Three months ago I was posting into the void. Zero followers on Twitter, a Medium account I hadn't touched since 2022, and a LinkedIn profile that might as well have been a tombstone. No email list. No YouTube channel. No Discord community. Nothing.
Then I stumbled into AI API affiliate marketing through a friend's referral link, and now I'm doing this thing where I publish my numbers every single month. If you've been around the Build in Public movement, you know what that means — full transparency, real revenue screenshots, the wins AND the ugly parts.
Here's my real numbers from the last 90 days:
Month 1: $214
Month 2: $871
Month 3: $1,762
Total: $2,847
This article is the full breakdown of exactly how I did it without an audience, without a personal brand, and without spending a dime on ads.
Why "I Don't Have an Audience" Is a Cop-Out
I used to believe this too. I'd see affiliate marketers on Twitter flexing their launch numbers and think, "Yeah, that works for them because they have 50k followers." The victim mentality was strong. I told myself the game was rigged unless you already had distribution.
Then I read one post that changed everything. Someone said: "You don't need an audience. You need a search engine." That sentence hit me like a truck because I'd been so obsessed with social media growth that I forgot Google still sends billions of clicks every day to small websites nobody's ever heard of.
The insight is this: search traffic is the great equalizer. Someone Googling "best AI API for startups" doesn't care whether the author has 200 followers or 200,000. They want an answer. If you provide a better answer than what's ranking, you win the click — and potentially the commission.
So I stopped trying to build an audience. I started answering questions.
My First Commission: The Ugly Truth
Let me tell you the story of my first $37 commission because it wasn't glamorous.
It was a Tuesday in January. I'd written four articles about AI APIs, posted them on a brand new WordPress site I bought for $11, and was checking my affiliate dashboard every hour like a paranoid stock trader. Zero conversions. Zero clicks, even. I was starting to wonder if I'd wasted a week of my life.
Then I refreshed the dashboard at 2 AM (yes, I was that obsessed) and saw $37.18 sitting there. Someone had clicked my Global API link, signed up, and used their 100 free credits to test the platform. My commission kicked in immediately.
Here's what I want to be transparent about: that $37 didn't change my life. But it changed my belief system. I proved to myself that strangers on the internet would click links from a website with zero brand recognition and convert into paying customers.
That's when the build-in-public mindset really clicked for me. I started screenshotting every milestone and posting it.
The SEO Playbook That Actually Worked
Here's the exact process I followed. No fluff. No "10 secret hacks." Just what I did.
Step 1: Find what people actually search for
I spent two hours typing variations of "AI API" into Google and writing down every auto-suggest result. Things like:
- "AI API for small business"
- "AI API comparison"
- "AI API free credits"
- "AI API integration guide"
- "AI API for chatbot" These are gold. Every suggestion is a query real people typed. I cross-referenced with the "People Also Ask" boxes and the related searches at the bottom of each results page. Within an hour I had a list of 47 potential topics. Step 2: Check what currently ranks For each topic, I looked at the top 10 results. Most were thin listicles, outdated blog posts from 2023, or generic SaaS review sites that clearly didn't
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