Building a hyper-niche content site: My growth experiment with Y2K Japanese Fashion 🌸

Hi everyone, While many of us here are building SaaS or B2B tools, I recently decided to start a pure content and community project in a highly specific visual niche: Y2K Japanese Street Fashion, specifically the Gyaru subculture. My project is Gyaru Online (https://gyaru.online/). The Strategy: Instead of competing in broad fashion categories, I'm targeting very specific long-tail keywords and focusing heavily on visual SEO (like Pinterest traffic and Google Image Search) where competition is slightly lower but user intent is highly engaged. Right now, I'm publishing deep-dive guides, makeup tutorials, and aesthetic lookbooks to build domain authority. My questions for the community: For those of you running niche content sites or blogs, what has been your most effective channel for initial traffic besides organic search? When it comes to monetization for a highly visual aesthetic site, do you prefer display ad networks (like Mediavine/AdThrive once traffic is high enough), or have you found better success with affiliate links and digital products? I'd appreciate any advice or feedback on the site's layout from an SEO perspective! Thanks! 💡