the honest version of the money.
Over one weekend I stood up two affiliate publications. The Caddie's Den, gear guides for golfers, and Covetory, curated lists of things worth wanting. Both live, both monetized, both built by one person and one AI partner. Here's how I did it, plus the honest version of what they earn, which is the part most passive income posts conveniently skip.
Start with why two, not one. They work as a flywheel. The apps capture attention. The publications turn that attention into curated recommendations. The recommendations earn through affiliate links. And the whole thing points back at the apps. The Caddie's Den is the narrow, credible niche, golf gear written by someone who actually breaks 75. Covetory is the wide one, gift guides and best of lists across every category. Narrow builds trust. Wide builds reach.
The build took a weekend because the machine did the grunt work and I did the judgment. Domains on Cloudflare. Each site is a clean static build deployed to Cloudflare Pages. The money plumbing is a tiny redirect worker. Every buy button routes through a /go link that attaches the affiliate tag and forwards to the retailer, so the tag lives in exactly one place and I can change it once instead of editing a hundred buttons. Amazon Associates on both, each with its own tracking tag. A newsletter wired to each site. I even ran small review panels, pointing the AI at the build through different lenses (design, conversion, credibility, SEO) and fixing what came back. A weekend of that is worth a month of doing it by hand.
What broke, so you don't repeat it. A domain can show Active in your registrar and still not resolve, because the hosting project never claimed the hostname. That cost me a confused hour staring at a site that was live and down at the same time. The hosting dashboard also liked to wedge in the middle of a deploy, so the command line deploy became the standing path. And you cannot hotlink brand product images forever. The real fix is licensed product feeds, which is a fast follow, not a launch blocker.
Now the money, honestly. It is early and it is small. Affiliate income is not a faucet you turn on. It's a garden you plant. Amazon doesn't even keep your account unless you log a few qualifying sales in the first window, and the real lever isn't the build at all. It's traffic and trust, which take content and time. So I'm not going to quote you a number that makes this look like a get rich weekend, because it wasn't. What I built in a weekend was the machine. Two properties that can earn, wired correctly, ready to compound. The earning is next year's work.
— MG
For the engineers.
That was the operator's view. Underneath it sits a small, deliberate stack: two static sites, one shared redirect worker that owns every affiliate tag, a links manifest, the newsletter capture, and a command line deploy I trust. I wrote the full build breakdown as a companion piece. If you want the wiring, that one is for you.
New notes land first in the weekly letter.