Starting an online side hustle is one of the best ways for beginners to start making extra money in 2023. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and services, it’s now easier than ever to launch and grow a successful side business with minimal effort and investment.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the top 3 online side hustle opportunities that leverage AI to enable beginners to get started and start profiting quickly in the new year:
- AI-Powered Affiliate Marketing
- AI-Assisted Blogging
- AI-Automated Video Ads
For each business model, we’ll explain:
- How it works
- The tools and services you need to get started
- Step-by-step tutorials to launch each side hustle
- Tips to scale up your earnings over time
By the end of this guide, you’ll have actionable blueprints to launch three lucrative side hustles that can automate much of the heavy lifting using artificial intelligence.
So let’s get started!
AI Side Hustle #1: Affiliate Marketing with AI Bots
Affiliate marketing remains one of the most popular and profitable online business models in 2023. As an affiliate, you earn commissions by promoting other companies’ products and services.
When done right, affiliate marketing delivers passive income with minimal upfront investment. You don’t even need to create your own products.
However, affiliate marketing has traditionally required extensive effort in finding profitable niches, creating content, driving traffic, and more. This is where artificial intelligence comes in.
AI tools can now automate or assist with many of the manual tasks in affiliate marketing, making the process much easier for beginners.
Here are the main steps to launch an AI-powered affiliate marketing side hustle:
Choose a Profitable Affiliate Program
The first step is joining an affiliate program that offers products you can promote in a niche you’re interested in. Some top affiliate programs include:
Amazon Associates – The largest affiliate program that allows you to earn commissions by promoting any of Amazon’s millions of products. Commissions range from 1-10%.
ClickBank – A large digital marketplace focused on info products in niches like health/fitness, business, and more. Commissions range from 50-75%
ShareASale – A network featuring over 4,000 merchants across many niches. Average commissions are 15-30%.
To maximize your chances of profitability as a beginner, we recommend Amazon Associates or ClickBank to start. Look for high-demand niches with buyers actively spending money.
Once you’ve chosen an affiliate program, the next step is finding the best products within it to promote.
This research process used to require extensive manual effort. But AI tools like Helium 10’s Cerebro make it incredibly simple.
Here’s how Cerebro works for Amazon affiliates:
- Enter a broad keyword for your niche (e.g. “yoga mats”)
- Cerebro analyzes Amazon’s product database to identify the top selling items based on various metrics like reviews, pricing, demand, etc.
- It outputs a list of the most profitable products to target.
This enables you to instantly find “winner” products loved by customers. You can then create content around these high-potential products knowing there is existing buyer demand.
Create SEO Content with AI Copywriting Tools
The next step is creating content to promote your chosen affiliate products.
This content will be designed to rank in search engines for relevant keywords so you can drive organic traffic to your affiliate links.
In the past, writing good SEO content took extensive time and skill. But now AI copywriting tools like Conversion.ai allow you to instantly generate written content optimized for your affiliate products.
Here’s how it works:
- Provide some basic inputs like target keywords, product details, etc.
- Conversion.ai’s AI will automatically write entire articles, emails, social posts, and more around your inputs.
- The AI-generated content naturally includes your chosen keywords to boost SEO rankings.
So in just minutes, you can create mountains of well-written, SEO-optimized content to promote your affiliate products without any writing skills.
Drive Free Traffic from YouTube
One of the best platforms for driving free traffic to your affiliate content is YouTube.
While creating high-quality videos used to require expensive equipment, editing skills, etc. AI automation now enables easy video creation.
Tools like Vidnami allow you to effortlessly turn affiliate content into professional-looking YouTube videos:
- Provide the AI with a script or existing blog post
- Choose from a library of templates for your video style
- The AI will automatically create an entire video presentation with visuals and voiceover
The resulting video will help rank for your target keywords and drive viewers to your affiliate links.
By automating video creation with AI, you remove the big barrier beginners face in leveraging YouTube to get traffic.
Put It All Together: A Blueprint
Now let’s put this all together into a simple blueprint:
- Join Amazon Associates or ClickBank
- Use Cerebro to identify hot products to promote
- Create SEO content around these products with Conversion.ai
- Turn this content into YouTube videos using Vidnami
- Embed affiliate links in your content pointing to the products
- Share your content and get organic traffic from search engines and YouTube
- Earn commissions when viewers buy through your affiliate links
This streamlined process allows complete beginners to start an AI-powered affiliate marketing side hustle in as little as one week. You don’t need any prior experience in content creation, video production, SEO, or traffic generation.
The AI tools do the heavy lifting while you simply focus on sharing your content and scaling up.
And since your affiliate links earn commissions on autopilot, this business model can deliver passive income for years to come once setup.
AI Side Hustle #2: Blogging with AI Assistants
Blogging remains hugely popular in 2023, with over 600 million blogs currently online.
While blogging involves more moving pieces than affiliate marketing, AI assistants can make the process far easier for beginners looking to profit.
Let’s explore how to start an AI-assisted blogging side hustle in simple steps:
Choose a Profitable Blog Niche
Like any business, finding a profitable niche is critical for earning money blogging as a beginner.
Consider niches like:
- Health and wellness
- Personal finance
- Cooking / Recipes
- Travel
- Education and Learning
Tools like Google Trends and SEMrush can help validate demand for a given niche.
Once you’ve found a profitable niche that excites you, secure your blog domain and hosting. Popular options like Bluehost make setup seamless.
Plan Content Strategy with AI Support
The key to a successful blog is consistently publishing helpful, high-quality content. This requires planning a smart editorial strategy.
AI tools like Painless AI help take the guesswork out of deciding what content to create.
Simply provide Painless AI details on your overall niche and target audience. It will instantly suggest hundreds of blog post ideas tailored to your blog.
You’ll get complete titles, outlines, and other prompts to spark ideas and make content planning much faster.
Write High-Quality Posts with AI Assistance
With your content strategy in place, it’s time to start writing posts.
While 100% AI-generated content has risks, you can use AI writing assistants like Jasper to supercharge your writing speed and quality.
Here’s how they help:
- Write the opening paragraph or summary of your post
- Chat with Jasper in conversational language about your post topics and ideas
- Jasper will suggest ways to phrase sentences, expand on ideas, and state facts
- You take these AI suggestions to craft the full post in your own words
This AI assistance helps you rapidly research, organize thoughts, and write high-quality blog posts at scale.
Design Beautiful Blog Graphics with AI
Compelling images and graphics make blog content more engaging. But designing custom visuals from scratch can be difficult without design skills.
Thankfully, graphic design AIs like Canva make this incredibly simple.
With Canva, you can choose from pre-made templates and then customize them for your brand with just a few clicks. It uses AI features like:
- Photo enhancement
- Object removal
- Background changing
- Text generation
So you can easily create stunning blog graphics that help your content stand out.
Drive Organic Traffic Through SEO
When your content is ready, it’s time to attract readers through search engine optimization (SEO).
This involves doing on-page optimization with your posts as well as off-page tactics like link-building.
Tools like Ahrefs utilize AI to automate and simplify core SEO activities like:
- Keyword research - Identify low competition keywords related to your niche to target
- Competitor analysis - Find strategies used by leading sites you can model
- Link building - Discover new link acquisition opportunities from automated website crawler
With AI SEO tools, beginners can execute proven SEO strategies at scale to gain organic search traffic.
Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Programs
When it comes to earning money from blogging, affiliate marketing is ideal for beginners.
You can join affiliate programs related to your niche and insert affiliate links into your posts. When readers buy through your links, you earn commissions.
Here are some examples of affiliate programs to consider across popular blogging niches:
- Health/Wellness - Myprotein, Life Extension, Vitacost
- Finance - Webull, TaxAct, Personal Capital
- Cooking - Ooni Pizza Ovens, ThermoWorks, Rachael Ray Cookware
- Travel - Airbnb, Booking.com, TripAdvisor
Affiliate marketing lets you earn income from your blog without relying solely on expensive ads. With AI blog automation and affiliate links, you can start earning your first commissions within a few months of launching your blog.
Blueprint to Launch
Let’s summarize the blueprint:
- Choose a profitable blog niche
- Use AI tools to plan and organize content
- Write posts efficiently with AI writing assistants
- Create visuals and graphics using AI design tools
- Optimize content for SEO with AI support
- Insert affiliate links to monetize posts
- Publish consistently to grow traffic and income
By streamlining each step of starting a blog with AI, complete beginners can launch and profit from their own site within weeks instead of months or years.
AI Side Hustle #3: Automated Video Ads
Our final AI business model - automated video ads - requires the least upfront work. But it delivers huge upside if you follow a proven framework.
Here’s how it works:
- Use AI tools to identify high-converting offers and ad angles
- Automate video ad creation tailored around these angles
- Pay to promote your AI-generated video ads through platforms like YouTube
- The ad drives sales of the offer you’re promoting and you earn commissions
This leverages the power of video marketing combined with AI automation to minimize the effort required.
Let’s examine the step-by-step process:
The first step is using tools like AdSpy to uncover offers with profitable existing video ad campaigns.
AdSpy lets you enter a broad niche like “weight loss” and instantly see current ads running on YouTube, Facebook, native networks and more.
You can sort and filter by metrics like views, clicks, and spend to find offer angles and ad creative already converting at high volumes. These indicate winning formulas you can model in your own video ads.
Reverse Engineer Top Ads with AI Transcription
Once you’ve identified a lucrative promotion, it’s time to reverse engineer what’s making the ads so effective.
Tools like AdsAnalyzer allow you to enter the URL of a top performing video ad. Through AI transcription, it will automatically extract the full ad script.
You now have the blueprint for exactly what offer angle, hooks, and messaging to use in your ad.
Re-engineer Ad Copy with AI Rewriting
To avoid duplication issues, you’ll want to re-engineer the winning ad copy using your own unique spin.
AI copywriting platforms like Jasper allow you to paste in the transcribed ad script and request a rewrite. Jasper will rework the copy using synonyms, changed sentence structure, and other optimizations while preserving the core angles.
This gives you proven ad copy updated in your own voice.
Automate Video Creation with AI Vendors
Now it’s time to get your rewritten ad script transformed into a video file.
Services like Vidnami handle this entire video creation process for you with AI:
- Paste your script and choose a template
- Vidnami’s algorithms will synthesize visuals and voiceover audio
- Render this automatically into a polished video advertisement
The AI systems create professional-quality video ads tailored to your offer without any editing or production work required.
Amplify Your Ads on YouTube
The final step is driving traffic to your AI-generated video ads using paid platforms like YouTube.
You simply need to set up a Google Ads campaign targeted around relevant keywords and demographics for your promotion.
Then direct your daily ad budget into the campaign and let YouTube display your high-converting video ad to interested viewers.
The AI automation helps maximize ROI from your video marketing budget. And you earn commissions from any resulting sales or leads.
Putting It All Together
Let’s summarize the automated video ads side hustle blueprint:
- Find profitable offers/angles with AdSpy research
- Reverse engineer winning ads with AI transcription
- Rewrite ad copy in your own voice with AI assistance
- Automate professional video creation using AI
- Amplify your ads on YouTube to drive commissions
This AI-powered framework allows even total beginners to leverage video marketing, one of the most effective online customer acquisition strategies.
By removing the extensive manual work traditionally required, you can start profiting from automated video ads within your first few weeks.
Get Started with AI Side Hustles Today
Starting and running a successful online business used to take months or years of hard work before earning any profits.
But as seen in this guide, AI automation now enables beginners to shortcut many of the hardest parts of launching online side hustles.
You can leverage AI tools to handle heavy lifting like:
- Market research
- Content creation
- Graphic design
- Video production
- Traffic generation
This leaves you to focus on high-level strategy while the AI systems do the tedious execution tasks.
The 3 side hustle blueprints in this guide - AI affiliate marketing, AI blogging, and automated video ads - represent proven business models now made even easier with AI.
So there’s never been a better time to start your own online side hustle and begin earning income outside your day job.
With a small budget and some hustle, you can get up and running with your first AI side hustle within weeks. Then scale up your earnings by reinvesting profits to grow your new business.
The passive income potential from affiliate marketing, blogging, and video ads is immense thanks to the power of artificial intelligence.
Stop waiting and start taking action today. Use this guide to start your AI side hustle journey and achieve financial independence!