If I Started From Zero With AI in 2026, I'd Do This (Step by Step for Beginners)

[00:01] 2026 with no audience, no business, I'm going to cover exactly what I would do to make money online right [music] now. Cuz there's a few options, but this has to be tailored to you based on your personality and what you would actually

[00:13] of things. There's like AI services where you start from small local businesses up to high-ticket clients eventually charging a lot of money. marketing and your own products including some new B2B options that

[00:28] And then finally creating a faceless website in low competition niches for So we're going to cover what's working right [music] now. Cuz I've made over $15 million online from affiliate marketing, digital products, and

[00:43] services. But I wouldn't do today what I did back then when I started [music] in going to show some examples of what's working best right now, especially if you're just starting out as a beginner with no website, no experience yet. Now

[00:56] click the link in the description below. I'll send you my free AI masterclass. I cover this in depth, especially these three topics. And uh you'll get some free lessons and AI prompts to guide you through so you can get started once and

[01:09] description. Make sure to click that and let's get into it. So the first one I'm all the rage right now. It's what everyone's talking about on YouTube. Every video out there about making money online includes AI. So but really it's

[01:22] just AI is a speed tool on top of existing business models. So I'm going to show you kind of how it works. We don't want to be doing AI to like be sending cold outreach on LinkedIn and getting like $300 clients doing these AI

[01:35] workflows and stuff. I just want to show you kind of how to speed this thing up want to show you one example. Here's an Here's an agency called Miami Marketing, right? This is a standard marketing company. They'd have every type of

[01:47] service from social media to SEO, content, reputation management, digital they're just starting out. You want to help local businesses. Local businesses they don't really know marketing that well. All you do is manage their Google

[02:00] Map listing, you know, their Google My Business. You do some local SEO for them and maybe you manage their social media. Local clients could pay you $500 to $1,000 a month. Or if you target higher-end local clients, things like

[02:13] law offices, law firms, regional dentist offices, things like that, people that would actually hire a marketing person, maybe they pay $4,000 a month. But that's a game of building a true business around it and, you know,

[02:28] having a potentially clients that you're servicing, people that are working for you, and all of that. And let's take another look at one that's more owner of this business, it's called Prompt as Hell. It's pretty cool. But

[02:42] by AI agents. So if we see what this actually costs, there's an AI action plan for five grand, and then there's an AI enablement grand, and then there's an AI enablement program, basically for 15 to 25,000

[02:56] pricing from an agency standpoint. Number one way to make money is doing services, right? So if you don't want to create content yet for yourself through building a business and create content for others and doing this as a

[03:10] can make money faster, you make it out of the gate, you have clients. It is passive income. But again, there's all types of services you can offer, everything from $500 a month up to $25,000 a month. I remember paying

[03:24] $6,000 a month for someone to edit my short videos, putting all the captions there's tons of you you're either doing a broad everything service or you're going highly specialized. I recommend

[03:37] that if you do want to start an agency for yourself, that you start local and don't have experience yet. You do a couple services that you're most comfortable with. You try to help maybe a friend or somebody that you know, and

[03:49] then you can always build this up over time. So you are building a true brand, over time and increase your pricing over time and change your clients over time. The key is just getting started. So, in one of my programs, I actually have this

[04:02] income launch plan memory, where if you take all this, this is going to help you write your homepage, write your services, exactly what it is, write your and give you all of this. I would have put paste this in the cloud and go

[04:15] through this whole process real quick. So, once you paste this in, Claude is you can see it says building a faceless agency with the income launch plan. I'm have experience in? I'm going to say real estate.

[04:28] confident working in? Again, I'll probably say is. Hit enter. choices and they make total sense. Which one feels like a stronger fit? So,

[04:41] it's going to narrow down which market do you actually want to help locally to know real estate, I know agents and all of that. Let's start with that. Okay, niche is always the most important thing. A lot where a lot of people

[04:54] agency, you can start broader, just do a lot of broad services, but if you have experience in a specific niche, do that. So, step one, complete the niche is 10K a month niche, and then it breaks

[05:07] here's exactly what it is. We handle your content, you close the deals. Done estate agents and brokerages, yada yada. It writes an intro paragraph. It writes the entire homepage for you. The seven services that you offer, including local

[05:20] SEO, content, video scripts. So, what's kind of nice is that they have different depending on who you're talking to. If it's a real estate agent, a law firm, than a salon, or something like that. So, it writes the entire

[05:33] action, book a strategy call, all of that. The seven services that you offer, you can put all of this on a service page. You have a simple one-page website that you could build with AI in about 5 minutes, and then you have a legitimate

[05:46] AI business that you're starting and you have pricing and then you can see it has a pricing and packages. So, blog post, social captions, email suits, $1,500 a month up to $3,500 a month. You can adjust the pricing as you go. So,

[05:59] literally can take about 15 minutes. The key is going to be understanding the with a few of these services, learning them over time, and then branding. It's really about brand positioning more than anything else. You want to go, you know,

[06:13] marketing services, you can do that at the beginning, or do you want to be over time. So, the benefit again of the agency model as one of the options that you can eventually build something and learn and grow and continue to get

[06:28] clients until you have something that's more like 5 to 8 to 10,000 dollars a month per client. Again, then you're targeting more software companies, few years down the line. Then it's just a numbers game of hiring more people,

[06:41] getting more clients, and managing it. So, the the benefit of an agency is that it can be passive over time once you hire people. Any business can be passive if you hire people to do it and you're just kind of running it in the

[06:53] background on a monthly basis. The agency can be the same thing. If you hire a customer success manager and a content manager to do the work and then meeting with them every week, then you manage the sales, the marketing of the

[07:07] business, meeting with clients once a month, and you can continue to grow it over time. Now, the benefits of AI for this type of business model, first one of three that we're going to cover today, what I would start in 2026 is AI

[07:19] planning, positioning, the standard operating procedures. It's almost like a franchise playbook for building this thing. You start with your own thing, so building your brand identity, giving your agency a name, one sentence value

[07:32] proposition, your offer, client onboarding, kickoff calls, how to actually do all this stuff. Client acquisition SOP, lead sourcing checklist, how to find leads, how to, you know, what to do, how to invoice,

[07:44] service playbooks. So then it's like, okay, I offer blog content to local actually do? Well, you just copy you can copy and paste things like this in and it will actually give you the right topics to talk about, how to create the

[07:57] are really easy ones when you're talking to local businesses. It's just like dentist in city, you know, root canal in city-based pages that are really easy to create and it gives you the full

[08:10] playbook here. So you can have playbooks built with AI that you then polish as a human, but everything is kind of productized with AI. You can create your website, your services, everything and run it through this system, create a

[08:24] it's really like the first client is the most work. When you get a client number you're kind of taking on a bit of a job because you haven't done this before, but then over time once you get client two and three, you can hire somebody to

[08:37] kind of elevating yourself above the business. So you can use AI to speed this up, create a business really fast, but again it comes down to fundamental strategies and things that you'll learn over time. So the goal is get started

[08:51] with this one. If this is more for you, if you don't want to create content, you channel, you're more business-oriented, maybe you're more of a project manager somebody, if that sounds like it's for you, then this is the fastest path to

[09:07] income in 2026. All right, now let's get to number two, which is blogging, but competitive niches. So as many of you know, I launched my blog in 2019, became one of the fastest growing blogs on the internet and it still makes me it's

[09:22] probably $5 million, but it makes me about 20 to $25,000 a month currently. Still chugging along, making affiliate commissions and a lot of recurring programs. So you can see my partner stack dashboard here with paid

[09:36] commissions, 1.2 million, 100,084. This is one affiliate network where I've done 5.6 million in revenue for brands and paid 1.5 through PartnerStack. There's also Impact, there's CJ, there's lots of individual programs where I've made over

[09:51] 100,000 each. So, it's a good business model, but I covered like every single software category back in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 where software was very competitive at the time, but not quite as competitive as it is now. So, I would

[10:06] not do now what I did back then. I tried to blast the market with every single software, it's actually an ad playing too, but this is like affiliate, some Salesforce, Thrive, Monday. So,

[10:19] going to Google that, we're going to see some sponsored results, an AI overview, and then Salesforce, Reddit, more sponsored results, Oracle,

[10:31] that, forums, what people are saying. So, again, video cover here in a second with YouTube. PCMag, Zapier, Creatio, and that's it on

[10:43] the first page. So, a blog is not going to rank for this. A single person is never never going to rank for this. If you just started a website, it's not So, if you look at my site map, you can see I focused a lot on These are pages,

[10:56] so I made individual pages for things like podcast hosting, AI writing, email marketing, online courses, landing pages, webinar software, CRM. There's a lot of individual things that I focused on. And then for posts, I kind of

[11:10] expanded it out to all types of different software categories and just have stuff on affiliate marketing, ChatGPT, monetizing a blog, blogging, Instagram, YouTube, Instagram captions, YouTube videos, podcasting stuff. So,

[11:25] it's kind of a generally marketing content, lots and lots of articles, as Look at how many about 500 here, 497 probably 600 articles. But, I wouldn't do this now because it's super

[11:40] all these different things. But, we have to find things that are not competitive. that are like hobbies. Hobbies, things about. So, Forbes is writing about technology, software, hardware, finance,

[11:54] maybe some a little bit of travel, gadgets, right? Software, health is get into health. So, I have a lot of students that'll say, "I want to start a sailed on that one. You're even much better off starting a technology YouTube

[12:09] channel. Even if you don't want to be on camera, you could do simple AI software and you're talking and showing stuff. More than the chance of ranking technology content on Google is just not going to happen. So, if you do want to

[12:22] more competitive. There are areas that you can do it. And I'm going to show you some examples of what is working. So, here's three examples of technology-based blogs that are actually doing well ranking on page one of Google

[12:34] and making affiliate commissions. So, we have to kind of think niche down when it we're just going to be talking about laptops, computers, technology things really hard. But, here's one, Sim Racing Cockpit. The best Sim Racing Pedals. So,

[12:48] people have VR headsets, they buy the full wheels, the the pedals, the whole car system in their house. Very niche, right? But, this one is a small website they're known for this one thing, Sim Racing. And they cover all types of

[13:01] lots of products around it, right? Look at all of these different articles about different products just for Sim Racing. So, you can see there's they have a ever seen in all in my life, but it's

[13:13] products here, budget pedal sets, how to spend a bit more, and just a normal blog post on this stuff. It's a little bit wide. They could probably bring it in a little bit, but I think it's it does its job. Sim Racing, very random. Another

[13:26] one, uh The Drone Girl. So, I found this one ranking on page one for drones for real estate, which would be a huge search. Best indoor drone for real article. She has a picture of herself, which is helpful. Video from uh someone

[13:39] else, right? Just showing the video. And then, a simple blog post with affiliate links, right? Amazon has it here, Amazon affiliate link, B&H photo affiliate like highly competitive, but if you start dominating that one category, she

[13:53] has a full buyer's guide for for kids, under 500, indoor ones, simulators, all training. So, every blog is again informational content, how to do stuff, use it for, and then the products to do it, the best ones for real estate, for

[14:09] videography, for filming, for indoor shooting, for action shots, whatever those keywords are. And then, another one here is the 13 best golf launch monitors of 2026. So, this one was ranking for best golf simulators. This

[14:22] is a small website, breaking80.com. So, it's a golf site. And they have, again, They have travel on, which isn't interesting for golf. The information on how to swing, how to putt. Also, where to golf. That's a big one. So, they have

[14:37] where to golf is an interesting one. Best in each state, and then product reviews, so the best shoes, bags, clubs, GPS, all of that. But, very expensive product is indoor golf simulators. Could be 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 dollars. And

[14:49] that's new technology, but it's very niche. So, you have to think deeper when area that you really want to focus on and go deeper. Cuz things like there's tons of things, outdoor hobbies, camping, fishing, hiking, backpacking.

[15:01] anyone else, and that's where you win. It's based on topical authority. It's based on speeding up content production, so you can publish more faster, but it, add your own take on it, your own images, and things that are actually

[15:15] thing? In blogging in 2026, you have to be known for one smaller thing. It's a dominate all these software categories, rather than just focus on one specific sub-niche within there. And you can always expand out over time. So, you can

[15:29] But yeah, if you see this one, just a normal blog post with the table of contents. This is like easy table of contents plugin or something for you can see. You can join an ad network like Mediavine, which I believe that is,

[15:43] which will have They're getting paid when people see these ads at the bottom they have simple affiliate links here buy from FlightScope. This one is $1,234. This is just the launch monitor, not necessarily the whole setup. Lots of

[15:55] different categories. Like there's When you think uh blogging and you're trying to choose your niche, think like Amazon. What is a product category that I could which means if you're doing physical products, you need lots of them. Not

[16:08] just one article ranking, but dozens of articles ranking across a lot of for making money online with this is you have a website that's central to your cover. Niche should be something that you're interested in, not just based on

[16:22] going to do well. It should be something that you want to actually talk about. If this site, what would be something you'd want to teach? You have informational mainly run it through affiliate marketing, and then you also build an

[16:37] land, they can get an exit intent pop-up to join your email list. That's how most people join. And then you want to have a secondary channel like YouTube or to cover next. Okay, so the first thing a lot of people think of when they hear

[16:51] I need high production. I don't want to edit the video. There's lots of things to tell you that YouTube is the best audience builder, and it's actually a talking about making fancy, crazy videos. We're talking about making dead

[17:06] simple talking head videos where you're teaching in a niche, and you're actually generating affiliate revenue and digital product sales more than worrying about ad revenue or millions of views. So, I've made about 97% of my YouTube income

[17:21] through selling products and affiliate marketing. Only 2 to 3% was actually building a true business on YouTube, it's a lot simpler than you think. head studio, but you need to be teaching something valuable in a niche. So, I'm

[17:35] what's working and actually how some areas like B2B are kind of a new way to do it and you can make a lot of money doing that. So, actually get in on YouTube, right? Because we don't want to get into one

[17:48] that requires us to do a ton of filming or one that we need to be outside and of time and effort and they do one video a month. There's channels that do that, for example, really good documentary channels like historical documentaries.

[18:02] that need to get about 1 to 2 million a month. They're highly produced. We're about let's publish one video a week. Let's keep it simple where we can just

[18:14] So, I'm going to show you a couple examples that I really like. So, the first one here is Callaway. Basically, really good at YouTube thumbnails, videos, retention, all of that stuff. The whole YouTube strategy. So, you can

[18:28] They're really stand out and they pop. So, part of YouTube is the thumb like people actually click on it? And then the other half is retention. Will they actually stay and watch it? YouTube again is an ad platform. The longer

[18:42] videos, the more ad revenue YouTube makes. The whole algorithm is based on people to click the videos and watch them as long as possible. What do we see in the thumbnails? Really good color theory, really good contrast, things

[18:56] that really pop out and really hook you and you want to click on. So, all of his do? Well, he teaches storytelling. He teaches how to do YouTube and how to do social media and shorts and stuff like that. And he has some beginner products,

[19:10] product and it's teaching the complete system for building a YouTube channel that blows up your business. So, he built a seven-figure business on YouTube in his first year, as did I in the kind of make money online niche. But, we can

[19:22] see what is the price of this. If we go down to it, it is $6,000. So, it's $6,000 for the full YouTube strategy theory and all of that. Why is it $6,000? Because businesses will pay $6,000. Individuals won't necessarily as

[19:39] easily pay $6,000. So, the B2B component of YouTube is businesses and teach teach both individuals, who are most of the people watching YouTube, but also businesses, it opens the door to much higher revenue

[19:53] through your products. So, there's two main ways to monetize YouTube outside of own products or just linking to them in the description saying, "Hey, I have this thing. Click it and join." And that gets people into an email sequence or

[20:05] into a, you know, sales call, whatever whatever way you're doing it, into your whatever it is. The other one is affiliate marketing, which I'll show B2B component out there that's really untapped right now because businesses

[20:18] think of Just start brainstorming like what niche Usually what niche could I teaching? Usually every niche selection comes down to personal versus professional experience. You have personal experience. I love tennis and

[20:32] pickleball. Professionally, I'm in sales. On YouTube, maybe I'd want to do more sense. I would talk to people doing that. If I was blogging, maybe the really just think about it through the

[20:45] you could sell to businesses. And again, you don't have to start out with skills to do it, and he has a really good channel. Another example, baby products, right? The only baby toys you need from 0 to 6 months. Well, people

[20:58] spend a lot of money on baby toys, and we can see, I do especially. Skillshare is a partner, so it's sponsored there, and then she has affiliate links to this she's talking about the video, this is her affiliate link. She'll get

[21:10] commissions on every sale. So, the YouTube description box is the monetization zone. You don't have to have much about the video. You just have You can copy and paste very similar things. Like you can see, 0 to 3 month

[21:22] toys, 3 to 6, other products mentioned. So, again, you can have your YouTube have to mention it in the video. You'll see a very simple setup next to a crib. literally sitting in a room and talking and showing different things. Very easy.

[21:37] Another niche is, for example, cruises. Let's say you like travel. Now, travel's an interesting YouTube niche. However, a lot of travel if you do a travel you're Anthony Bourdain. You need to start going to Europe and like shooting

[21:51] travel. It's more lifestyle. However, there's niches within travel that are things like cruise reviews, credit card points, how to get things for cheap, all see, for example, the best cruise line. Seems like a tough

[22:06] video. This one has, you know, lots of content of cruises. She's showing lots when you actually look at it, she's just sitting in a room, right? So, how would it? Well, if you love cruise lines, all you do is go on some cruises, shoot as

[22:21] much video as possible when you're on them, not even of yourself, just B-roll shots here, shots there, shots up, down, whatever. You start building this backlog of like hours of B-roll footage. And then, when you get home, you make

[22:34] the most simplest video talking in a studio about the eight best cruise lines over top of it and talk over it. That's how a lot of people do it for like Disney content, travel content, travel travel rewards points, credit cards, and

[22:48] just shoot the B-roll once and then you sit in a studio, you use AI to help you script the videos, and you go from there. It's a very simple setup. You want the main setup to just be in one room. You want it to just be in a room,

[23:02] talking. And you can fully script the videos if you choose to with AI. I'll you can just talk. Like this one's not fully scripted. I'm just making it up. Some of these videos don't do as well cuz I ramble a bit. I tend to go longer,

[23:15] trying to teach this rather than reading a script. And what you'll notice is creator is going to be different. So like this one is very long. She has this here. This video is not sponsored. The links are affiliate links, so that's She

[23:30] probably every video. Cruise essentials, which is really nice. Tons of different holders. Lots of different links here. The ultimate cruise planner. So if you click on this, $17 checklists, and then this will probably be into the email

[23:45] sequence, into a higher ticket thing. Let me help you plan your cruise. I'm just assuming. Right? So there's lots of different ways to do this, but the main goal is YouTube into a funnel of some kind, a very simple one. And all you're

[23:57] doing is here's a good guide that you get. Here's the emails. If you choose to work with me, you can. It's like a 5-day email sequence. There is psychology this video, you know, just know that YouTube to a business, YouTube to your

[24:11] own products in a specific niche, talking in a room, is a highly actually quite easy to run. Another interesting angle if you don't want to videos. So like look at this. How to build a website in seconds. 2.1 million

[24:25] views, 47,000 likes. And you can say at the very end, "Hey, make sure to link in my bio, or all of these different calls to action that you can do on that many views." But if you see this video, it's just showing stuff,

[24:39] TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube. It's like, "Do this. Do this. Do this." Very simple stuff. And with a lot of AI tools that are coming out, tutorials that you could create, you can create these really good short videos of you

[24:53] necessarily, but still teaching. Let's get into how kind of to use AI to do it. So, I have a cloud project that I can use for myself, specific to my YouTube I didn't use it for this video specifically. You can see how things

[25:07] like no over-promising, income numbers should be presented as realistic, avoid AI clichés, agentic AI framing, broad hooks, specific delivery, how to structure it, adding a call to action, tone and style, format preferences, all

[25:20] types of different things like that. So, if I were to go here and I say, "I need a video script for a video called affiliate marketing on Pinterest in and simple. It's already been trained, so it's going to just It might ask me a

[25:34] All right. Now it's saying now it's researching trends, writing a full script, and creating it as a doc file. Okay. Then here's the full script. It's 4,000 words. It's 25 to 35-minute video. It covers with a hook, a cold open, why

[25:48] Pinterest is different, the foundation decision with or without a blog, secondary. So, I as I built it where it has micro hooks between the points. Now, quite long. So, I would really, you know, edit this, make it your own. I

[26:02] could be quite boring. But you you know, you get the point. AI can really help speed this up in a niche that you know about and you can talk over, create to opt in to different things, build your email list that way. So, again,

[26:16] these are the three main businesses that I would either pick and start in 2026. Either blogging in a low-competition niche, in a sub-niche that you dominate in and then using AI to do that, YouTube to your own digital products in a niche

[26:29] simple talking head studio, or an AI agency where you start uh locally, helping friends, local businesses, going up market to $5,000 a month per client would start in 2026 if I had to start over. Which one do you think that you

[26:44] your thoughts in the comments below. These are the three that I'm seeing work enjoyed the video, again, if you're interested in learning more about this from today's video and other new prompts, too, about choosing your niche,

[26:59] the content with prompts, make sure to click the link in the description below. I'll send you my free AI Masterclass. Actually have a huge discount going on right now, too, 75% off if you want to join our communities. We have hundreds

[27:13] of hours of content in there, live Q&A's, all kinds of fun stuff. So, hope to see you on the inside. Please sign up for that. And I'll see you in the next for that. And I'll see you in the next video.