In 2022 I wrote, on the first page of a site about traffic and offers, that there were affiliate links throughout it, that I would get a commission if you signed up through one, and that you should feel free to sign up to every link you could find. That paragraph is still the most honest piece of marketing copy I have written.
The mechanism is not complicated. A link that says "I get paid if you buy this" is a claim about me that you can check, because the FTC in the United States and the Fair Trading Act here both require it, and because the disclosure costs me something. A link that hides it is a claim I was hoping you would not check. On the reputation clock, the one measured in years, only the first kind compounds.
There are 229 of them across these five sites. All 229 are listed, numbered and disclosed at timmybrown.co.nz/links, with what I earn printed next to each one. The ones that pay me nothing say so, and they are the reason the list is worth reading, because a list that names only the payers is an advertisement wearing a list's clothes. That is not a stunt. It is the trust algorithm run at full transparency, to see whether it still works when everyone knows how it works.
This site is the one place in the system with no tools page, and that is deliberate. The theory layer carries no tactics, so it carries no shopping list either. What it carries is the argument for why the other three sites can publish one without it costing them anything.