Most niche site operators hit the same wall: traffic scales faster than monetization infrastructure. Shawn Hill built thegrillingdad.com to $25,000 per month while working a full-time SEO job at Forbes. His bottleneck was not content. It was the manual work of building affiliate product boxes, keeping links current, and converting readers who already had buying intent.
He implemented Lasso, saved days of work versus hand-coding displays for every product in every buyer’s guide, and lifted Amazon conversion rates from 8.3% to 10.1%. That is a meaningful revenue jump on a site already earning at scale.
Updated 2026.
1Snapshot
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Site revenue (end of 2022) | ~$25,000/month |
| Amazon conversion rate (before Lasso) | ~8.3% |
| Amazon conversion rate (after Lasso) | 10.1% |
| Site rollout (with VA) | ~200 posts in 2 days |
2Who is Shawn Hill?
Shawn Hill is founder of thegrillingdad.com, an online brand built around barbecue grills, smokers, and outdoor cooking.
He launched at the end of 2020. By the end of 2022, the site was doing an impressive $25,000 per month.
“It’s something I am passionate about, something I do a lot of – having a big family.
Shawn grilling with his family.
“A lot of meat at once goes a long way for meal prepping, but also it just saves us a ton of
“So it saves us a ton of
Shawn lives the niche. He is a family man who loves to cook:
“I say big family. We have my wife and I, we have seven kids – four of which are biologically ours. We adopted the other three.”
He mostly taught himself SEO by running the site and creating content that ranks.
3The problem: manual displays do not scale
For operators building at scale, the affiliate display layer is where time disappears. Shawn was doing everything himself.
“Yeah. So one of the reasons I got Lasso in the first place, I was doing everything myself…
“I was creating these custom blocks for each product to include a photo, some text, the button, adding in all the affiliate links, trying to manage when things went out of stock, which was not easy to do.
Shawn’s original displays that he built himself, vs his Lasso displays.
“And… it’s kind of like sneakers, you know, they come out with a new version of the grill and the old one, they just stopped selling it.”
Working in-house for some of the biggest online brands in the world for a day job, plus growing the Grilling Dad brand, meant Shawn’s time was at a premium. He did not have time to check for out-of-stock or no-longer-sold products.
Any way to scale by saving his valuable time was essential. The data tells a different story than “just add more content.” Without link infrastructure that updates and converts, growth creates more maintenance, not more margin.
4The solution: Lasso product displays
Shawn found Lasso the way most operators do: he had a problem and searched for it.
“I think I just googled it like ‘product display boxes’ or something like that, and saw a few different options, Lasso being one of them.
“And when I clicked onto the site, saw the displays, it reminded me a lot of what we were using or trying to build at This Old House.
“And so I was like, wow, this looks incredible. What an awesome solution! It is affordable and it’s going to save me a ton of time. It’s going to make the site look way better.
Shawn’s new beautiful affiliate CTAs using Lasso – that earn him more
“[Before] It looked like a guy in his basement was writing a blog, right? And adding Lasso, it just made it go from like blog to business in a really good, sleek way. Like, Hey, this guy knows what the heck he’s talking about.”
That shift matters. We’ve seen this pattern across high-earning sites: the display layer is infrastructure, not decoration. For a deeper look at why layout and CTA design move the needle, see our guide on second CTA button conversion.
But beyond saving time and looking like a real brand, it is all for nothing if you are not making more
5The results: 8.3% to 10.1% on Amazon
So what happened to conversion rates and earnings?
“So it just, it really leveled it up. And so it did all those things at once, being able to add it in as far as the conversion rates, the conversion rates on Amazon actually increased after adding Lasso, which was a bit surprising.”
“They went from, you know, like mid eight percent. It’s to close to, it was a little over 10%. I think it was like 10.1%.”
Shawn shared the momentum publicly on Twitter in October 2022:
Just to chime in, I’m not affiliated with Lasso but a big fan. Halfway through October and at the same rev numbers as the previous 2 full months in Amz (and already up MoM for other affiliate deals). And I’m not close to being done adding Lasso to the spots it should be in.
Shawn Hill (@shwnhll), October 18, 2022
“And a lot of that I think has to do with buying intent, being able to show like, ‘Hey, this is you know, having the little prime logo on the displays, showing the price ahead of time’, which I’m sure there’s a lot of testing I could do there.
“People, when they click on that product, they already know the price. They’re not price shopping anymore. They’ve already decided that they want to buy it. I just have to lead them to the spot where they can put their credit card information in.
“And that’s huge. Being able to show that up front, I think it’s just a whole new level of transparency that I’m able to bring and definitely increase the conversion rate on the Amazon side.
“It’s certainly a net revenue increase. I mean, you can actually see it!”
Price transparency removes friction. Readers arrive at Amazon with intent already formed. That is exactly what high-converting product displays are built to do.
Rolling out across ~200 posts in two days
“Again, I was time crunched working a full-time job running this on the side.
“So it was taking a while to roll this out across all the pages. And that was actually kind of a big fuss. The pages I had it on looked amazing, but I had all these other pages that were mentioning products that didn’t look good.
“So I hired a VA, and it was way cheaper than I thought. They helped roll it out across the entire site. They were done in a matter of two days. The entire site! And this was at the time, like around 200 posts!
Lasso table displays on Shawn’s site.
Before you roll displays site-wide, run an Opportunities scan on pages that already rank. Most operators find product mentions sitting unmonetized in URLs that already get traffic.
What else has Shawn found helpful?
“I mean, I tried using other products. And now, like the new Performance [Lasso’s new affiliate revenue tracking product] helps track the revenue that certain pages make, as well as which products are actually converting on the back end the best and making me the most
“Those insights are so valuable.”
Affiliate tracking with Performance, finding you locations on your site where you can earn more revenue.
Page-level revenue data is the next layer. Lasso Performance shows which URLs and products actually earn, not just which links get clicks.
6Advice for other niche site owners
Shawn’s methodical approach is worth copying. It is easy to get distracted by high commission rates when revenue per click is what matters.
1. Affiliate boxes in informational content
“Again, I think there’s a couple of things. Most of the time you don’t need to do a lot of A/B testing. I’m also like a super nerd who’s been able to do that on some really big media sites [like Forbes].
“I see the incremental differences and how much
“But I do think that there’s some quick wins.
“And that is adding affiliate boxes to your informational products, especially how-to guides.
Shawn increases his earnings in informational content with cleverly-placed Lasso boxes, such as to buy frozen burgers in this guide to grilling frozen burgers.
“And I’ve talked about it a few times on Twitter. If someone’s looking for how to do something, there’s usually a product that will make it easier for them – and just offering that to them.
“It’s very soft. It’s not salesy. A lot of times they’re going to want to buy it. They are looking for a solution on how to do blank easier, even if they don’t type in the word easier.
“Definitely add those to your informational posts.”
2. Direct affiliate deals (with caution)
“Also, going after direct deals, reaching out to them, partnering with them on Shareasale or Impact and asking for custom rates through those.
“It could be a little scary, but it can pay off. If the products are actually good, and they’re actually converting… then you might as well send them there and get the extra commission percentage because you’re going to net out better on the flip side.”
“However, just because you sign up with a direct deal with the partner doesn’t mean that you’re making more
“When I switched all the links there, over three months, I had one sale. I was sending thousands of clicks per month. They just could not convert the traffic. We did several different tests. Everything was firing back that I was sending them clicks and I should be getting credit and nothing was converting.”
Measure offers against results. Test programs, implement the winners, and cut what does not convert. That discipline pairs well with earnings per click as your north star metric.
Shawn is already using Performance to make smarter bets:
“I think Performance from Lasso is huge. I think as it continues to improve and give more insights and page-level data… it’s going to be huge.
“The reason being too, if there’s page level-data and I can measure the revenue per visitor, if someone visits the site and I make 10 cents every time someone visits this page, but 25 cents every time they visit another page, well, I know where to focus my time from an SEO perspective, but also I can start introducing ads.
If a page is making me 25 cents every time someone visits it, and I can get clicks over there for five cents from Facebook or 10 cents from Google and they can continue to convert at the same level, then it’s free
7The takeaway
Shawn runs one of the fastest-growing outdoor cooking brands online. He did it while balancing a top SEO role at Forbes. The systems that made it work: displays that convert, rollouts that scale with help, and data that tells him where to focus next.
We built Lasso to solve the display problem operators like Shawn face every day. Performance extends that into page-level revenue intelligence. See how Lasso fits your stack. Get started with Lasso and turn your ranking pages into revenue.
Jamie I.F.
Jamie heads up marketing at Lasso, runs a portfolio of niche sites, and tweets a lot about affiliate marketing and SEO.