Welcome back to this week’s Side Income Roundup, Monday, August 10.
The number most of us check first turns out to be close to useless, and there’s a Google Ads change landing on the 17th that costs you money if you leave it alone.
📧 Why the open rate you’re proud of might be hiding your best email
🛠 Turn one product photo into a ready-to-post video
🔍 Fix the site search that’s quietly losing you sales
⚡ A Google Ads deadline on August 17 worth beating
🤖 The affiliate AI rule that can claw back your commissions
Let’s get into it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
📢 Open rate is a vanity metric
Opens only tell you a subject line got attention. They say nothing about whether the email made you money.
Email consultant Nabeel Azeez makes the case that proper segmentation lets you mail far more often without burning your list, with one of his clients sending upwards of eight emails a day to different segments while most brands manage three a week. And before you delete your dormant subscribers, about 10% of them come back through a reactivation campaign.
Our Take: Pull up your last ten email sends and rank them by revenue instead of opens. If your best earner had a weak open rate, you’ve been optimizing the wrong number.
TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🛠 Vmake Labs Brainrot Marketing video styles
Upload one product photo, pick a Brainrot, UGC, or TV-ad template, and it builds a ready-to-post TikTok, Reels, or Shorts video in seconds.
🔍 SearchUs for WordPress
Ranks search results properly across your posts, pages, and WooCommerce products, and turns dead 404 pages into related-content suggestions.
Our Take: Run your three best-selling product photos through Vmake this week. Post one a day to TikTok and see which format actually pulls clicks.
TODAY’S QUICK WINS
⚡ Google clarifies its Smart Bidding update after advertiser pushback
From August 17, budget-limited Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns get pushed to hit the target you set rather than beat it.
⚡ Instagram now lets you swap the music on old posts
Replace Audio sits in the three-dot menu on any published post, video, or carousel, and keeps every like, comment, and share the post already earned.
Our Take: Tighten the target on any budget-limited campaign that’s beating it before the 17th, or Google will spend the difference. Then fix the audio on your best post instead of reposting it.
FROM OMC
📝 112 Days to Black Friday: The 20-Minute Audit That Could Save Your Q4
August is the last quiet month before Q4 gets busy, and most sellers spend it guessing at what to fix.
Our Take: Block twenty minutes this week and run the audit. Finding your real bottleneck now and fixing it beats doing it when it’s more expensive later.
AI SPOTLIGHT
🤖 TikTok Shop’s AI videos are putting affiliate trust under pressure
AI-generated product videos are flooding an affiliate program with 11.3 million selling creators globally, and TikTok permits them only with clear disclosure and no altered product claims.
Our Take: Before you let AI make your next product video, open the brand’s affiliate terms and check its AI rules. Some programs are already clawing back commissions.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK…
Here’s your move this week:
✅ Rank your last ten emails by revenue, not opens
✅ Turn three product photos into short videos
✅ Tighten your Google Ads targets before August 17
✅ Check the AI rules in every affiliate program you promote
Talk soon,
Aidan
P.S. If Q4 already feels close, that audit takes twenty minutes and tells you where to aim.
