Building an affiliate blog to $100/month — Week 2 in public

Tam Nguyen — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:18:29 +0000

Week 2 recap

Last week I started a public build log of clarratools.com — an affiliate blog
focused on AI voice and text-to-speech tools. Week 1 was three articles and
a lot of setup. Week 2 was about volume.

What I shipped

5 articles published, all comparison format:

ElevenLabs vs Murf AI
ElevenLabs vs Descript
ElevenLabs vs Speechify
ElevenLabs vs LOVO AI
ElevenLabs vs Resemble AI

That brings the total to 11 articles in 2 weeks. The cluster strategy: own one
tool's comparison space before expanding. Every article links to the others.
Internal linking is intentional from day one.

Metrics

Traffic: No data yet. Google hasn't indexed most of the pages. This is
normal for a new domain — I'm not expecting organic traffic for 2-3 months.

Revenue: $0. No affiliate clicks that converted. Also normal. You don't
earn on a site nobody's found yet.

Pinterest: 11 pins live. Building a content library before there's an
audience to see it. Pinterest has a longer half-life than most platforms —
pins from week 1 can still get clicks in month 6.

Product Hunt: Launched on Jun 10. 0 comments. This was expected — I have
no existing audience there. The goal was a backlink and a timestamp, not
a viral moment.

What I tried for distribution

Reddit warm-up. I've been commenting on relevant threads (r/podcasting,
r/instructionaldesign, r/elearning) without links. Pure value-add. The rule
I'm following: no links for the first 30 days, build account karma first.
3 comments this week.

Guest post outreach. Pitched 5 sites. 3 said no. 2 haven't replied.
The no's were polite but direct: they don't accept guest posts without payment,
or they're not accepting pitches right now. I followed up on the 2 non-replies.
If no response by Jun 20, I'll move on to smaller niche sites.

What I learned

Volume beats perfection at this stage. I'm not obsessing over making
each article perfect before publishing the next. Ship, iterate, fix later.

The "vs" article format is surprisingly efficient. Same structure every
time: quick verdict → pricing table → feature comparison → who should choose
what → how to make money with each tool → FAQ. Once you've written one,
the next one is 30% faster.

$0 is fine right now. I knew going in that month 1-3 would be building
infrastructure, not revenue. The question is: will the content rank in month 4?
That I don't know yet.

Week 3 plan

2 more articles (guide format this time, not comparison)
Start Read Next internal links across all 11 articles
First dev.to reposts for backlinks
Check Google Search Console for first impressions

Still at $0. Still building.

→ Site: clarratools.com

Building an affiliate blog to $100/month — Week 1 in public

Tam Nguyen — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:30:29 +0000

The goal: $100/month in recurring affiliate income. Constraint: Hostinger hosting + Namecheap domain — everything else free tier.

Why this niche

ElevenLabs has a 22% recurring affiliate program. Their product is genuinely good — I use it. And there's a whole search cluster around it: pricing questions, comparisons, "is the free plan worth it", alternatives. Every one of those is a searcher 80% of the way to buying.

I'm not targeting head terms. I'm targeting the bottom of the funnel — people comparing plans, comparing tools, reading before they upgrade.

What I built in week 1

7 articles in 9 days:

ElevenLabs Pricing (Jun 1)
ElevenLabs Review (Jun 3)
ElevenLabs Alternatives (Jun 5)
Best Text-to-Speech Tools 2026 (Jun 8)
ElevenLabs Free vs Paid (Jun 10)
ElevenLabs Free Plan Limits (Jun 12)
ElevenLabs vs Murf AI (Jun 10 — today)

Each is 2,000–3,500 words. Rank Math scores: 80–92/100. All have affiliate CTAs, internal linking, and Read Next cards pointing to related articles.

The honest numbers (Day 9)

Revenue: $0
Affiliate clicks: 0 — no meaningful traffic yet
GSC impressions: collecting since Jun 6, too early to read
Pinterest: 7 pins live (Rich Pins active)
Email subscribers: 0

Also launching on Product Hunt today. No idea if it'll go anywhere.

3 things I learned the hard way

1. WordPress's wpautop filter will silently break your CSS.
It wraps inline elements like <a> buttons in <p> tags — making <p> the actual flex child, not your button. So margin-top: auto on the button does nothing. Fix: target p:last-child in a <style> block at the top of your post HTML. Lost 2 hours on this.

2. Affiliate programs decline without explanation.
Murf AI rejected my application even though I already wrote the article featuring their product. Always have a non-affiliate fallback link ready.

3. Rank Math 80+ doesn't require keyword stuffing.
Keyword in first 100 chars of intro + in one H2 + in meta description. Done. Chasing density past that hurts readability for zero SEO gain.

What's next

4 more comparison articles (vs Descript, vs LOVO, vs Speechify, vs Play AI)
GSC check ~Jun 20 to see what's actually getting impressions
Reddit: start adding contextual links in late July when account karma is built

The real talk

7 articles, $0, no traffic yet. I'm giving this 90 days before drawing conclusions. If Google doesn't reward the cluster approach, I'll pivot to lower-competition long-tails.

If you've done affiliate SEO before — what actually moved the needle in the first 90 days?

Site: clarratools.com — honest reviews & comparisons of AI voice tools

DEV Community: Tam Nguyen