In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Holly Homer — who leads organic and AI visibility at Digistore24, the world’s largest affiliate network and marketplace. Holly accidentally launched one of the first mom blogs more than 20 years ago, and her arc — from comment-section communities to affiliate marketing to being scraped and replaced in search by her own words — is a tour through the entire modern history of being found online.
Comments Were the Original Social Network
Holly never read a blog before she started one. She filled out a form on Blogspot, named it June Cleaver Nirvana, and started writing to replace an expensive scrapbooking habit. In the early days a post might get 300 readers and 150 comments — the comment section was the social network. She and Jeremy land on a provocative point: because WordPress never solved comment spam (thousands sit in her spam folder), that conversation migrated to social platforms. Had creators kept owning it, the web might look very different today.
Affiliate Marketing Is Still an Underrated Channel
Digistore24 is the largest affiliate network and marketplace, especially strong in the supplement and health space, with a built-in affiliate network and payment processor so vendors can scale quickly. Based in Germany, it gives U.S. brands a ready framework to expand into Europe. Holly’s case to SEOs and marketers: affiliate marketing is a legitimate, low-risk, pay-for-performance channel — communication you can’t fully control, but that costs you nothing unless it works.
The Pajama Jeans Masterclass
About 17 years ago, watching infomercials with her husband, Holly bought pajama jeans just so she could write them off as a business expense. The review wasn’t glowing — but by echoing the infomercial’s exact keywords, she hit the number one result for “pajama jeans review” right as the company launched a massive radio campaign. Traffic jumped from a few thousand to 100,000 page views a week, and after a brief moral debate she added the affiliate banner and started selling 10–12 pairs a day for roughly eight months. The company could never outrank her own honest review.
“Being human in a place where being human is kind of neat and special now is really, I think, the next frontier of affiliate marketing.” — Holly Homer
Replaced by Her Own Words
Holly has four books and roughly 13,000 blog posts. Her main site, kidsactivities.com, covered simple topics — you don’t need a 4,000-word post on a paper-plate squirrel craft — which made it trivially easy for AI to scrape and replace her in search without compensation. She was bitter for a while. Now she uses AI all day to build a content-generation machine in her own voice, fed with her writing and quotes from her podcasts and videos.
“I was literally replaced by my own words in the search results and the AI results.” — Holly Homer
Feedback Loops Over First Drafts
Holly’s hot take: AI is amazing and crappy at the same time, and the magic is in the feedback loops. She once uploaded a spreadsheet of real data and got a glossy output with invented numbers because the model “estimated” them. One favorite technique: ask the AI what feedback you’re about to give it — flipping the logic so it self-critiques before you even look. Without that policing, output stays glossy, vague, and “something for everyone.” Her north star is the same one that’s run through her whole career: the human voice is what stands out as AI slop floods the internet.
“It’s our own damn fault if we don’t let people know what we do.” — Holly Homer
Holly Homer leads organic and AI visibility at Digistore24. Find her work and her long-running blog at kidsactivities.com.
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