I run a few niche affiliate sites and used to waste tons of time writing content for products that nobody actually bought, would spend a week on an article just to find out the product had terrible conversion rates or wasn't actually selling Built a validation workflow that I run before writing anything now, takes about 30 minutes per product but saves me from writing dead content step 1 - checking if the product is actually selling on ecommerce stores, I use winninghunter to see sales data for shopify stores selling the same products, if nobody's moving volume on it then affiliate commissions will be trash too step 2 - checking amazon reviews and questions, looking for patterns in what people actually care about, this tells me what angle to take in the content, if everyone asks about durability then that's what I focus on step 3 - checking search volume and competition in ahrefs, need at least 500 monthly searches and KD under 30, otherwise not worth the effort step 4 - checking current ranking content, if the top 10 results are all major publications I probably can't compete, looking for weak content I can beat step 5 - checking affiliate commission rates across networks, sometimes amazon has terrible rates but shareassale or cj has the same product with 3x commission Only start writing after all five checks pass, sounds slow but I went from publishing 8 articles per month with 2 making money to publishing 4 articles per month with 3 making money, better roi on my time The validation step is crucial, can't just write about products you personally like, need actual data showing people buy them.