The Old Affiliate Website Back to Life Using AI Project - Week 1

Hey everyone,

Last week I dropped back in like I owned the place after quite long hiatus to announce that I was going to rebuild my old MMO website using AI. So, here is my first week of action.

I should highlight from the start that this is not a full time thing (which probably puts me into the half-assed basket to start with) as we are still running fitness businesses here in the US after moving over from Australia.

Anyway, I will get into this week below but here are the highlights:

1. The project has already turned into something a little bigger than I first planned - So I have had to really narrow what I am trying to achieve.
2. To that end, I am working on two fronts, firstly, rebuilding the website for WA affiliate income and secondly, building some tools that can hopefully earn me some $$ quickly
3. AI is a beast, but one that has to be tamed. I had been away for a while and even though I have built some amazing tools for our business, using it in the blogging/website world takes some learning (I think anyway).
4. I ran out of credits in Chat which has held me up - (I am on the $20 plan and made a promise to myself that I would not upgrade until I earned the $$ to do so)

The initial plan

As I outlined last week, the basic idea is still pretty simple. I am rebuilding my old affiliate website using AI to help me do it properly. Not just changing a few colors or making the odd page look nicer, but actually going back through old posts, checking whether the information is still valid, cleaning up SEO issues, improving the layout, and making sure the site has a much clearer path for people who are interested in affiliate marketing.

During the last week, I used chat Codex to connect my accounts to it - such as my WordPress account, Google Search Console, Bing and GA as well as setup GITHUB repositories so that we can save files to it. Now, if you read all of that and went WHAT???, then here is the first lesson i learned - AI can teach you AI - Meaning that if you tell it what you want to do and then ask it to help you set that up, it will actually take you through step by step and do that (make sure you get it to document it as well however as I have a habit of getting it set up but not watching what has happened so I don't actually learn anything).
After that, there was a full SEO check and we updated the money pages as well as any CTAs that were stale or not leading to where we wanted them to go.
As we went through this, we decided that , as they still attract the most traffic (even though there were set to no-index) that we would work through my old MLM review posts first. A few years ago, after a Google update, I made a lot of those reviews noindex. At the time, that probably made sense. But now we are going back through them properly rather than just switching them all back on.

For each one, we are checking whether the company is still active, whether the opportunity still exists, whether the old review is now misleading, whether there are broken links, old videos, stale screenshots, outdated compensation plans, or dodgy old schema sitting in the background.

Within AI - we setup the task, ran it a couple of times and once we were happy with the outcome (I corrected a few layout and text issues I wanted) - we set up a skill to run these automatically. For the next two days non stop, Chat codex clicked away reviewing, editing, updating, reworking and publishing updated posts to my site.

Then I ran out of credits and that is where that sits until tomorrow...

Side note: For our fitness business, I have been using Claude Code extensively (we pay the highest subscription base here) and have built an extensive array of tools that runs all manner of audits etc. - I even built a command center for it all (love my command center haha). I chose to use chat for this one as I want to keep the projects completely separate as AI tends to have a habit of bleeding one project into another - there are ways around this via Cursor and the like but I was trying to keep it simple. The command center is below just as an FYI:

Now I had no credits

So as I ran out of credits with codex - which would reset in 6 days, I asked chatGPT (the general chat, not codex) the following question:
Cool - i have been starting the refresh of the site in chat code (but I ran out of credits) so I am looking at filling my time here whilst I wait. Tell me as a side note then. What are people currently doing that can make them cash really quickly (something to do whilst the site rebuilds i guess)

So we came up with a plan:
Create a practical manuscript and workbook based on my experience of using AI. Not in a “press a button and get rich” kind of way, but more around how to use AI to organize your thinking, build real assets, write better content, and eventually create tools that solve specific problems. - Basically a copy of the tools I created for our other business above.

That part has however also been a little frustrating.

ChatGPT has been great for getting ideas out of my head and onto the page. It helped me shape the book idea, the workbook idea, and even some possible tools we could sell later. But the problem I kept running into was that it would often tell me what it was going to do rather than actually doing it.

It would say things like, “Next we will create the structure,” or “Now we will build the tool,” and I would be sitting there thinking, yes, lovely, but can we actually build the thing? Then it would write in a manner that even a 5 year old would look at it and say "yep, AI wrote that" - even though it has an extensive "pauls_voice.md" on file.

The other issue was that it could not really work inside the files as we went. So I kept having to explain things again. I would go over the same context, the same idea, the same voice, the same direction, and then still have to clean it all up afterwards. It was useful, but it started to feel like I was managing the AI more than the AI was helping me.

So, I have ditched that and am working back in Codex now. It can do some of the things normal chat can do whilst I wait for my credits to reset.

Learning as I go

The biggest lesson I have learned so far is that AI is powerful, but it needs structure. If I ask vague questions, I get vague answers. If I give it a real project, real files, real goals, and a proper process, it becomes a lot more useful.

I am also learning that there is a big difference between AI that talks and AI that builds.

Normal ChatGPT has helped me think through the idea. Codex is helping me actually build the thing.

Once the credits refresh, the plan is to finish the current post we were working on, then pause for a moment because I have some new information to feed into the process before we continue through the next batch.

After that, I want to bring the product repo into the same workflow. That means creating a proper project brief, adding my voice guide, cleaning up the manuscript structure, building the workbook underneath it, and then turning the best parts of the process into sellable tools.

So that is where things are at.

It is a little messy. The website is being rebuilt, the product idea is starting to take shape, and I am learning a lot about how to use AI as a working partner rather than just a place to ask questions - or to say "write me a blog post that says x,y,z. " I mean that is a great way to use it as well - but not for a rebuild like mine I guess

Anyway, hope that ramble makes sense and hopefully next week I can come up with some stats as well for how it is all going..

Let me know what you think below

Paul