Answers
The questions, answered properly
Each of these is something a small business owner actually asks, answered with the arithmetic rather than the adjectives — including the parts where the honest answer is that you cannot do the thing you wanted.
Pricing and margin
How much can you afford to pay an affiliate?
The arithmetic that decides an affiliate rate: contribution, the margin you protect, and the ceiling above which a sale costs you money. With the numbers worked through on a £100 product.
Why some products cannot carry a commission at all
Thin-margin products cannot fund a percentage, however small it looks against the price. What to do instead of quietly cutting the rate — and why a headline rate that shrinks is worse than no programme.
How do you know when to stop a campaign that is losing money?
The four numbers that decide it, why ROAS on its own is misleading, and what a holdout group tells you that attribution never will.
Creators and affiliates
What should you pay a creator who has no followers?
Most programmes turn away anyone under 10,000 followers and lose the person who was about to be big. The two-door model: 0.5% with no gate at all, 0.75% and 1% for a verified audience.
How do you pay a creator in a country with no bank account?
Nine payout rails including African mobile money, what each actually costs, and the tax question nobody answers: what happens when somebody's country issues no individual tax reference.
Do you have to withhold tax when you pay an affiliate?
Affiliates are not employees, so they are paid gross — but the platform still has reporting duties. What gets reported, what the creator sees, and why identity is checked before the first payout rather than the tenth.
Ads and creative
How do you resize one ad for Instagram, Stories and a banner without it looking stretched?
Why an ad squeezed into a story looks wrong, what each platform actually covers with its own interface, and how to lay one design out for five placements without regenerating the artwork.
How do you make an ad from your own photos?
Your own photographs beat generated artwork for most small businesses, and they need one thing to work as ads: the copy has to stay readable over them. How that is handled automatically.
Why your ad text is harder to read than you think
Contrast ratios, the amber-on-white trap, and why the person who made the ad is the last person who can tell. What to measure and what the numbers mean.
Getting found
What does a website audit actually check?
The twelve things worth measuring on a page, what each one costs you when it fails, and how to tell a real audit from a lead-capture form with a progress bar.
Why AI assistants never mention your business
When somebody asks an assistant for a plumber in their town, something decides which names come back. What it reads, why most small business sites are invisible to it, and what you can actually change.
Why your business does not show up for your own town
The six causes of local invisibility in the order they matter, starting with the one that outranks your website entirely and costs nothing to fix.
Reputation
Trust and security
If you would rather see it than read about it, the free audit reads your actual page and gives you three true things about it in about fifteen seconds, with no account.