#2 Attract and forward machine
There is a really good post on reddit written by a guy that created a product review website that made him a peak of 21k usd/month. He was able to then sell it as a standalone business for 200k usd. Here are the system components:
Product review articles
First component is the content that is attracting people interested in buying products. He composed 585 articles that serve as buyer's guides. All of them in 5+ categories like home improvement, tech, sports, outdoors, tools (although if he was to do it again he would narrow it down to just one niche). Articles are 3000+ words, long content, high quality, each written by him partially outsourced to VAs, English teachers.
Link juice
He spent 60 days getting his post linked on already highly ranked websites. The more his review site is linked on other popular websites the higher the chance his site will be recommended by google and other search engines. He was sending and responding to emails for 10+ hours per day until he secured backlinks to 100 of his articles. Getting someone to link his website on theirs had a cost of 30$ to 120$ for one. He used Ahrefs to track gained and lost backlinks. If he was to do this again he would only create 10-12 articles very high quality content 3500-5000 words and a bunch of info posts surrounding the main ones with internal linking (passing the link juice). Then he would blow up these 10-12 main articles with backlinks as much as possible (shifting the investment into link component more than into creating more and more articles).
Search Engine Optimization
Next important component was search engine optimization. He hired freelance writers to do patches to articles focusing on SEO analysis, looking at competitors for each post, what sections they had that he didn't, what was their word count against his, how many backlinks they had for each post. If he had to do this all over again he would also ask virtual assistants to add images, links and charts to save hours of work and focus more on the business side. He puts emphasis on how keywords are everything and advises to put time in it, to use allintitle and to go for keywords that are below 200 results and use Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) method. This is to find the less competitive keywords.
Revenue sharing
All main articles had links to sale pages (Amazon under affiliate program), what would bring the gold. Amazon paid for bringing clients that bought products. Since 2010 until 2020 the average commission rate dropped from 9.25% to 3.14%. Seeing this and google search algorithm changes he decided to sell his entire machine.
Sources:
https://geniuslink.com/blog/amazon-affiliate-commission-rates-historical-guide/