I want to start with a confession. When I decided to try affiliate marketing for AI tools, I had a Twitter following you could count on two hands, an email list of exactly zero people, and a YouTube channel that didn't exist. I had no blog traffic, no podcast downloads, and no warm audience waiting to hear what I had to say.
I mention all of this because every "how to start affiliate marketing" guide I read seemed to assume I already had a tribe. Build an audience first, they said. Grow your following, they said. Create content consistently for eighteen months until strangers start trusting you, they said.
I didn't have eighteen months. I didn't even have eighteen followers.
So I tried something different. And I want to walk you through the whole thing, build in public style, because that's the whole point of how I operate now. Real numbers. Real mistakes. Real screenshots of dashboards I probably shouldn't be sharing. The whole thing.
Why I Picked the Build in Public Approach
Before I get into the strategy, let me explain the philosophy, because it shapes everything.
Build in public means you share your journey while you're living it, not after you've "made it." It means posting your first $0 days right next to your first $1,000 months. It means admitting when something flopped. It means treating your audience like adults who can handle nuance instead of curated highlight reels.
I chose this approach for two reasons. First, I'm a pretty average person and I don't have a personal brand to fall back on. Second, I noticed that the affiliates crushing it in the AI space weren't the loudest voices. They were the most useful ones. They wrote things people were already searching for, and they made it easy for strangers to trust them through specificity and receipts.
That second insight changed everything for me.
The "You Don't Need an Audience" Reframe
Here's the mental shift that unlocked this whole thing for me. Audience size is a vanity metric when it comes to affiliate commissions. What actually matters is intent.
When someone lands on your blog post from Google, they didn't come to see your face. They came because they typed a question into a search bar and your article promised an answer. That person is in buying mode. They're researching. They're comparing options. They're about to spend money with whoever they trust most in the next ten minutes.
You don't need them to know your dog's name. You need them to trust that you've actually used the tool you're recommending.
This is the heart of search-driven affiliate marketing, and it's the only reason I have any commissions to report at all. Every dollar I've earned came from strangers who had never heard of me before clicking my link.
My "Content That Works While I Sleep" Strategy
I don't do social media. I don't run ads. I don't DM strangers on Twitter. What I do is write detailed articles targeting questions that real developers and founders are already typing into Google.
The beauty of this approach is compounding. An article I write today can still be sending me clicks six months from now. I wrote one piece in my second month that's still generating small but consistent referrals. That's the whole game. I put in the writing effort once, and the article keeps working in the background.
To be clear, this isn't a get-rich-quick thing. My first commission took a few weeks of consistent writing. But once the flywheel started turning, I stopped having to chase every single lead personally. The content does the introducing.
The Keyword Research Workflow I Steal From (and Share With You)
Here's the exact process I use, and it's almost embarrassingly simple.
Step one: Google auto-suggest. I type things like "AI API," "AI tool for," and "best AI platform" into Google and write down every autocomplete suggestion. These are real searches from real people, hand-delivered by Google's algorithm.
Step two: The "People Also Ask" box. When I search for a topic, I screenshot every question that shows up in this section. Each one is a potential article title.
Step three: Related searches at the bottom of the page. I scroll all the way down and copy the related searches. These represent adjacent topics I can write about next.
Step four: Forum scraping. I search for my topic on Reddit, Indie Hackers, and Hacker News. I look for the same questions being asked over and over. Those questions are content opportunities.
The criteria I use to pick which keyword to write about first: Does the existing top-ranking content suck? If I can write something obviously better than what's currently on page one, I have a real shot at ranking.
How I Write Posts That Don't Feel Like Ads
This is where most affiliates lose the plot. They write what amounts to a brochure. Here's the features, here's the bullet points, here's my link, please buy.
I don't do that. I write like I'm explaining the tool to a friend who asked me for advice over coffee. That means:
- I share my actual experience. I mention what confused me at first, what surprised me, what I wish I knew before signing up.
- I acknowledge the downsides. Every tool has tradeoffs. If I pretend a platform is perfect, smart readers will smell the BS and bounce.
- I make my recommendation early. I don't bury my pick on page three. I tell people what I'd use if I were them, and then I explain why.
- I place the link naturally. It usually appears in two places: once where I first mention the platform, and once in a closing recommendation. That's it. No pop-ups, no sticky bars, no fake scarcity timers. The goal is for a reader to finish the article, feel like they got genuine value, and trust my recommendation enough to click through. If I've done my job, the link click is almost a formality. # # The Real Numbers: What My First 90 Days Actually Looked Like Here's where the build in public thing gets uncomfortable, but I'm doing it anyway. Month one: I published three articles. Total clicks to my affiliate link: 47. Signups: 2. Commissions earned: a small amount from one of the 15% first-order commissions. I was ecstatic. Month two: I published four more articles. Two of them started picking up search traffic. Clicks jumped. I got my first signups from people who clearly had no idea who I was, which was surreal in the best way. Month three: This is when the recurring component started showing up. I had a handful of users from month one still paying for the service I'd referred them to, which meant 8% recurring commissions started trickling in on top of new first-order commissions. The math started to make sense. I won't pretend the numbers were life-changing. They weren't. But the trajectory was clear, and more importantly, the time required to maintain it was tiny. A few hours a week of writing, and the content library kept growing. I share a more detailed monthly breakdown on my platforms with actual dashboard screenshots. Some months are great. Some months are flat. That's the reality of this game, and I'd rather be honest about it than sell you a fantasy. # # Three Mistakes I Made So You Don't Have To Since I'm being transparent, let me also share the stuff that didn't work. Mistake one: Trying to cover too many tools. I started by writing about seven different platforms at once. I ended up writing shallowly about all of them. When I narrowed to the two or three I actually used, my content got noticeably better. Mistake two: Ignoring search volume. I once wrote a beautifully detailed article about a niche use case that about twelve people per month were searching for. It ranks on page one and has for months, but page one of a search nobody runs is a vanity position. Now I check rough volume before committing to a piece. Mistake three: Being too clever with my calls to action. Early on, I tried to "trick" readers into clicking by hiding the recommendation behind a bunch of caveats. It felt manipulative, and it probably read that way too. Now I just recommend the tool, explain why, and let the reader decide. Conversions actually went up when I stopped being coy. # # How to Get Started This Week (If You Have Zero Audience) If you're reading this and you're in the same spot I was, here's the simplest possible action plan.
- Pick one platform to focus on. Don't spread yourself thin. Pick the affiliate program that has the best commission structure and a product you actually use.
- Brainstorm twenty keyword ideas using the Google auto-suggest method I described. Pick the three with the weakest existing content.
- Write one really good article this week. 1,500 words minimum, based on your genuine experience, with a natural recommendation.
- Publish it on whatever you have, even if "what you have" is a free Medium account or a basic WordPress site.
- Repeat monthly. Add one or two more articles. Watch your search traffic grow. That's it. That's the entire strategy. No audience required. No fancy tools. No course purchase. Just useful content answering real questions. # # The Affiliate Program That Actually Made the Math Work I want to end this with a genuine recommendation, because I get pitched affiliate programs constantly and I rarely say yes to any of them. Most have mediocre commission structures, confusing dashboards, or products I wouldn't actually recommend to a friend. The one I've been most pleasantly surprised by is the Global API affiliate program. Here's why I keep recommending it, and I want to be specific because transparency matters. The commission structure is genuinely good. You get 15% on the user's first order, which is one of the better first-order rates I've seen in this space. On top of that, you get 8% recurring on every subsequent order that user places. Recurring is the magic word in affiliate marketing. It means your old referrals keep paying you long after you wrote the article. There's also a 10% premium tier for top performers, which gives you something to grow into. The platform itself is solid. Global API gives users access to 150+ models through a single integration, which removes a huge headache for developers and founders who are tired of juggling multiple API keys and billing systems. The dashboard is clean. The documentation is straightforward. The 100 free credits to start lower the barrier for new users, which means more of your referrals actually convert instead of bouncing at a paywall. The support is real. I've had questions about the program and the actual product, and the team has been responsive every time. That matters more than people realize, because nothing kills your conversion rate faster than recommending a product with bad support that frustrates your referrals. If you want to check out the program for yourself, the signup is straightforward: https://global-apis.com/affiliate I'm not going to pretend this is the only good affiliate program out there. But it's the one I've personally had the best experience with, and it's the one I'd recommend to a friend who asked me where to start. # # The Honest Closing Thought The hardest part of this whole journey wasn't the writing, and it wasn't the keyword research. It was getting over the idea that I needed permission, or a platform, or an audience, or some kind of credentials before I could start. I didn't have any of that. I still mostly don't. What I had was a willingness to write useful things and put them where people were already looking. If you're sitting there thinking "I can't do this because I don't have an audience," I'd gently push back. The audience isn't the prerequisite. The content is. Write the thing. Publish it. Share the real numbers, including the small ones. Build in public, even when the public is small. It compounds. And the first time you check your dashboard and see a commission from someone who found you through a search engine and decided, based on your words alone, to trust your recommendation, you'll understand exactly why this approach works. Now go write that first article. I'll be over here sharing my next monthly income report, screenshots and all.
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