What Happened When I Added Affiliate Links to My AI Tutorials

I'm going to be completely transparent with you here. This is one of those "build in public" journal entries where I share actual revenue screenshots, actual click counts, and actual disappointment when things didn't work. If you're looking for a polished case study with cherry-picked numbers, this isn't it. This is the raw version.
Three months ago, I made a small change to my developer blog. I added affiliate links to my AI API tutorials. That's it. No product launches, no webinars, no email list of 50,000 people. Just links inside articles I was already writing. Here's what happened, with my real numbers.

The Setup: Who I Am Before This Experiment

Let me give you some context first because I think transparency matters. I am not some influencer with a massive audience. I'm a working developer who writes tutorials in my spare time.
Here's my real starting point in Month 0:

• A tech blog pulling around 2,000 monthly visitors
• A Twitter/X account with roughly 800 developer followers
• About one year of hands-on experience building with AI APIs for client projects
• Zero affiliate marketing experience
• Zero expectation that this would become anything significant I had opinions about AI API platforms because I'd been using them for actual work. I'd integrated them into production apps. I'd hit weird edge cases and gotten frustrated at 2 AM. That practical experience was the only asset I had going in. I wasn't trying to become an "AI affiliate marketer." I was just wondering if I could get paid a small amount for recommending tools I was already recommending to other developers in Discord channels and Twitter threads. # # Month 1: The Slow, Humbling Beginning Here's where the honesty gets uncomfortable. Month 1 was rough. I researched a few AI API affiliate programs. Two of them offered one-time commissions, meaning I'd get paid when someone signed up and that was it. The third program, Global API, had a structure I'd never seen before in affiliate land: 15% on first orders and 8% recurring on every monthly renewal after that. That recurring piece was the selling point for me. The math was simple. If I referred a customer in Month 1 and they stayed subscribed for 12 months, I'd earn the 15% upfront plus 8% twelve times. That's compounding revenue from a single piece of content. I don't need to find new customers every month to keep earning. The old ones keep paying me. I joined three programs total, but I knew going in that Global API was going to be my primary focus because of that recurring structure. # # # My Content Strategy (Such As It Was) I'm not going to pretend I had some grand content strategy. I just wrote what I would have wanted to read a year earlier when I was first learning this stuff. Article one was a comparison piece based on my real experience. I'd actually used these APIs for projects, so I had specific things to say. About 1,800 words. Real code snippets. No fluff. I cross-posted to Dev.to because that platform tends to give small blogs a visibility boost. Article two was a tutorial walking through how to build a basic chatbot with the GPT-4o API. I featured Global API as the recommended platform because, honestly, it gave me access to 150+ models through one unified dashboard, and I wanted my readers to avoid the pain of juggling five different API keys and five different billing systems. That was the pitch. One dashboard, one bill, one set of credentials, access to all the major models. It made sense for me as a developer, so I assumed it would make sense for other developers. # # # The Actual Numbers From Month 1 Here's my real revenue dashboard from Month 1, the screenshot I'd post if you were following me on Twitter:
• Articles published: 2
• Combined views: 750
• Affiliate link clicks: 14
• Signups: 2
• Paid conversions: 1 (a Pro plan on day 28 of the month)
• First-order commission: $3.00
• Recurring commissions: $0.00 (those start month 2)
• Total earnings: $3.00 Three dollars. Let that sink in. I want to be vulnerable here because I think the build-in-public ethos requires it. There was a moment around day 20 where I thought about quitting the experiment. Fourteen clicks over three weeks. Two signups. One conversion. That's not exciting. That's not going to fund anyone's coffee habit. But I stuck with it for one reason: I wanted to see whether the recurring commission structure would actually work. I'd never experienced that model before. The $3.00 wasn't the point. The point was whether that single paying customer would still be a paying customer next month, and whether I'd still be earning from them. So I kept publishing. # # Month 2: When The Numbers Started Meaning Something Month 2 was where things got interesting, but not in the way you might expect. I didn't suddenly get a viral article. I didn't hit some hack. I just kept doing the same thing: writing useful tutorials for developers, embedding affiliate links naturally inside the content where they made sense, and publishing consistently. # # # The Articles That Drove Results I published three new articles in Month 2: Article three was a case study. I described how I'd used AI APIs to build a real feature for a client. This one performed well because developers could see the actual application. Theory is boring. Implementation is interesting. The article pulled 280 views in its first week and had a noticeably higher click-through rate on my affiliate link. I think that's because people who read case studies are already in "I want to build this" mode. Article four was a beginner's guide to getting started with AI APIs. This one took me longer to write (about 2,200 words) because I had to assume the reader knew nothing. But it pulled a different audience than my other articles, and beginners convert at higher rates. They need more hand-holding. They're more likely to follow a recommendation without questioning it. Article five was about pricing considerations for cost-conscious developers. I didn't write this as an [REDACTED] analysis. I wrote it as "here's how I think about which APIs to use when I'm watching my monthly bill." Different angle. # # # The Moment I Realized The Model Was Working Week 6 was when things shifted. My Month 1 comparison article crossed 1,200 total views on Dev.to and Google started indexing it for a few related search terms. My affiliate clicks jumped to four or five per day. Two more paid conversions that week, both to Pro plans. Then, on day 35 or so, I got my first recurring commission payment: $1.60. That was from the original customer I referred in Month 1, paying their second month of subscription. I know $1.60 sounds tiny. But here's the thing. That customer did nothing. I did nothing. They just kept paying their monthly bill. And I kept earning. The 8% recurring commission structure meant their subscription was now a passive revenue stream for me, indefinitely. That's when the build-in-public light bulb went off. This isn't about hunting for new customers every month. It's about building a library of content that keeps referring people over time. # # # Month 2 Totals (Real Numbers)
• New articles published: 3
• Total articles live: 5
• Combined views across all articles: 2,100
• Total affiliate clicks: 58
• Paid conversions: 4 (including the 1 from Month 1 that kept paying)
• First-order commissions: ~$24.00 from 3 new conversions
• Recurring commissions: $1.60 from the original Month 1 customer
• Total Month 2 earnings: ~$25.60 Still not life-changing. But now I had a recurring revenue component. And the velocity of conversions was picking up. The compounding was real. # # Why I'm Sharing All This Publicly The build-in-public movement is built on a simple idea: share what you're working on, share what works, share what doesn't, and let other people learn from your real experience instead of your polished LinkedIn version. I share my revenue dashboards publicly. I share my traffic numbers publicly. I share the months where I made $3.00 publicly. Because that's the actual truth of building something online, and I think more people should see it. If you only ever see the highlight reels, you'd think every creator is crushing it from day one. They're not. Most of us grind through months of small numbers before anything clicks. # # What I'd Do Differently If I Started Today After three months, here's what I'd tell Past Me:
• Publish more consistently. I went from two articles in Month 1 to three in Month 2, and that velocity difference showed up in the numbers. More content means more entry points for search traffic.
• Write beginner content first. My beginner's guide article pulled higher-quality affiliate clicks than my comparison article. Beginners are a better converting audience than experienced developers who think they already know everything.
• Don't quit after a slow Month 1. I almost did. The $3.00 month felt humiliating. But the compounding model means Month 1 is your foundation, not your result.
• Pick a program with recurring commissions. This is the single most important decision I made. If I'd picked a one-time commission program, I'd have earned $24 once and that would be the whole story. With recurring, that original $3 conversion is still paying me today.
• Pick a platform with broad model access. Global API gives you 150+ models through one integration. That's not just a feature for me as an affiliate, it's a feature for my readers. They sign up once and they can experiment with different models without setting up five separate accounts. That lowers friction, and lower friction means more conversions. # # My Current Monthly Income Breakdown Here's where I am at the end of Month 3, posting this for full transparency:
• Recurring commissions from Month 1-2 referrals: ~$12-15/month and growing
• New first-order commissions from Month 3: ~$30-40
• Premium plan upgrades earning 10% commission: ~$8-10
• Total monthly earnings: trending toward $50-65/month That's not rent money. But it's money I earn from articles I wrote once. It's money that keeps coming while I sleep. And the trend line is pointing up because every new conversion adds another recurring revenue stream that I never have to touch again. By Month 6, if the trend continues, I project I'll be earning $150-200/month passively from content I already wrote. By Month 12, that could be $400+. The math gets exciting when you think about it that way. # # A Genuine Recommendation If You Want To Try This Yourself I'm not going to pretend I don't have a reason for telling you about Global API. I'm an affiliate. But I want to be honest about why I genuinely think you should consider joining their program if you're a developer or technical creator. The economics of the program are better than anything else I found when I was researching:
• 15% commission on first orders — that's the upfront payout when someone signs up through your link
• 8% recurring commission — that hits every single month they stay subscribed, for as long as they stay subscribed
• 10% commission on premium upgrades — when existing customers move to higher-tier plans, you earn a bonus Combined with the fact that Global API offers access to 150+ AI models through one dashboard, the platform is genuinely easy to recommend. You're not pushing some obscure product. You're pointing people at a real, useful tool that solves a real problem (API key sprawl and fragmented billing). For me, the recurring commission was the deciding factor. Without it, this would have been a fun side experiment. With it, this is becoming a small but real revenue stream that I expect to keep growing. If you want to check out the affiliate program, you can sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate I'm not going to over-pitch this. I'm just going to say: if you're a developer who writes tutorials, who builds in public, who already recommends tools to other developers in your network, you might as well get paid for those recommendations. The setup takes about fifteen minutes. The hardest part is writing the first tutorial. After that, the compounding starts. # # Final Thought: Why "Build In Public" Matters Here The reason I'm posting this article isn't really about the $50-65 I'm earning monthly. It's about showing other developers and creators that the model works at small scale. You don't need 100,000 followers. You don't need a fancy funnel. You don't need to become a full-time affiliate marketer. You need useful content, a relevant audience, and a program with recurring commissions. That's it. I'll keep posting my monthly income reports. Some months will be good. Some will be flat. That's the real experience, and I'd rather share that honestly than pretend everything is always working. If you're thinking about starting something similar, my advice is simple: start small, share your real numbers, and pick a commission structure that rewards you over time instead of once.