These are real money-making ideas where AI does most of the work for you. Here are five ways to make money with AI starting from zero, including how to find and sell to customers, and the cost, effort, and potential for each one.
1. AI Thumbnail Design
You can get paid to design those thumbnails that you see on YouTube that you have to click to watch the video. It’s designing high-converting YouTube thumbnails using AI products like Midjourney, Photoshop, and Canva AI.
Here’s the problem: Most people think that it’s just like vibe designing where you just like “I’m really good at prompts” and it just creates images. That’s not what this is about.
The cool part is:
- Cost: Low to get into it
- Effort: Medium—it’s not that hard
- Potential: Actually pretty high right now with the rise of personal brands
Earning Potential:
- Low end: You can make $50 a day doing like five thumbnails for $10
- High end: $200 to $400 a day where high-quality thumbnails are paid at $50 each for 4 to 8 thumbnails
You might think to yourself, “Who would pay for this?” It has been observed at successful YouTube operations that thumbnail designers work with two monitors testing different things and iterations, working on five different channels. The pros that actually make money with YouTube will pay for this, and that’s why you got to get good at it.
How to Learn Thumbnail Design to Get Paid the Big Bucks
1. Analyze dozens of viral thumbnails in your niche
- There’s tools like One of Ten and View Stats that will help you find those different sites and study exactly what they’re doing today because it will change to stand out on YouTube
2. Create a portfolio of thumbnails
- Literally collect your favorite thumbnails to build a body of work that you can use as reference material when you’re designing your own
3. Model best performers
- This might make a lot of sense, but the truth is using ChatGPT, you can upload the portfolio of thumbnails that you found and then use that as the base foundation to design new and better ones
How to Find Customers: The Audit to Deal Process
Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Well, this sounds great, but how do I find customers?” Here’s the audit to deal process—it’s how agencies sell what they do easily.
1. Pick a niche
- Automotive, personal development, doctors, running—the riches are in the niches. So pick an industry that you personally love, that you would love to create thumbnails for
2. Scrape the leads
- Build a targeted list of potential buyers. Go on LinkedIn, do your research, and just build a massive spreadsheet. This is called mapping the universe for your market
3. Run an audit
- If you’re doing AI thumbnails, go to their YouTube channel, run through the whole video catalog, give them suggestions on how to make it better. Record yourself doing a quick Loom video, 60 seconds or less. And then if you can add some examples of what you would do if you worked with them, add value to their life before you ever ask them for a dollar
4. Offer service
- This is a quick fast action bonus—some kind of guarantee to reduce the risk to get your foot in the door. Something very simple, not expensive they can make a decision on. They might get the email from you with the video and reply and say, “Sounds like a deal. Take the payment.” Trust me, get on the call after they’ve paid
Now, once you do some great work, you can offer them stuff that might keep you around longer.
2. AI Blog Generation
Essentially, you create content that’s highly specific for your customer that gets them awareness in their market. So top of funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Every piece of content serves a different purpose, and that’s what makes it different.
Even going as far—and this is where you get paid the big bucks—is to make it work for AI. So now with search being the new chat prompt, companies want to rank inside the AI language model so that their business is recommended when people ask questions of the universe for how they should solve their problems.
The Numbers:
- Cost: Very low—there’s no tools involved. You just start using the free tools
- Effort: Low—you literally just start asking the AI what you should do to work with these customers. It’ll tell you
- Potential: Medium—the reason why is because blogs long-term with AI getting so good at this, it just may not be as relevant as it is today
Earning Potential:
- Low end: You could create five really good blogs per day at about $10 a piece for some of these larger SEO farms out there
- High end: $200 to $500 a day because if you get good at this, you can get paid to help people rank in some of these new AI language models or get paid through affiliate revenue by creating content with links to products you get paid when people buy
It has been observed that clients are using AI to create SEO blog posts from podcast episodes, making over $100,000 a month doing this. This is why AI can support but not replace the human process, because the most powerful stories still come from the human experience. AI just helps us tell them better.
How to Get Started
1. Model, then modify
- Find the top 10 blogs in every niche using tools like SEMrush or Ubersuggest so that you can see where their outliers sit to find the patterns
2. Create a portfolio
- Use ChatGPT or some other AI to create a portfolio of writing samples using the best blogs as inspiration. Don’t copy, but use it to train exactly what you want the outputs to look like so it’s going to work for you
3. Rank in search
- There’s tools like Rank.ai to help your blog post rank not only in Google but also in the large language models like ChatGPT
And yes, this sounds really simple. The challenge you’re thinking is, “Well, where do I find the customer going to pay me the money to do their SEO?” Run the audit to deal process. It’s the same thing. It’s so simple, so powerful that if you just do a little bit of work up front, show the buyer that you know what you’re doing, and make it really easy for them to buy from you, they will.
3. The Faceless YouTube Channel
This one’s wild because one might think AI can’t really replace a person. It turns out that AI-generated YouTube content has been consumed for years without people even knowing. There are those YouTube channels where there’s a person talking and there’s a bunch of B-roll explaining the concept, but there’s nobody on screen and they get hundreds of thousands of views. If you understood the CPMs, those people are making $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a month off of YouTube ads.
The Numbers:
- Cost: Medium—there’s more tools to get started. You need some of the editing software
- Effort: Medium—there’s some skills you got to develop: storytelling in the narrative arc and how to create good hooks and clips and packaging
- Potential: High—what’s great about it is it allows you to build and keep stacking income because the more it grows, the more you’ll make
Earning Potential:
- Low end: Small channels might only make $10 to $50 a day, and there’s a lot of effort up front to build to that first 10,000 subs
- High end: $500 a day or more, monetized not only through the YouTube ad network but also affiliate links
How to Get Started
1. Pick a niche
- Think categories where you can sell either affiliates, brand deals, or get paid top CPMs (cost per thousand) based on what people are paying today for other YouTube videos with that kind of content
2. Create your scripts
- Use tools like ChatGPT to outline them and to really find your narrative style. What you want to figure out is what’s your signature video type? And it all comes from the script. It’s the language you use, it’s the cadence, it’s the way you open up. How do you explore it? Try to find a unique voice for you to create your faceless YouTube videos
3. Build your avatar
- It could be faceless where there’s no person, or you can use Synthesia or 11 Labs to generate a virtual AI avatar talking so that it reads the scripts, but you’re never on camera
4. Post and iterate
- Most people talk about 10,000 hours and you get really good at something. It’s not 10,000 repetition, it’s 10,000 iterations. Meaning, every time you post a new video, try to make it 1% better
4. AI Website Building
When a business starts, they need a website. And there’s 22 million small businesses in North America. In the past, they’re used to paying $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 for a website that you can use AI to build. There’s literally these new no-code building tools, and you use AI to generate not only the imagery, the copy, but the whole code structure. And you can still charge a lot of money if you’re good at what you’re doing.
The Numbers:
- Cost: Low—there’s not a lot of software you got to pay for or people you got to hire
- Effort: Medium—there’s some technical skills you may need to learn like hosting
- Potential: Massively high because if you perfect that one offer, you can scale it because think about every new business that needs a website every day
Earning Potential:
- Low end: You might only make $100 a day, and that might be like generating one new website a day, but honestly, that’s for very small businesses
- High end: $500 to $1,000 a day because you have multiple clients and you’re upselling them—AI SEO, hosting, and AI automations—because you have the relationship with the customer
It’s kind of scary how many of these design agencies are going to lose all their work to some 17-year-old kid doing it with AI.
“The most valuable real estate in 2025 isn’t on Earth. It’s on the internet and it’s going to be built with AI.”
How to Get Started
1. Pick a no-code builder and get really good at it
- Frame AI, Bolt, or Reloom are good options for people just getting started
2. Generate the custom copy with ChatGPT and then visualize the copy with Midjourney
3. Build two to three example websites to show buyers your skill
- Actually build stuff maybe for your parents or for yourself that you think is a cool idea that demonstrates the quality of your work
How do you sell this thing? Run the audit to deal process.
5. AI Automation Agency
This is like the hotness.
The Numbers:
- Cost: Medium—maybe for some projects you’re going to need some software and pay for pro versions of it
- Effort: Medium—there’s a learning curve if you’re new to this. But the cool part is it has been taught to 12-year-olds. Anybody can learn this if they’re willing to just put their head down, search and consume that information instead of drowning themselves in personal development podcasts. It’s time to go learn
- Potential: High because you will be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. You’ll be helping businesses reduce the complexity in their business and you will find new opportunities because you’re sitting in those companies
Earning Potential:
- Low end: $200 a day—that only takes one or two small clients that you automate their workflows every week. You just work on it
- High end: $1,000 to $2,500 a day because that’s where you’re integrating their current tool sets with other software integrations. You’re helping them with lead generation. You’re figuring out how to improve the back-end workflow so they can increase their capacity to work with more customers
The problem you’re solving is for bigger customers that have more money, which means they’ll pay you because the problems you solve make them more money.
Here’s a rule: Every person on a team has to understand how to do this anyway. Even heads of finance have sat down for three weeks and built complete end-to-end processes to automate all the bookkeeping. People who love spreadsheets and didn’t know anything about AI can do this.
“Automation isn’t about replacing people. It’s about freeing them to focus on what matters most—about being creative, focusing on results, really figuring out what parts are going to move the needle. And anything that’s just processing information or moving things forward can be done by a computer.”
How to Get Started
1. Create a course of action
- Just ask ChatGPT: “If I wanted to start an automation agency, what are the top 10 steps I should do?” Be detailed, be very concise, and it will tell you
2. Master one automation use case
- Most people that get into this start thinking about all the things they could do with AI. And you could, but then you’re not really going deep on anything. Cold outreach, team training, building bots, onboarding automation—pick one specific area and go deep because specialists get paid
3. Join a community
- You want to be around other people doing the thing so you can learn faster. Dave Ebel is good if you’re more technical and want to build AI systems. If you want to learn content and automation, follow Stephen Pope and join their communities
Finding Customers for Automation
This one’s a little harder to run the audit to deal process because we’re talking about internal workflows. But what you do instead is you just reach out to customers and say:
“Hey, I’m new. I’m looking to build some case studies. I will go fix this problem for you for free. It costs you nothing. All I ask is that if I overdeliver on what I promised, that you allow me to use this project as a case study so I can share with other customers going forward.”
That’s the win-win. They get a free problem solved, you get a case study. Do 5 to 10 of those. Trust me, they’ll want to keep you around if you’re good, and they’ll refer you to people they know.
Note: If you’re actually building real AI technology—real products, real software, not just doing automation stuff—and want to explore partnership opportunities, reach out with the word “venture” for a discussion to see if what you’re working on makes sense.
