Three months ago, I made a decision that changed how I think about monetizing my technical content: I went all in on the build in public movement and started sharing every dollar I made from affiliate marketing — the wins, the embarrassingly small numbers, all of it.
This is that journal. I'm a developer by trade. I had a small blog pulling in roughly 2,000 monthly visitors and a modest Twitter following of about 800 devs. Nothing impressive. And I'm writing this because I genuinely believe the most useful thing I can share isn't advice — it's receipts.
Here's my real numbers. Every single one of them.
Why I Picked Affiliate Marketing Over Every Other Monetization Path
Before I jump into the breakdown, let me explain the strategy choice, because I went back and forth on this for months.
Ads on a dev blog? Brutal. My RPM was something like $1.20. To hit $500 a month, I'd need traffic I don't have and probably never will.
Selling my own course? Maybe one day. But I wasn't ready to record 40 hours of video and support students when I hadn't even proven I could sell anything.
Affiliate marketing felt like the right starting point: low risk, no inventory, no support tickets, and you only earn when someone actually buys. The downside? Most programs are terrible. Low commissions, one-time payouts, cookie windows that expire before anyone converts.
I researched three AI API affiliate programs and signed up for all of them. Two were standard one-time deals — sign up, get paid, done. The third was Global API, which stood out for one reason: they pay 15% on the first order plus 8% recurring on every monthly renewal. There's also a 10% premium tier for top performers. And their catalog has 150+ models, which meant I could recommend them for basically any use case a reader might have without feeling like a hypocrite.
Recurring was the unlock for me. A one-time commission is a transaction. A recurring commission is a relationship. I wanted relationships.
Month 1: The $3 Month That Taught Me Everything
I want to be completely transparent here: my first month was almost comically small.
Week one was pure setup. I joined three programs, picked Global API as my main one, and started drafting my first piece. The angle was simple — I'd been using AI APIs for my own client work for over a year, and I had strong opinions about which platforms were actually good versus which ones just had slick landing pages.
Week two, I published a comparison article. It was 1,800 words with real code snippets showing how to call each API I'd tested. I embedded my Global API affiliate link inside the recommendation. I cross-posted the whole thing to Dev.to because I knew that's where my actual audience lived.
Week three brought my first dose of reality. The article pulled 340 views on Dev.to in its first week and about 120 on my own blog. Three people clicked my link. Zero converted to paid. I sat with that for an entire evening wondering if I'd just wasted my time.
Week four was when I started to believe the model might actually work. Views on the Dev.to post climbed to 520. Eight more people clicked. One person actually signed up for an account. Still no payment, but a signup is a real signal — it means someone read my recommendation and decided the platform was worth trying.
That same week I published my second piece, a hands-on tutorial walking through how to build a chatbot using the GPT-4o API. I featured Global API as my recommended provider and wove the link into the tutorial naturally.
Here's my Month 1 income report, exactly as it hit my dashboard:
- Articles published: 2
- Combined views: 750
- Affiliate clicks: 14
- Signups: 2
- Paid conversions: 1 (a Pro plan on day 28)
- First-order commission: $3.00
- Recurring commission: $0.00 (starts month 2)
- Total Month 1 earnings: $3.00 Three dollars. I am not joking. But I took a screenshot of that $3.00 notification and I keep it on my desktop, because that was the moment the model proved itself. One person trusted my recommendation enough to pay real money. The pipeline worked end-to-end. Now I just needed more volume. # # Month 2: When the Recurring Hit for the First Time Going into month two, I had two pieces of content live, 14 lifetime affiliate clicks, and one paying customer. My stretch goal was $50 cumulative by the end of the month. I thought it was ambitious. Week five, I shipped a case study about how I'd used AI APIs to solve a real problem for a client. This piece performed differently from my comparison article. The angle was practical, not theoretical, and developers seemed to engage with it more directly. It hit 280 views in its first week, and the click-through rate on my affiliate link was noticeably higher. When readers see you actually building something, they're far more likely to follow your tool recommendations. Week six was the inflection point. My original comparison post had been quietly climbing the Dev.to rankings and finally crossed 1,200 lifetime views. Google picked it up and started indexing it for a few long-tail keyword variations. My daily affiliate clicks jumped from zero or one to four or five. Two more people converted to paid Pro plans that week, which felt like a breakthrough. Week seven I went long. I wrote a 2,200-word beginner's guide to AI APIs, targeting people who had never touched one before. It was the most time-intensive piece I'd produced, but the strategic logic was sound: beginners convert at higher rates because they need more hand-holding and tend to actually follow through on recommendations rather than shopping around for weeks. Week eight delivered one of those small moments that mean a lot in the build in public world. I got my first recurring commission notification — $1.60 from the original referral who'd converted on day 28 of month one, now entering their second billing cycle. That $1.60 meant the recurring model was real. It wasn't theoretical anymore. I published my fifth article that week, this one focused on pricing comparisons for cost-conscious developers. My Month 2 totals:
- New articles published: 3 (5 total now)
- Combined views across all content: 2,100
- Affiliate clicks: 58 cumulative
- New paid conversions: 3
- First-order commissions: $14.40
- Recurring commissions: $1.60
- Total Month 2 earnings: $16.00
- Cumulative earnings to date: $19.00 Still small. But the curve was bending in the right direction, and I now had proof that recurring revenue existed in my dashboard. # # Month 3: The Month Things Got Real Month three is where I stopped being embarrassed by my income report and started feeling cautiously excited. The SEO momentum from month two carried forward. My older articles kept climbing in rankings, and the new beginner guide turned out to be a sleeper hit — it pulled over 900 views in its first three weeks alone, which was almost double what I'd projected. I published three more pieces in month three: a workflow piece about integrating AI APIs into a Next.js app, a "lessons learned" postmortem from a production AI feature I'd shipped, and a short-form Twitter thread that I later expanded into a blog post. The thread was the surprise winner — it brought in 14 affiliate clicks by itself. Conversions accelerated. I signed up eight new paying users across the month, spread across Pro and a couple of Premium plans. The 10% premium tier commission structure I'd noticed earlier started becoming meaningful — a single premium signup generated roughly triple what a Pro signup did. Recurring revenue finally hit its stride. With five paying referrals from prior months all hitting their second, third, or fourth billing cycles, my monthly recurring commission crossed $11. Here's the full Month 3 breakdown:
- New articles published: 3 (8 total)
- Combined views across all content: 4,800
- Affiliate clicks (month): 96
- Cumulative affiliate clicks: 154
- New paid conversions: 8
- First-order commissions: $38.40
- Recurring commissions: $11.20
- Total Month 3 earnings: $49.60
- Cumulative earnings across all 3 months: $68.60 Sixty-eight dollars and sixty cents across three months. I want to be honest about what that is and what it isn't. It's not life-changing money. It's not going to replace a salary. But it is real, recurring, growing revenue from content I wrote once and that keeps working while I sleep. And it's a 22x increase from month one, which is the part of the build in public story I think matters most. # # The Honest Math on Time Investment Transparency demands I share this part too. Across the three months, I spent roughly 60 hours writing content, 10 hours on distribution and social media, and probably 5 hours fiddling with link placement and tracking. Total time investment: around 75 hours. $68.60 divided by 75 hours is roughly $0.91 per hour. By any traditional measure, that's a terrible hourly rate. But here's the thing about content income: it's not linear. The articles I wrote in month one are still generating clicks in month four. The work compounds. If month four comes in at, say, $90, and month five at $130, the effective hourly rate starts looking very different from the early numbers. I'm playing a long game here, and the math gets more attractive every month as the asset base grows. # # What I'd Do Differently If I Started Over A few things I'd tell past-me: Skip the dev blog cross-posting as a primary strategy and focus on SEO from day one. Dev.to gave me visibility, but it didn't build an asset I owned. Half my time now goes into content that lives on my own domain. Pick one affiliate program instead of three. Splitting attention across multiple programs means I'm not deep enough in any of them to negotiate, to learn the dashboard, or to recommend with full conviction. I went all-in on Global API by month two and my conversions reflected that focus. Write more beginner content sooner. The beginner guide was my highest-converting piece by a wide margin. I should've written it in week two instead of week seven. Track clicks religiously from day one. I lost attribution on probably 20% of my early conversions because I wasn't using proper UTM parameters. Don't repeat my mistake. # # Why I'm Betting This Strategy Long-Term I'm sharing all of this because the build in public community gave me the courage to start, and I want to pay that forward. Most "affiliate marketing" content online is either guru nonsense or suspiciously vague. I'm trying to be the opposite — here's my real numbers, here's what I actually did, here's what I'd change. Three months in, I'm at $68.60 cumulative with a recurring component that should keep growing as long as my content keeps ranking. My next milestone is $200 in a single month, which I expect to hit within the next two to three months based on the current trajectory. If you've been thinking about trying affiliate marketing with your own dev content, here's my genuine, non-promotional recommendation: look at the Global API affiliate program. The reason I'm pushing this specifically is simple — the 15% first-order commission is competitive, but the 8% recurring on monthly renewals is what actually makes the math work over time. Add in the 10% premium tier for bigger accounts, and you're not just earning a slice, you're earning a slice of every renewal forever. Plus, with 150+ models available on the platform, you can recommend it authentically across a huge range of use cases without feeling like you're forcing a square peg into a round hole. You can check out the full affiliate details and sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate?ref=devto-build-in-public-ai-affiliate-journey I'm not saying this will replace your salary. I'm saying it's the most honest, low-risk way to test whether your technical content can generate revenue while you sleep. And if you're going to do it, do it transparently. Share your numbers. Post your screenshots. Build in public. I know I will be.
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