Does affiliate marketing actually work?"

Something isn’t working…

Queue a clickbait title about how “this polyamory thing isn’t working”, but no, I think the internet is the issue.

Does affiliate marketing actually work?

18 months ago I started an affiliate marketing site with the idea that I would slowly grow it into a passive income business. Why affiliate marketing? Well mostly because I wanted to create revenue streams, because housing and food are expensive.

A few months before I started this site, I was laid off from a media company. Something I knew at that time was that every major media company was making some kind of affiliate play, or already had affiliate partnerships propping up their revenue. As traditional advertising markets shift and change, affiliate marketing seemed like a salvation to that industry.

Getting Starting with Amazon

Before you have an audience you have to have products, but you can’t get product partnerships without an audience. Except for Amazon.

It’s widely known that Amazon doesn’t pay very much in terms of affiliate commissions, but it’s a good place to start because they will let literally anyone become an affiliate and start sharing links.

Picked by actually poly people

Amazon links let me test a proof of concept site. Because it was November, my local poly social group was circulating a google doc of “Holiday gift ideas for your partners” so my own poly community helped generate the ideas for what products got suggested.

I made JustPolyThings.com by buying a webflow affiliate template and filling the CMS with Amazon items. I wrote a handful of buying guides, had to figure out all the legal stuff for cookies and affiliate tracking links and hook up analytics, and relearn SEO. I also made an instagram account to share the guide posts.

This felt amazing.

JustPolyThings immediately had traction. It was exciting for me to see my local poly community get excited about it.

Promoting Other People’s Content & Products

As an individual, I don’t want to tell people HOW to do polyamory or consensual non-monogamy. There are plenty of poly relationship coaches, and qualified authors writing books, and a huge world of resources that already exists, so my idea was to make a hub for sharing, not a blog site or personal platform for promoting my own brand of polyamory.

I pictured something more inclusive than some of the existing non-monogamy focused sites/platforms which tend to lean in hard on their preferred “flavor” of CNM and why theirs is the “right” way to be polyamorous. By making it a hub of other people’s content, it would become a place for people curious about non-monogamy to learn about all of those different “flavors”.

Content For Poly People, By Poly People

Originally I envisioned a feedback loop where poly people would contribute posts directly and be able to tell other poly people about our favorite books, courses, adult toys, and events we were attending.

The original idea was not me out here writing long form buying guides, but more like a public version of my own poly circle’s “gift ideas” google doc.

No, THIS is THE bullet vibe

I wanted to recreate the experience of being at a munch or a sex party and having someone be like… “no THIS is THE best bullet vibe out there, it’s rechargeable and waterproof, and is by far the most powerful one I’ve tried yet, here let me send you the link.” (Yes, this exact convo happened irl)

Side-gig style

I figured that I could make partnerships with poly creators who were already creating products, like stickers and t-shirts and that those affiliate commissions could support the site. The financial goals initially were just to support the site by covering the hosting fees, and maybe someday give me a little something for my trouble of putting it together. At no point was this supposed to be my primary source of income.

Step 3, profit, right? right?!?

As exciting as it was that JPT was getting indexed and ranking on google and that my friends were sharing it on social media, I knew that a handful of amazon commissions was not going to solve my “I should be working and need to make money to live.” problem.

Last year I got stuck in a cycle that looked like…

• Wanting to work on growing JPT full time, but knowing it’s not going to pay my bills so, “responsibly” putting my time & efforts into something else that might bring in $$ immediately.
• Spend a bunch of time on something else, sometimes making a little quick cash, but not figuring out anything that works to create sustainable income.
• Go back to working on JPT because it has traction and it’s the thing I actually WANT to be working on, and maybe if I’d just kept working on it all along it’d be that much closer to actually making money.

During the course of this cycle last year, I …

• Built a micro-saas hosting service for comment widgets, unfortunately I can’t even give this service away for free. I built it because I needed commenting and ratings and reviews for JPT, but no one wants “comments for webflow”.
• Signed up for a ton of freelancing sites, and tried to market myself as a contractor
• Applied to more part time jobs that I can count
• Published a physical book to sell on JustPolyThings.com in an attempt at creating my own merch

Eventually when all of that didn’t work, I moved out of California to a lower cost of living (red) state to extend my “runway”. I think I’m trying to bootstrap something, but apparently I don’t know exactly what yet.

Rejection sucks

The other thing slowing down growth of JPT was getting rejected for partnerships.

Since I wanted to promote poly creators, one of the first sites I tried to curate poly items from was Etsy. There are a ton of Etsy shops selling every kind of polyamory merch under the sun, so I thought it would be easy and obvious to become an Etsy affiliate and then promote those stores.

Instead, I got to publish a post called Is Polyamory an “illicit” topic? about how Esty rejected JustPolyThings as an affiliate, because they thought my site “is significantly inspired by illicit content”.

Illicit means illegal. Polyamory isn’t illegal.

Why aren’t you bringing in $10k a month yet?

Oh, then there has also been the constant bombardment of “why aren’t you making unreasonable gobs of money doing affiliate marketing” scams.

According to the internet, affiliate marketing is the easiest form of passive income ever, and the only thing I need to do is pick a niche and I will be instantly making huge sums of money.

Lies. All lies.

Getting partnerships

Even the affiliate “How To” scams say you won’t make money as an affiliate until you are able to link to good products with long cookie durations and high percentage commissions. The more high ticket items, the better. Last week I learned that that is also a lie.

It seems to be an open industry secret that even if you send quality traffic (that is likely converting), many affiliates don’t pay. I was flat out told by someone actually running profitable sites….

“Don’t waste your time sending anybody traffic for free.”

I learned that every site I link to should have paid me in advance for the privilege. Oops.

I’ve been doing this wrong

Last summer, JPT got its first real affiliate partnership with a company that makes sex furniture. I was so excited to promote their products, in part because I actually like their stuff, but also because I (mistakenly) thought that finally JPT would at least be able to make back some of the hosting costs.

I spent months building product tools that integrate with Claude and Webflow’s API to pull product images, write non-monogamously oriented product descriptions, and add these partner products with their affiliate links to my site.

I’ve actually developed some really great automations that I’m quite proud of, but I struggled when I tried to hire help with writing and editing the product guides content. It was a HUGE amount of work to get an entire brand’s catalog of products up and links online.

And 6 months of sending traffic to that sex furniture partnership later, unfortunately I’ve made $0. I know exactly how much traffic has been sent to them, but somehow magically none of it has managed to convert (according to their reporting).

I know what my conversion rates are with amazon products, but for some reason even with a 30 day cookie, they say my conversion rate is staying at 0.

So an Amazon shop we remain

It was never my goal to be passionately supporting Amazon, personally I think they are a “problematic” company at best, but at least I (mostly) trust their reporting.

Big changes coming soon to JPT

Running JustPolyThings as an affiliate site isn’t working so I’m not going to keep doing it this way.

This post is about collecting my thoughts so that I can start to announce these changes on JPT and to that audience.

My plan for JPT as of today looks like:

1. Develop a “Rate Card” for paid promotions, from now on if you are a company that wants us to send traffic to your store, links cost something.

2. Break up with the unprofitable partners, if i have to take pages down that I spent a ton of effort on that’s okay, but I’m done sending big companies traffic for free.

3. Open up an application process for poly creators and makers to be able to list their products. If you have an Esty shop selling poly stuff, I want you to be able to list your products and sell them on JustPolyThings too. I’m starting this by integrating Stripe’s Connect merchant services since I already use Stripe as a shopping cart tool for JPT. I’ve started active dev on a version 0 of this, JPT will handle payments and take a % commission that is still TBD. Think of this as a JustPolyEtsy.

4. Connect more with the poly community… I might just start some google docs and share them. I feel like I’ve been struggling to write “salesy” content while at the same time feeling like NO ONE WANTS TO READ SALESY CONTENT. Get back to the vibe of that OG gdoc.

I might even move CMS’s. Looking at you Ghost Pro, and Outpost. However, I feel like I need to refine the new content strategy a bit more first. Big UI changes will be coming, and maybe JPT adds a new newsletter or app, but I’m NOT doing what I have been doing, anymore.

JPT exists to normalize consensual non monogamy, and promote its wonderful community of content creators. Today forward, that’s what I’m going to do.

Reply with your thoughts or comments about this post on Bluesky..

Sharing more in an effort to share more... today I wrote about some of the issues I've been dealing with since starting an affiliate marketing site 18 mos ago. coastweb.dev/blog/does-af...

[image or embed]

— Jessie Rushing (@immber.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 3:13 PM