01 — The map Which of the five is yours?
There is no best model, only the one that fits what you’re short of. Each zone below is a model’s range from the book’s comparison table: what it costs to start, and how long until it pays properly. Pick your main constraint and watch which ones light up.
Pick the constraint that dominates for you. Most people have one.
Or tap any zone to see its numbers and its first week.
Solid edge: you own the customer Dashed edge: the marketplace owns the customer
These ranges are rough guides drawn from what sellers report, not measurements. What you sell, how much you put in and plain luck will all shift them.
The interactive map needs JavaScript. The same mapping is written out in full just below.
The four constraints, on one page
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Money is shortPlenty of hours, not much you can riskPrint on demand, or digital products Both run on your time rather than your cash. Skip dropshipping while money is the limit: opening a store looks cheap, but the advertising is the real cost.
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Time is shortSome money to spend, but a job and a lifeA marketplace Your evenings are the scarce thing, and finding buyers for free eats them. A marketplace brings the buyers and takes a cut (on Etsy, 6.5% plus processing), which is worth paying when your hours are worth more than that cut.
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You’ve never done itAnd you’re not sure you canWhatever can be live this week Choose the quickest route to a real result: one marketplace listing, or a one-page digital product. The first one isn’t about income. It’s about proving to yourself that you can.
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You already have peopleEven a small following, even for something elseAsk them what they would buy Getting strangers to turn up is a large part of the work elsewhere, and you’ve already done it. Ask, then build what they ask for.
02 — What changed, and when The ten things most guides still get wrong
These are the claims from appendix B of the book. Each one carries the date it changed and the date we last confirmed it. A heavier left bar means the rule changed recently enough that most advice online has not caught up. Each item also says how long ago we checked it, and flags itself once that passes three months.
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Etsy wants your own original design — reselling or lightly editing someone else’s template doesn’t qualify
The Creativity Standards require that what you sell was made, designed, handpicked or sourced by you. Reselling a bought template, or a light edit of one, is a policy violation rather than a grey area. It ends the template-resale pitch still circulating. An original you designed can be sold again and again; a bought template, or a light edit of one, cannot.
Check it: Etsy Seller Policy — House Rules (see the Creativity Standards section)
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Etsy fees — 6.5% transaction fee, charged on the shipping
price too
Plus a listing fee per item and a separate payment-processing fee on top. The part people miss: the 6.5% applies to the postage you charge as well as the item. Offering “free” shipping doesn’t dodge it if the cost is folded into the price.
Check it: Etsy Fees & Payments Policy
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Amazon Associates reportedly cut commissions by up to half, and narrowed its onsite commission
Two changes in the same direction. The reported rate cut (from around March 2026, never published by Amazon) is the big one. The 14 April 2026 agreement also narrowed commission on Amazon’s own onsite placements to the exact product linked; ordinary links you send still earn on other items bought in the same visit. Any income figure published before 2026 should be treated as fiction.
Check it: Amazon Associates Program Operating Agreement — and the current fee schedule linked from it
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Amazon Associates stopped paying recurring commission on
subscriptions
The “build passive recurring income” model that a great deal of affiliate content was built to sell no longer exists in that form on Amazon. One payment, not a stream.
Check it: the fee schedule inside the Associates Program Operating Agreement
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Google shows an AI summary for about a fifth of search terms, and most searches now end without a click
SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb data found 68% of US Google searches ended with no click to any website (January–April 2026); separate Ahrefs research found AI Overviews on 21% of the keywords it tracked. ⚠️ These come from independent search-industry measurement, not from Google, so treat the exact numbers as a range rather than a fact. The direction is consistent across studies: ranking for a question no longer means being visited.
Check it: there is no official page for this one. Look for measurement published in the last six months and check who funded it — question 1 applies to this claim as much as to any other.
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YouTube does not monetise mass-produced or templated content
— but faceless channels are fine
This is the most widely misreported rule in the book. The policy targets mass production: templated scripts with words swapped out, slideshows with little or no real narration. A faceless channel with original scripting and real narration is eligible to be monetised. If someone told you faceless was banned, they were reading headlines rather than the policy.
Check it: YouTube monetisation policies
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TikTok Shop takes 6% in the US (its published table; many sellers report 8% since August 2026) and 9% in the UK, with a reduced rate for new sellers
The US referral fee covers both commission and payment processing in one number. The new-seller rate of 3% runs for 30 days — note that it is conditional, not automatic: you have to make a first sale within a set window of onboarding to trigger it. Select jewellery categories sit lower. Refunds carry a separate administration fee.
Check it: TikTok Shop Seller Center — confirm your own market and category rather than a blog’s summary
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TikTok Shop announced a shipping mandate, then reversed it
Worth keeping on the list precisely because it was undone. A great deal of content was published during the four weeks it stood and never corrected afterwards. When a platform announces something, the useful habit is to check whether it actually took effect before you rebuild anything around it.
Check it: TikTok Shop Seller Center announcements
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Shopify renamed its middle plan from “Shopify” to
“Grow”
A small thing with an outsized effect on searching: any tutorial telling you to pick “the Shopify plan” is now ambiguous, because that is also the brand name. Compare the transaction-fee rows rather than the plan names.
Check it: Shopify pricing
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Pinterest: pin steadily rather than in bursts, and avoid link
shorteners
Commonly quoted as 5–15 pins a day. ⚠️ That number is community guidance, not a published Pinterest rule — the published rule is the spam policy, which flags deceptive or obscured destinations. Shorteners hide the destination, which is why they attract trouble. Pinterest matters here because it is built around clicking through to the source: a single post can send someone to your shop without you paying for it.
Check it: Pinterest community guidelines (see the Spam section)
⚠️ Every row above will eventually be wrong. That is not a defect in the list, it is the reason the list has dates on it. If a date here is more than three months old, treat the row as unverified and check the platform’s page yourself — which is exactly what the three questions below are for.
03 — The habit The three questions
These work on any business advice, including this book and including this page. They are the part with no expiry date, which is why they appear in every book in the series rather than only in the first one. Print this and keep it somewhere you will see it.
The three questions · ePORTS
- Who gets paid if I follow this and it does not work? Not who is right — who is paid. It is a faster question and it has a checkable answer.
- What is the date on this specific claim? Not the date on the video. The date on the claim inside it. A 2026 upload repeating a 2022 fee is a 2022 claim.
- Can I reach the platform’s own page in two clicks? If nobody will show you where the number comes from, that is the answer.
If a claim fails all three, it is not necessarily wrong — but it is unverified, and it should be treated as a rumour until you have checked it yourself.
Prints the card on its own, postcard size.
04 — Worksheet Your three lines
The chapter 9 exercise. Three lines, about four minutes. Fill them in, print them, and keep them where you’ll see them — it’s the quickest way from “thinking about it” to “started”.
Now stop reading about the other four. Give your pick about three months, judged on money rather than mood. Picking the wrong one is cheap if you only picked one; trying all five at once is what wastes the year. And whichever you choose, start collecting email addresses from day one — it’s the one thing a platform can’t switch off.
Nothing you type here is sent anywhere, stored, or seen by us. The page’s own script only uses it in your browser — to print the sheet with your answers, or to build the calendar file, which goes straight to your device. Close the tab and it is gone.