Build The Recommends Page You Keep Putting Off

The shelf we already run — Ours has been live a while. Go look at how the lines read and where the disclosure sits, and notice how few tools actually made the cut. Copy the bones for your own.

Mr Pugo and his solopreneur tool stack — Mr Pugo runs a pile of one-person businesses and writes up the exact tools he uses to find niches and ship digital products. He’s kept his own recommends shelf for years, so if you want to see the finished version of today’s drill before you build yours, that’s the man to watch. (Affiliate link, the building takes a cut.)

Build the Affiliate Shelf

You recommend the same eight or ten tools every week and pocket nothing for it.

Today you build a recommends page. One URL with the tools you already vouch for, and the affiliate cut riding quiet inside the links. You already do this recommending for free, every time somebody in your replies or DMs asks what you’re running. This just points the credit back at your own address.

1 // List the tools you touch every day

Open a blank note. Write down every tool you opened this week to do real work: the tabs you keep pinned, the app you tell people to try when they ask. Don’t pad it. If you haven’t logged in for a month, it comes off. The only gate that matters is whether you’d put your name on it in front of someone whose opinion you actually respect.

2 // Grab the affiliate links, skip the dead weight

Go down the list one at a time. Search the tool’s name plus ‘affiliate program,’ or check the site footer for ‘Partners’ or ‘Affiliates.’ Some have one, some don’t. Where there is one, sign up and grab your link. Where there isn’t, still list the tool with a plain link, the honest recommendation is the point either way. But if the commission is the only reason a tool is on the list at all, kill the damn line. One bought recommendation the reader can smell and the whole shelf goes in the trash with it.

3 // Build one page, one honest line each

Make one page and call it /recommended. One heading, then a simple list. Each tool gets its name, one honest sentence on what you actually use it for, and the link right under it. If it needs a full paragraph to justify, it doesn’t belong on the shelf. Before the first tool, put the disclosure in plain words: some of these are affiliate links, and if you buy through one, I get a cut at no extra cost to you. Say it the way you’d say it to somebody’s face, don’t bury it in the footer.

Stand the page up before you log off tonight.

THE TIP. Recommend a tool you quit using six months ago and the reader can tell. Walk your recommends page every quarter and pull anything you’ve gone cold on, even the ones still paying out. See which of ours survived the last cull. The Tools shelf

DEAD AIR · MAINTENANCE LOG / ENTRY 9

The work order closed this week lists the center fountain pump, cleaned and returned to service, twelve minutes labor. The fountain came out with the skylight repairs two summers back. The basin is under a tarp. Somebody initialed the line.

PS. Reply with the one tool you’d put your name on without thinking twice. I’m re-culling ours this week and I want a few picks from outside my own tabs. ~ J.D.