8 Realistic AI Side Hustles To Start in 2024

There has never been a better time to make money using AI.

The problem is that when we're just getting started, lots of AI passive income methods can seem overwhelming, and they're just not that realistic for most people.

I'm going to walk through eight realistic AI side hustles that you can start right now together with the tools that I'd use if I was starting again from scratch.

AI Shorts Video Editing

So the first AI side hustle I want to talk about is AI created video shorts. These are short form video content that can be used on platforms like YouTube or Instagram or TikToK in particular. Traditionally you had to have a lot of video experience to actually shorten long form content, put compelling captions and understand how to engage the audience and hold their attention throughout a 30 second or one minute clip.

Well, now there are lots of tools out there, tools like Opus Clip, where you can actually upload a long form piece of content, and then it will identify potential viral clips and cut these down. And they will even put engaging subtitle overlays on these so that you can export them quickly.

There are lots of content creators and businesses out there who are using video as a form of marketing to engage their audience. And they'll often create long form content, but they just don't have the time to cut it down.

A really interesting hack from a marketing point of view here is to have multiple shorts channels which are then directing people back to your website or your main long form channel. And so if you've got multiple people creating shorts all in different styles, it's a really good way to build up your brand and your exposure and grab people's attention at scale.

And to start this particular side hustle, all you need to do is to look through a platform like YouTube or TikTok and identify some creators or businesses who you feel might be struggling with their shorts. These might be people who are well known brands or they might be up and coming creators where they've got long form content and maybe they've got one or two shorts, but you feel that you could help break those long form pieces of content up into shorter videos.

And then what you want to do is reach out to them with a nice compelling email, perhaps offering them a free sample of some of your work. And you can negotiate a fee, which might be something in the region of $50 - 200 per short depending on the budget of the person you're working with.

AI Ghostwriting

The next AI side hustle I want to talk about is writing blog or newsletter content using AI.

While copywriting used to be in demand on platforms like Fiverr, people are now getting quite sketchy about the type of content they're receiving. Having used AI writing tools to create content and comparing it to human copy, I can tell you that really well written, well researched human copy is often far superior from what a simple prompt in an AI text generation platform can actually create.

However, if you know how to use some of these platforms, it can massively reduce your time of creating content as a copywriter and allow you to work with more clients as a side hustle. If you wanted to put yourself up on Fiverr or a freelancing website, you could use AI to map out things like your subheadings or even give you an intro and a hook and an ending before researching things and adding that into your AI writer.

An S-tier hack here is to also then take content from your customer's existing blog or newsletter and actually train up an AI model on that content so that the AI writes like your customer. You can do this with tools like some of the new GPTs, where you can upload a document and train it for a tone of voice or writing style, as well as a lot of the newer AI writing tools.

AI YouTube Optimization

Side hustle number three is called AI YouTube and there are lots of creators who struggle with things like doing YouTube research or creating good hooks for scripts or optimizing thumbnails and things like that.

Luckily there are also some really great tools that you can utilize to help you with this, but they do take some manual time to actually use. These are tools like TubeBuddy and vidIQ where they actually have AI systems integrated, including AI coaching, AI trend identification, and AI text generation for creating things like SEO optimized descriptions on YouTube videos.

This is a great AI side hustle because you can quickly identify your customers by going onto YouTube and looking at people's YouTube channels and identifying videos where perhaps the title isn't that great or the thumbnail isn't that great or their description isn't SEO optimized. And if you jump in and buy a tool like TubeBuddy or vidIQ, these will actually show you that information at scale.

What you can then do is reach out to that creator or that business via their contact us information and offer up your services. What this might look like is then offering to optimize a few of their videos and seeing the results before getting yourself onto recurring subscription contract where you can work with multiple clients at the same time.

The really satisfying thing here is that if you work with a creator who's actually really good or a business who you feel is underexposed, your AI skills and use of these optimization tools can massively impact their following and their audience. And it's really satisfying. something that you do has a big impact on the lives of creators all those businesses.

Build a GPT

The next AI side hustle that can give you a good $500 to 1000 extra per month is to look at becoming a builder of GPT on OpenAI's GPT store. This is an area that's pretty new. And lots of businesses and individuals are looking at creating GPTs to help both marketing and internal processes at their organizations.

But because it's so new, not many people have mastered it and there aren't many agencies that are offering outsourced GPT creation just yet. So if you can get in early here, you can offer to build GPTs on behalf of somebody else and help them to solve either internal process problems or you can build them a custom GPT which really just acts as a marketing tool for them so that they're getting more views on their brand.

Now building a GPT is super simple and I've got a really great video hat takes you through how to build a GPT from scratch. And if you can spend a little bit of time mastering things like APIs and the agent tool in the GPT builder, you can actually link up GPTs to business systems and external systems, which then make that GPT really unique.

And you could easily charge a thousand dollars for creating a one off GPT, which shouldn't take you more than a few days to do.

AI SEO

People will happily outsource their search engine optimization in order to appear higher on Google and then get more customers and more revenue.

There are lots of great AI tools which automate this process, which not very many people know about at the moment. One of the best ways to optimize SEO and get people to rank is creating blog articles that rank for certain keywords.

And this is where you don't really need to know a huge amount about search engine optimization to start an AI SEO side hustle. All you need to do is look at tools like Neuron Writer, for example, and then upskill yourself a little bit in keyword research and understanding which words rank highly on Google for potential customers.

And then you can use a tool like SpyFu, which is a free search tool where you could add in a competitor to one of the customers that you might be working with, or you could add in that customer themselves, and it will show you which keywords they're ranking for. And it will also show you any gaps in the keyword analysis of the competitors.

And what you can then do is take those keywords or take those particular topic areas and pages. And put them into a tool like Neuron Writer, which will then generate an AI produced blog post in the fraction of the time it would take you to write it. You can then very quickly help those businesses rank across a huge number of keywords against their competitors and help them rank really, really quickly on Google.

While AI generated SEO isn't as good as high quality created human articles in terms of research and benefit to the actual reader, it is a really good way to optimize the creation of things like glossaries or just quickly getting a new website to rank against a competitor.

It's very easy and accessible to jump onto a freelancing website like Fiverr and offer up your SEO optimization services and then produce blog posts and pricing things based on the length or the quality of the blog posts you're going to produce.

Lots of busy businesses and professionals and creators want to maximize their exposure across all social media platforms. And particularly for B2B businesses, LinkedIn is really taking off at the moment. The problem with LinkedIn is it's quite text based. And in order to really increase your following, you need to engage with accounts on LinkedIn and like things and really just be present on LinkedIn for more time than busy CEOs and professionals have in their day.

And this is where you can actually offer up some of your AI services. AI tools like Tapio, for example, have integrated DALLE-3 tand GPT4, so they will find viral posts and suggest posts based on some of the topics that you enter. And then it will even generate a really interesting. and compelling image to accompany that post.

And for platforms like LinkedIn, where you want to stop people from scrolling and then click on and engage with your article. Having a really cool AI generated image accompanying your post is a real game changer for many businesses who don't quite know how to use social media or LinkedIn in particular.

Now you can apply this to any platform. I'm just using LinkedIn as a really good example of something that's. trending at the moment. But if you double your AI side hustle down on areas that have money and in areas that are kind of trending and taking off at the moment, you'll be able to tap into higher revenues and charge subscription pricing for your services.

So for example, if you wanted to make that $500 to 1000 extra a month, all you might say is I will engage with five accounts per day on LinkedIn and I'll produce one LinkedIn it for you every single day. Now using Tapio, you can short circuit that in just a few hours, meaning that you can actually work with multiple people and probably generate even more than $500 to 1,000 if you wanted to.

AI Cold Email & Prospection

Our next side hustle is AI cold email prospection. And basically all this means is someone who is writing cold emails that are personalized to a potential prospect that a company is trying to sell into.

So if you're not familiar with cold sales, it's those emails that you get from companies you've never heard of asking you to try out their services.

Now, when this is done badly, those emails are not personalized and it's very obvious they're spam and you often delete them immediately. But if that cold email has been well researched and it's personalized to the receiver of the email, you've got a much higher chance of them clicking on a link. or being interested.

Now the problem with personalizing those cold emails is that it takes a heck of a lot of time. When I used to do this as a solo founder and when some of my junior salespeople do this as they're emailing lots and lots of our customers, it can take hours to research their LinkedIn profile and their Twitter. If you're doing that for about a hundred emails a day, it's going to take up all of your time. Well, that's where AI comes in.

AI has been integrated into a lot of cold email outreach tools, tools like Lemlist, where you can quickly generate complete cold email outreach campaigns in the fraction of a time it would take to do this manually. Not only that, but it will personalize those email campaigns based on the information it scrapes from platforms like LinkedIn or any information you want to enter about the prospect.

And then you can sit back and optimize it. Now this is a great side hustle for two reasons. Firstly, you can actually use this method yourself for getting your own customers so you can reach out to people and personalize those emails yourself. And then get really good at doing that. And then once you've done that and you started to land customers and you've understood what good copywriting is with AI, you can then start doing that for other people.

Again, you can charge $500 to 1000 a month for doing this and setting up those campaigns as a one off or doing it regularly and optimizing those campaigns based on some of the data that comes back.

The final AI side hustle I want to touch on is a little bit of a meta one, but it's something that's really accessible for everybody.

You don't need any AI knowledge really to actually do this. And it's something that could generate you a lot more than $500 to 1000 extra dollars a month. And that is to start an AI newsletter. Now, this isn't creating a newsletter with AI. It's actually about creating a newsletter that tells people and updates them on the latest AI trends.

And people have already done this and those who jumped onto the hype cycle when AI really burst onto the scene about three years ago have done really well and are now generating over seven figures in paid email subscriptions or in sponsorships for their newsletters. And the way to do this is actually pretty straightforward.

What you probably want to do first is to set up some Google Trends alerts on topics like AI or open AI or ChatGPT or any of the AI related keywords. And then you can summarize these into a daily or weekly newsletter and try and focus it on a specific niche. Now that the market is relatively saturated with AI and technology newsletters, what you probably want to do to cut through the noise is to focus on a particular niche group of people.

So this might be an AI newsletter for marketeers or the AI sales newsletter or the AI learning newsletter, whatever it is, you want to focus down on that niche group and give them relevant and specific information that you know that they will love and they'll thank you for because it's just so overwhelming to stay up to date.

Once you scale that to a decent number of people, and this might just be 5000+ members, you can then start charging things like sponsorships or actually open up a paid newsletter where you sell things like specific prompts or your own educational products.