Alright, let's get into it. I want to talk about something that genuinely frustrates me because I hear it in almost every comment section on my channel, in every DM, and from basically every person who slides into my inbox asking how to get started with affiliate marketing in the AI space.
The objection always sounds something like this: "Dope video, but I literally have zero followers. Is there any point in me even trying?"
Or: "I started my channel three months ago and I'm at like 47 subscribers. Affiliate stuff feels pointless until I blow up."
I get it. I really do. I remember being that person. I remember staring at my YouTube Studio dashboard watching the views tick up by ones and twos, wondering if I was wasting my time making content nobody was watching. And I remember thinking that affiliate marketing was this exclusive club reserved for creators with massive audiences — people with six-figure subscriber counts and sponsorship managers fielding their DMs.
I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. And the video you're reading right now (well, the written companion piece to a video I dropped recently) is basically my whole playbook for going from literally zero to earning commissions without having any kind of audience at all. No email list. No Twitter following. No TikTok. Just me, a laptop, and a willingness to make content that answers questions people are actively typing into Google.
Let me walk you through exactly how I did it, and how you can replicate it.
The Biggest Lie in Affiliate Marketing
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out. The whole "you need a huge audience" narrative is a lie. Not a small lie, either. It's a massive, profit-driven lie that benefits people who sell courses about how to build audiences, and it leaves out the most powerful traffic source on the entire internet.
Search engines.
Think about the last time you needed a new tool. Did you wait for a creator you follow to recommend it? Maybe. But more likely, you went to Google and typed something like "best AI tool for X" and clicked around until you found a recommendation that made sense. You didn't follow that person. You didn't subscribe. You didn't even read their about page. You just found their content, trusted it, and pulled out your credit card.
That's the kind of traffic we're chasing. Not followers. Not subscribers. Buyers who are already looking for what you're recommending. These are the warmest, most ready-to-convert humans on the entire planet, and they don't care if you have 0 followers or 10 million. They care if your content answers their question.
I made my first commission this way. A stranger in Brazil found one of my pieces of content through a Google search, clicked my link, signed up, and I got paid. I had no idea they existed. They had no idea who I was. The content did all the heavy lifting.
That's the model. Once you understand it, everything else falls into place.
Why Search Beats Followers Every Single Time
Let me give you some context on my own channel because I know you guys love the numbers. As I'm writing this, I'm sitting at around 12,400 subscribers. I get between 15,000 and 25,000 views per video on a good month, and the algorithm is... let's call it moody. Some videos pop, some don't. That's the game.
But here's what most people don't see. My YouTube content is only one piece of the puzzle. A huge chunk of my affiliate revenue — and I mean a real, meaningful chunk — comes from written content I publish that ranks in Google. Pieces of content that I wrote months ago are still generating clicks and signups every single week. They're little evergreen assets that work for me 24/7, even when the algorithm decides my latest video isn't worth surfacing.
This is the shift in thinking that changed everything for me. I stopped thinking about my audience as a group of people who follow me, and started thinking about them as anyone who is searching for the thing I know about. That audience is exponentially larger, and they're way more likely to convert because they've already raised their hand and said "I want this."
When you create content for followers, you're competing with millions of other creators for attention. When you create content for searchers, you're competing with a handful of mediocre blog posts and outdated listicles. The bar is way lower, and the payoff is way more consistent.
My Keyword Hunting Process (Steal This)
Okay, so how do you actually find the searches to target? I'm not going to gatekeep this because it's genuinely simple and free.
Step one: I open an incognito browser window. Always incognito. You want raw data, not personalized suggestions based on your search history.
Step two: I start typing things related to AI APIs and tools into Google. Things like "AI API," "AI tool for," "best AI," and I let auto-complete do its thing. Google's auto-complete is basically a giant database of what real humans are searching for, and it's been my secret weapon since day one.
Step three: I scroll to the bottom of the search results page and look at the "related searches" section. These are goldmines. They show you variations of your original query that you might not have thought of.
Step four: I check the "People also ask" box. This is where you find the actual questions people are typing. Questions like "How do I start using AI in my business?" or "What's the best way to integrate AI into an app?" Each one of these questions is a potential piece of content.
Step five: I keep a running Google Doc of every relevant query I find. I sort them into three buckets: high intent (someone is ready to buy), medium intent (someone is researching), and low intent (someone is just curious). I focus most of my energy on high and medium intent queries.
In a recent video I dropped, I showed this process step by step and you guys loved it. Like, the comments were flooded with people saying they had no idea keyword research could be that simple. Honestly, the tools out there are amazing — Ahrefs, SEMrush, all that jazz — but for getting started, free Google research is more than enough. I made my first commissions using nothing but incognito mode and a notes app.
Creating Content That Actually Ranks
Now, finding keywords is the easy part. The hard part is making something worth ranking. And let me be real with you, the bar is low in the AI space right now. A lot of the content that ranks for AI-related queries is straight-up garbage. It's generic, it's clearly written by people who've never touched the products, and it reads like a content farm's fever dream.
You have an enormous advantage if you're actually using the tools you're writing about. And if you're a creator making YouTube content, you have an even bigger advantage because you can share screen recordings, demos, real workflows — the kind of stuff that a text-only writer simply can't replicate.
When I create a piece of content meant to rank in search, here's my framework:
First, I make sure I'm covering the topic more thoroughly than anything else on page one. That doesn't mean padding the word count. It means actually answering every question a reasonable person might have about the topic. If I were searching for this, what would I want to know? What objections might I have? What would make me trust (or distrust) the recommendation?
Second, I share real experience. Not "I read the docs" experience. Real "I built a project with this and here's what happened" experience. My viewers can tell the difference immediately. If you've ever watched one of my tutorials, you know I always show the messy parts — the things that broke, the things that surprised me, the things I wish someone had told me before I started.
Third, I structure it for skimmers and deep readers. Lots of headers. Bullet points where they make sense. A clear recommendation near the top for people who just want the answer, and detailed sections below for people who want to understand why I made that recommendation. This is exactly how I structure my video scripts, by the way, and it works in both formats.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Let me share some real data because I know you appreciate transparency. I'm not going to give you my exact revenue (privacy, taxes, all that), but I'll give you the framework and the kind of returns you can expect.
A typical piece of search-optimised content I publish takes me about 4-6 hours to research, write, and polish. Within the first 30 days, it might bring in a handful of clicks to my affiliate link. Within 90 days, it usually starts ranking on page one or two for my target keywords. Once it ranks, the traffic becomes mostly passive.
When I compare that effort to making a YouTube video — which takes me 10-20 hours including filming, editing, and writing the script — the ROI on written content is genuinely insane. The video might get 20,000 views in its first month and then fade. The article might get 500 views in its first month, but keep getting 200-500 views every single month for years after.
I made a video recently where I broke down my traffic sources and my audience was shocked. Something like 65% of my affiliate clicks come from search traffic, not from my YouTube audience. That's a stat that would have sounded insane to me two years ago when I thought everything had to come from the algorithm serving my videos to the right people.
Common Mistakes I Made So You Don't Have To
Let me save you some time by sharing the mistakes that cost me months of progress.
Mistake number one: I waited until I had a "big enough" audience to start. This is the trap. I spent my first year of creating content building an audience and only thought about monetization after I hit 1,000 subscribers. Looking back, I should have been planting affiliate seeds from day one. Every piece of content I made in that first year could have included relevant recommendations, but I left money on the table because I thought I needed to "earn" the right to recommend things.
Mistake number two: I only focused on YouTube. I love YouTube. YouTube is my home. But I was ignoring the fact that Google is a much more predictable traffic source for buyer-intent content. Once I started publishing written content alongside my videos, my income basically doubled in four months. Not because I had more viewers, but because I had more entry points for people to find me.
Mistake number three: I was too generic. My early content was all "Top 10 AI Tools" type stuff that tried to cover everything. The problem is that the search results for those broad queries are dominated by massive sites with thousands of backlinks. I had no chance. The shift happened when I got specific. Very specific. Instead of "best AI API," I started writing about specific use cases, specific industries, specific problems. Less search volume per article, but way more likely to rank, and way more likely to convert.
Mistake number four: I didn't track anything. For the longest time, I had no idea which pieces of content were actually driving clicks and which were just collecting dust. I use UTM parameters on my links now, and I check the data weekly. It's not glamorous work, but it's the only way to know what's working. You guys have heard me say this in my videos a hundred times: what gets measured gets improved.
How This Changes the Way You Think About "Audience"
Here's the mindset shift I want you to sit with. You don't need an audience in the traditional sense. You need a portfolio of content that captures intent. Each piece of content is like a little salesperson standing at the door of a store, greeting anyone who walks in looking for what you sell. You can have 10 of those salespeople, or you can have 1,000. The store doesn't care. The customer doesn't care. The salesperson is just there to help.
The beauty of this model is that it compounds. Every piece of content you publish makes the next piece easier to rank, because you're building domain authority, you're building topical authority, and you're building a track record with Google. A year from now, your channel (or website, or whatever you call your corner of the internet) will be a destination, not because of a single viral video, but because of the cumulative weight of dozens of helpful pieces of content.
This is also how you future-proof yourself against the algorithm. If YouTube changes its recommendation logic tomorrow, my income doesn't vanish. If Google updates its algorithm and I lose rankings on 20 articles, I have 80 more. Diversification isn't just a stock market term. It applies to content too.
The Engagement Rate Truth Bomb
One more thing before I get to the recommendation, because I know some of you are thinking about YouTube specifically. Engagement rate is the metric that actually matters for the algorithm, not subscriber count. A channel with 1,000 subscribers and a 12% engagement rate will get pushed harder by the algorithm than a channel with 50,000 subscribers and a 1.5% engagement rate.
Why am I bringing this up in an article about search-driven content? Because the same principle applies. Search engines care about how users interact with your content. If people click on your result and immediately bounce back to Google, you drop in the rankings. If people click and stay and read and click your affiliate link, you rise. The algorithm — whether it's YouTube's or Google's — rewards content that genuinely helps people, full stop.
So even as you chase search traffic, write the kind of content that earns engagement. Make people want to read the whole thing. Make them want to click around your site. Make them want to subscribe. Search and engagement aren't competing strategies. They're the same strategy viewed from different angles.
My Genuine Recommendation for the AI Affiliate Space
Okay, so let's talk about the specific opportunity I've been focused on, because I know a lot of you are going to ask.
The AI API affiliate space is genuinely one of the best affiliate opportunities I've seen in years, and I've been doing this long enough to have lived through the crypto affiliate boom, the VPN gold rush, and the hosting referral era. The reason is simple: demand is exploding, the products are legitimately useful (which makes recommending them feel good), and the commission structures are competitive.
I've been recommending Global API as my go-to platform, and I want to be transparent about why. First, they offer 150+ models in one place, which means you can write content that covers a wide range of use cases without having to recommend five different platforms. Second, the commission structure is one of the best I've seen: 15% on the first order, 8% recurring on every renewal after that, plus a premium tier that bumps that up to 10%. For anyone doing the math at home, recurring commissions on subscription products are the holy grail. You do the work once, the content ranks once, and you get paid month after month as long as the customer stays subscribed.
Third — and this is the part that matters to me as a creator — it's a product I actually use and trust. I don't recommend things I haven't personally tested. When I drop a tutorial on my channel about building something with an AI API, I'm usually using Global API in the background. That means my recommendations are genuine, my audience trusts me, and conversions happen naturally because I'm not pushing something I don't believe in.
The other thing I love is that Global API has a proper affiliate dashboard, which is more than I can say for a lot of programs in this space. You can actually see your clicks, your signups, your conversions, your earnings. The data is there, and as I mentioned earlier, the data is how you optimise.
If you want to check out the affiliate program, you can sign up right here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate
That's the direct link. No middleman, no "click here for a special bonus"
Top comments (0)