---
title: 'Online Business Changed in 2024: Here''s How to Stay Profitable'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJQX--xy054'
video_id: 'CJQX--xy054'
date: 2026-07-31
duration_sec: 698
---

# Online Business Changed in 2024: Here's How to Stay Profitable

> Source: [Online Business Changed in 2024: Here's How to Stay Profitable](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJQX--xy054)

## Summary

Gillian Perkins explains why AI-generated free content threatens traditional info products and shares four tactics to keep online businesses profitable. She argues that paid courses still win when positioned as complete systems, and encourages adding human elements, done-for-you services, and productized tools. The video is aimed at course creators and digital entrepreneurs adapting to the 2024 market.

### Key Points

- **The AI and free content threat** [00:02] — AI is being used to create massive amounts of free content, making online course creators worry about being replaced. Despite this, digital entrepreneurs are still earning millions by focusing on what consumers actually want and need.
- **Tactic 1: Sell the complete system** [01:11] — Free videos only give a snapshot or a random tactic, whereas a paid course offers a comprehensive system to achieve a desired outcome. Better marketing should fully communicate this value gap.
- **Better marketing is the first defense** [02:44] — The simplest fix is to become better marketers and clearly communicate that your paid product is the complete system that free content cannot replicate. People will buy if they see the full path to their goal.
- **Tactic 2: Add human elements** [03:09] — AI can create how-to content and coach with expert information, but it can't provide human elements. Adding community, support, accountability, and coaching (group or one-on-one) differentiates and adds value to your digital product.
- **Keep income passive by delegating** [04:32] — You don't have to deliver human elements yourself. Communities can run on autopilot, and you can hire coaches or team members to serve customers — preserving passive income and even creating jobs.
- **Tactic 3: Offer done-for-you services** [05:29] — Go beyond teaching by doing the work for clients. For example, in her business, Gillian has team members build sales funnels for clients, evolving from an information product into a service that customers reliably pay for.
- **Tactic 4: Productized tools and templates** [06:22] — A merge of 'done-for-you' and 'do-it-yourself' — create templates and tools (funnel templates, meal plans with shopping lists) that save customers time. These can be created without coding skills and represent a huge opportunity.
- **Advanced: Apps as productized tools** [09:22] — With coding skills (or by hiring developers), you can build smartphone or web applications like meditation, nutrition, or email marketing software. The main idea is to augment learning products and help customers achieve results AI can't provide.

### Conclusion

The key to surviving AI disruption is to evolve from selling pure information to offering complete systems, human support, done-for-you services, and tools — outcomes that free content and AI can't fully replicate.

## Transcript

here to stay and people are using it to create massive amounts of content online and this has a lot of course creators and other online entrepreneurs wondering if they might be soon out of a job and you might be wondering this too I mean
how can we sell online courses and other information product when there's so much content available for free well there is no denying that information marketing has changed a lot over the last year or so the fact of the matter is that there
are still plenty of digital entrepreneurs out there who are still earning millions and millions of dollars online and what it really all comes down to is knowing what consumers currently want and need and I think you'll agree
with me that even with all that free content that's out there we still need help with some things so in this video I'm going to show you how you can keep making great money online over the next several years even as we're competing
with AI and all that free content that's out there there okay so the first tactic the least exciting it's the least Innovative but it's the simplest thing that you can do right away without having to change to selling a different
version of your product or a different product alt together so in short one of the problems that we are running into right now is simply competing with free content so for example why would someone want to pay for your online course about
are thousands of YouTube videos about exactly that well the short answer to this question is because those videos only give a snapshot of the process but there might be a lot more involved to go from where someone is right now to where
they eventually want to be the skill that they want to master or the problem that they want to overcome so with your online course you're selling a complete online course you're selling a complete system and a very comprehensive program
for achieving that end outcome whereas with a free content people are either just getting the condensed version or getting a random tactic so another example would be in my business I teach people how to build Sales Systems for
their digital products well there are plenty of free videos about how to build plenty of free videos about how to build a sales funnel for example but people need to learn all the different steps of the process from how to decide exactly
what product to sell to the tech aspects of how to put the funnel together to important parts like how do you communicate what should you communicate to sell your product effectively and then how do you get leads to sell it so
process that I take weeks and weeks to teach my clients and to coach them through and there's just no way that that can be covered comprehensively in the free content so this first tactic that we can use to keep successfully
selling our digital products even with all that free content is simply to become better marketers and fully communicate the value that is being provided in our paid products because there are still plenty of people out
there who want to buy your course if it is is the complete system to get them where they want to go now with tactic number two we're going to start to augment your digital product a little bit we're going to step outside the box
of simple information marketing so the simplest form of information marketing is where you're selling an educational product it could be a course it could be a book it could be an ebook but you're just teaching people what they need to
do and how to do it you're just teaching them well that's something that AI can do pretty effectively it can create howto content it can even coach people right we can ask AI how to do something it can tell us how to do it it has a lot
it can tell us how to do it it has a lot of expert level information in it but what it can't do is it can't provide the human elements so adding human elements into your course or digital product is a great way to differentiate yourself and
increase the value of your product we can add Community elements where people can get that inspiration and that support and that accountability you can add coaching whether that's group coaching or one-on-one coaching now at
this point we're taking the information product and we're kind of servicizing it their service so packaging their service up as a product and that can make it easier to sell but by adding service components into your digital product it
can really augment that value now one concern that I know people have sometimes about adding in human elements or adding coaching that sort of thing is that it negates the passive income aspect of their digital product maybe
digital products in the first place isn't so much because you want to teach it's because you want a stream of passive income in your life well I'm here to tell you that the income can still be passive even if you include
these human elements in it because you don't necessarily have to be the person to deliver those things a community can be self-sustaining or set up to run on autopilot you can schedule out the discussion prompts or the posts in the
community group but perhaps even better than that is simply to delegate to hire people to work in your business serving your customers with these different human elements for example I have a team of coaches who work in my business
supporting my clients and as a side benefit you are creating jobs in the process now we can even take this simple idea of adding Services into our product a step further and not just give people accountability and coaching but actually
do something of the work for them so for example in my business as I mentioned I teach people how to build sales funnels well I don't have to just teach them how to do it themselves I can have people who work for me build the funnels for
them at this point I'd say we're crossing that line no longer is this strictly an information product or even necessarily a digital product but now it's more a service but this is a way we can evolve our businesses to keep up
with the market and make sure that we are offering products that are things that customers the current customers in the current market actually want and need they might not depending on your Niche need how two type training on how
to do something but there will always be customers who want the work done for them and this is a great and very reliable way that you can keep your business making money long into the future now for the fourth tactic we're
going to come back to the digital information product and we're going to see a merge here between the done for you you and the do it yourself because now we're going to get really creative about how we can do some of the work for
about how we can do some of the work for the clients but in a really productized talking about earlier that might have been somebody on my team building the funnel for the client but something that we've realized recently is that we can
build template funnels and we can just hand the templates over to the clients and then they can just pop all of their copy their sales cop the words the emails that they write their sales page all of that into the template that we
gave them so we've saved them a massive amount of time because now they don't have to create all of the Integrations and they don't have to connect the funnel in all these different ways they don't have to Mastermind or strategize
the whole thing either we've done all of that for them so they can just focus on creating those key pieces of content communicating with their potential well and plugging those words into what
we've already created for them so this is a pretty new kind of digital product where it's not an information product but it's also obviously not a physical product but it is a tool that you can take and sell to people and this is
where I am really seeing huge opportunity in the online business bace right now because these tools can be created without knowledge of coding or with any advanced skill set at all you know what I was describing with that
something a little bit more complex but for a much simp simpler example let's say that you are a health coach and maybe you have a course related to that maybe your course guides people to adopt a healthier way of eating well that
course can be purely informational and educational or you can add tools and educational or you can add tools and resources into it for example done for you meal plan this is something that people consistently buy is ready-made
meal plans complete with grocery shopping lists right so that's something that like I was saying like doesn't require any sort of advanced skill set aside from your unique expertise on that topic or Niche which is what we're
typically selling with an information type of product anyway okay and this wanted to talk about which is to graduate from selling purely information or educational type of products and instead be selling tools or done for you
resources so maybe you don't need to sell the nutrition course at all maybe people just want to buy the meal plans and the shopping lists in my case maybe people don't want to buy a course about how to build a sales funnel maybe they
just want to either hire my team to build the funnel for them or buy that funnel template that they can take and install onto their website now you can also get much more advanced with this if you have coding skills or you know
someone or hire someone who has coding skills because another thing that consumers are actively buying will continue to buy is applications these could be smartphone applications these could be web-based applications so this
could look like building a meditation app or in a nutrition app or building an email marketing software or any other type of software now obviously like I said this requires more advanced skills and as humans we have a tendency to kind
of fixate on the last thing that we hear like if someone lists a series of things don't want you to leave this video thinking that you need to create an app main idea here is that we're thinking about how we can augment our learning
products our educational products and help our customers get the result that they're looking for because that's something that AI is not very good at and in some cases just straight up can't do sometimes more than anything our
customers need a friend or accountability or Community or coaching or they want someone to just do it for them or they need the tool that will enable them to do it so I hope that this video gave you some things to think
about helped you see how online businesses changing this year and on into the future and how we can adjust and pivot and augment our digital products so that we can stay profitable now before you go uh the first thing I
talked about in this video was about how we can improve our marketing skills to better communicate the value of our educational products so I still actively sell online courses in my business that are simple online courses so if you want
doing that then go to Gillian perkins.com perkins.com breakdown for a four video screen share Series where I show you how one of my highest converting sales funnels works
from start to finish everything from the landing pages to the emails to the webinar in the funnel again that's Gillian perkins.com breakdown for that free training and then next up you can watch this video right here where I
break down exactly how much you can expect your online course to earn you that can help you figure that out for yourself that you'll definitely want to yourself that you'll definitely want to check out