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.…