Most affiliate sites hit the same ceiling: traffic grows, but revenue per visitor stays flat. The bottleneck is rarely content quality. It is link infrastructure. How you manage, display, and track affiliate links determines whether a growing audience actually converts.
Riley Adams runs Young & the Invested, a personal finance site for young adults who want to invest, manage, and plan
Updated 2026.
1The Operator Snapshot
Riley launched Young & the Invested in July 2018 while working as a CPA and transitioning into a Senior Financial Analyst role at Google. At the time of this case study, the site averaged roughly 30,000 monthly visitors after two and a half years of publishing.
The revenue mix tells the story:
- $2,000 per month in affiliate revenue
- 90% of site income from affiliates
- 10% from display ads
Riley turns ads off on pages that contain affiliate links. Informational, trust-building content keeps ads on. That split keeps the site from feeling like a cash grab while still monetizing buyer-intent pages aggressively.
For operators at this scale, the question is not whether affiliate marketing works. It is whether your tooling keeps pace with content production.
2Before Lasso: Redirects and Manual Work
Riley had no prior experience with a dedicated link management tool. His entire setup ran through the Redirection plugin.
Redirects solve real problems. Affiliate URLs are long, ugly, and impossible to say on a podcast. Cloaking them behind clean paths makes sense. Redirect plugins also give you basic click tracking.
But redirecting is a single function. Product displays, inventory management, and in-editor link insertion require other plugins or manual workarounds.
Riley’s Redirection setup worked for cloaking. It did not work for writing. When he composed posts in WordPress, his redirect-based affiliate links would not appear in the editor. He had to remember URLs, hunt through his redirect list, or paste messy tracking links by hand.
Lasso changed that workflow. When Riley highlights text and starts typing a partner name, matching links surface automatically. Lasso also applies nofollow attributes and opens links in a new window without extra steps. Riley estimated that saves him five to ten minutes per post.
3The Three Problems Riley Needed to Solve
Riley was looking for one tool that could handle three jobs at once:
- Manage his affiliate link inventory across a growing content library
- Track link performance so he could see what actually converted
- Display products visually instead of relying on text-only links buried in paragraphs
A friend recommended Lasso. Riley signed up and started migrating.
The upfront work was real. He had to untangle cloaked links from Redirection and rebuild his inventory inside Lasso. That migration took about three months before he felt fully comfortable. Lasso’s plugin import feature can accelerate onboarding for users coming from other tools, but Riley’s redirect-only setup required manual cleanup.
For operators considering a similar move, budget time for migration. The payoff shows up in daily publishing speed, not day one.
4How Riley Uses Lasso Displays
Riley deploys single, custom Lasso displays across his site, with the heaviest use in listicles. Articles like “free stocks,” “best Robinhood alternatives,” and “income-generating assets” are natural buyer-intent pages. Readers arrive looking for options. Displays give them a scannable path to click.
On informational and authority content, Riley uses displays sparingly. Less selling, more trust. That balance matters for finance content where credibility is the product.
Display Setup and Theme
Riley uses the Lasso
His single displays typically include:
- A product logo
- An optional badge (like “Our Pick”)
- One or two CTA buttons
- Bulleted product descriptions
Write the description once in your Lasso dashboard. Every future display for that product pulls from the same source. Riley cited this as his favorite Lasso feature. No rewriting product copy every time he adds a display to a new post. He clicks the Cactus icon, inserts the shortcode, and moves on.
Primary and Secondary CTAs
In his “Best Robinhood alternatives” article, Riley uses a display with two CTA buttons and no badge. Not every reader uses iOS. Some of his audience runs Android. A secondary button captures that segment without forcing a separate display.
We have written about this pattern in detail. Read our guide on using a secondary CTA to improve conversion rates for the full breakdown.
Use caution: Some affiliate programs prohibit pairing their product images and details with a secondary CTA linking to a competing store. Check your program rules before adding a second button.
Riley also includes at least one plain text affiliate link alongside each display. Some readers skip buttons but will click an inline link. Cover both behaviors.
Badges and Customization
Badges personalize recommendations. An “Our Pick” badge signals that Riley stands behind one option in a crowded list. His free stocks article uses this pattern effectively.
For setup details, read How to Add Badges to Displays. For advanced customization, see the Shortcode Reference Guide.
5Results and What Changed
After three months of migration, Riley’s workflow transformed:
- No more rewriting product descriptions for every new post featuring the same affiliate
- No more manual link hunting inside the WordPress editor
- Organized link inventory managed from a single dashboard
- Click tracking integrated with Google Analytics
- A more professional site appearance with consistent product displays
Riley reported a modest increase in affiliate revenue alongside the operational gains. The site looked more polished. Publishing got faster. The link stack stopped being a collection of one-off workarounds.
That is the pattern we see across operators who treat monetization as infrastructure rather than a plugin afterthought. The bottleneck was never traffic at ~30,000 monthly visitors. It was conversion per click and time spent maintaining links.
6What This Means for Your Site
Riley’s case study maps to a broader shift in how serious publishers run affiliate sites. Redirect plugins handle one job. Spreadsheets handle another. Display plugins handle a third. None of them talk to each other.
When you consolidate link management, displays, and tracking into one system, three things compound:
- Publishing speed increases because links appear where you write
- Display consistency improves because product data lives in one inventory
- Revenue recovery becomes possible because you can actually see what converts
If you already have content sitting in your archive, start there. Run an Opportunities Scan to find unmonetized product mentions and pages with broken or outdated links. Most operators find quick wins on the first pass.
For a broader look at why we built Lasso around this problem, read why you need Lasso.
7Ready to Boost Your Affiliate Earnings?
Riley’s migration took work upfront. The daily payoff was worth it: faster publishing, cleaner displays, and a modest revenue lift on a site already earning $2,000 per month from affiliates.
If your link stack looks like Riley’s old setup (redirects, manual insertions, text-only links), the fix is structural. Consolidate inventory, displays, and tracking before you publish another listicle.
Get started with Lasso and migrate at your own pace. Then run an Opportunities Scan to surface revenue hiding in content you already published.
Want another operator story? Read how Elizabeth Harrin from A Girl’s Guide to PM uses Lasso displays to earn more revenue from her project management content.
Sean Brison
Sean Brison is a dad, writer, business owner, and Content Lead at Lasso. He's spent the past several years in cahoots with Lasso's founder, Andrew, creating awesome things for people. He's also addicted to perfectly-balanced cocktails, the outdoors, and John…