Semi-Passive AI Income with Amazon KDP — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] The laziest way to make money with AI right now only takes me about 2-3 hours a week to make 5 figures every single month. If you're new to the channel, my name is Sean and I've tried a bunch of different businesses over the years and I made millions of dollars doing so.

[00:13] And after 10 years of doing this, I've realized there are basically 2 types of businesses out there. The first type can make you a lot of money, but you have to work non-stop. You're always active, always working, always putting out fires. Then there's the semi-passive one.

[00:26] Once you build it up, it runs pretty much on its own and takes only a few hours a week to maintain. And even with that semi-passive model, you can still make a lot of money. Like I'm making five figures a month. I got students in my private community making four, five, even six figures in a month.

[00:40] So if you love to work nonstop, if that's your thing, you can definitely build the first type of business. But if you'd rather enjoy life while making money, the second one is what you want. And AI just made it 10 times easier than it used to be.

[00:52] Before we move forward though, quick heads up that obviously this is not financial advice and results aren't guaranteed. In this video, I may talk about my own results as well as my students' results, but that is definitely not me guaranteeing that you will achieve the same

[01:04] results. Because this is a real business, not a garbage quick scheme, so it takes work, effort, you have to invest into this. But if you're willing to actually do the work, this is in my opinion the easiest way to make money online that I've found so far. So let me first explain the

[01:17] reason why this is the latest way to make money and everything else is not. So there are many different business models out there. If you would categorize these businesses into how it works, you come down to four different options. Option number one is selling services. So these are

[01:30] freelancing, coaching, consulting. Yes, you can make money without a lot of upfront capital, but the second you stop working, you stop getting paid. So the way I look at service-based business is that it's great. I'm not denying that, but it's kind of like just working a job that you do

[01:45] online. And because you have to constantly show up and constantly provide the service, it's the opposite of the lazy way of making money. Option number two is selling physical products, things like dropshipping and e-commerce. This also works well. A lot of people are successful in it, but I

[01:58] don't think this is the most beginner-friendly. I don't think this is the laziest way because now you got inventory or suppliers to deal with. Plus, you got a lot of ads that you have to run. You got customer service every time something goes wrong, and that is a lot to manage. Option number three

[02:11] selling digital products on your own platform like Gumroad, Etsy, or your own Shopify store. This is way better than the first two options because there's no inventory, no shipping, because you're dealing with digital products. So I like this a lot better, but there are still

[02:24] some downsides to it. You're still responsible for driving the traffic because you're trying to sell on your own website that has no existing traffic. You also have to build the audience yourself. And if something breaks, you're the one to handle customer service and other logistical

[02:36] issues. So you're still doing a lot of the work yourself. So even though it's less work because you're selling digital products than other businesses, you're still doing a good amount of work yourself. Then there's option four, selling digital products on Amazon. And more

[02:50] specifically, I'm talking about selling digital books on Amazon's self-publishing platform called KDP. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. And once again, this is Amazon's self-publishing platform where anyone can upload a book file and Amazon will print it into an actual physical book

[03:05] or sell it as a digital copy and they pay you for it. Users upload a PDF copy to Amazon, Amazon puts it on their store and when someone buys, Amazon takes care of everything. They handle the printing, the shipping, even the refunds and customer support. They do all of that for you and

[03:21] your only job is to make the book and hit upload. That's why in my opinion, if you're talking about the most passive way to make money online, I think this model wins because Amazon already has millions of customers ready to buy. They're the biggest online retail store in the whole world. So if

[03:35] you're going to sell your product, if you're going to piggyback off of existing traffic, Amazon is by far the biggest and you want to be on Amazon. You don't have to build a huge social following to start because Amazon brings all the traffic to you.

[03:47] And on top of that, AI just made the entire book creation process way faster, way cheaper than it's ever been. So here's the four-step process that I use. Step number one is picking your niche. A niche just means a topic of your book.

[03:59] And when it comes to KDP, there are honestly a ton of options. There are so many different genres you can publish in, like kids' storybooks, coloring books, activity books, journals, trivia books, puzzle books, low-content books, even non-fiction books or fiction books.

[04:12] Every one of these is selling on Amazon right now The big mistake I see beginners make is spending weeks trying to figure out the perfect niche That not really risk management It not really trying to be perfect It literally just procrastination You know getting ideas of what books you

[04:26] about to publish is easy. It's fun. Like the learning phase, the research phase, that's always fun. But you don't make money in the learning and research phase. You make money by actually publishing the book, getting it out there, right? Selling your products. But since people are scared

[04:38] of actually taking action, they mask that by staying in the research phase permanently. So the big thing to understand here is that there's no perfect niche. There are a lot of great niches out there, but nothing is perfect. Okay, so just pick one that looks good and you want to move

[04:50] forward. So what I personally do here is I open up Clotter Chachapiti and I ask it to give me 30 ebook niches with high demand and low competition. Then I actually take those topics onto Amazon and check if there are other books selling on the topic. I run them through coauthor.ai's free

[05:05] Chrome extension to check the real numbers, like how much it's making per day in royalties, how many copies it's selling per day. Once again, this is using Co-author's free Chrome extension. It's 100% free. I'll leave a link in the description. You just want to install that

[05:17] onto your Chrome. And whenever you browse on Amazon, it shows you the best sellers rank, which is Amazon's data of how well the book is selling and the rough monthly earnings and daily sales on any book that you're looking at. So when it comes to the best sellers rank,

[05:29] the lower the number, the more copies the book is selling. So this way, instead of guessing whether a niche is profitable or not, you're looking at what similar books are actually earning right now. Again, if you find a lot of books that are doing well using co-authors, you know, extension,

[05:44] you literally see how much money it's making. If it's making $500 plus per month, that is enough proof that if you create a similar book like that, there is potential for you to make a similar amount. So this whole process should take a couple hours to max, maybe a couple days if you really

[05:58] want to go deep in the research process. But the issue, once again, as I said earlier, people spend weeks, if not months, just stuck in this process. Just don't make the mistake. Step number two is writing the actual book. This used to be the hardest part, even just a couple years ago.

[06:11] If you wanted to publish a book, you either have to write it yourself, which takes months, or hire a ghostwriter, which costs anywhere from $1,000 to $2,500 or more. That's why most people never actually got started, because I completely understand

[06:23] risking that much money without knowing if the book is going to sell or not. It's scary. But the good news is, AI changed all of that. So you basically have two options right now. Option one is using generic AI tools like Clod or Chattopaddy.

[06:35] These tools are pretty good at writing, but there's a catch. You do have to know how a book is actually put together and you have to prompt it correctly section by section to get the output that you can actually sell. This whole prompting process, this whole learning how AI communicates, learning how AI thinks

[06:49] is a little bit of learning curve. But if you have a good understanding of that, you can definitely go with that option. Option number two is using a specialized book creation tool like Co-author. This is what I personally use and Co-author is built specifically for the Amazon KDP business.

[07:03] So the exact book structure to make it sell is already baked in. it's already prompted in the back end and it walks you through the research, the outline, the chapters, the book cover, the formatting, the entire process step by step. So you basically have

[07:16] to follow those steps, fill out a few fields and it handles the rest. So since this video is talking about the laziest way to do things, if you truly want the laziest way, then co-author is the way to go because it does most of the hard work for you. I do want to clarify that co-author chrome

[07:30] extension, the research features is free, but if you want the step-by-step book writing process, then that comes with the paid subscription. Just want it to be up front there. So both options work. If you like learning the process and you have time to figure out the prompting,

[07:43] generic AI is fine. But if you just want the book done fast, that's when co-author makes sense to use. All right, step number three is uploading your book on Amazon. This is a pretty easy step. You just go to kdp.amazon.com.

[07:55] You sign up for a free account. Just fill in your basic information. It's the same process as signing up for any other website. You want to link your bank account so you can get paid. You want to fill out the tax form and you're all good to go. So from here, you want to upload the book, right?

[08:08] So in the title, the description, the keywords, and you upload the manuscript that you wrote, the cover file that you created, and that is it. The whole thing takes maybe 10 to 30 minutes per book. Then Amazon takes 72 hours or so to review it and put it live on the store.

[08:21] Once it's live, you're officially a published author. You can start bragging in family dinners and whatnot. But besides that, Amazon will start showing your book in search results so people can actually look it up and buy it If someone buys it then Amazon will pay you for it And all you did here was upload a file So that is how simple this is But there one more thing that you have to do if you want it to actually sell And that is step number four getting reviews

[08:42] Now, getting reviews is the hardest part of self-publishing. Everyone knows that if you have three reviews and the book next to yours has 50 reviews, if you got the same product, if you got similar books that are offering the same thing, most likely the buyer would choose the one with more reviews.

[08:55] Now, there are many ways to stand out and sell your books, even if you have way less reviews. and I talk about that often in my channel or in my community, but getting reviews is still very important. So there are a few ways to get reviews. You can build up your own audience on social media

[09:08] or an email list and give out free copies in exchange for honest reviews. That is one way of doing so. It's 100% allowed by Amazon. And this works, but it takes a long time. Building up your audience, it's not easy, right? It can take months, sometimes years to build up an audience big enough

[09:22] to actually see real results. Another option is to post in Facebook groups and forums asking people to review your book. This also works. It's 100% free, but it's very slow and time-consuming. Or you can use option number three here, which is using a service called Book Reverb. So Book Reverb

[09:38] is by far the fastest way and the laziest way that I've found to get consistent reviews on Amazon. The way it works is super simple. Book Reverb has an email list with tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of real readers at this point, all from different demographics, all

[09:53] interested in different book topics and you upload your book onto Book Reverb, you set a bid for how much you're willing to pay per review and Book Reverb will take that and start showing your book to their audience. Very quickly, you will have readers start reading your book and leaving

[10:07] reviews on Amazon. So there are two things worth knowing about Book Reverb before you use it and the first one is on compliance. It's important to know that readers are paid to read the book, not to leave a review. They get paid the same amount whether they review or not and they're

[10:20] never required to leave a positive review. So that's what keeps it inside Amazon's guidelines. I've been using this personally for a very long time and a lot of my students use it too with no issues. The second thing to know is on pacing. So you don't want to try to get 100

[10:32] reviews in three days. Amazon's algorithm doesn't like that pattern. It's way too quick. So you want to aim for something like 10 to 15 reviews a week. That is a natural steady pace that Amazon has no problem with. So I'll leave a link to Book Reverb in the description below. Full transparency, that

[10:46] is my fuller link so I do get a small commission if you sign up through it. You can use it or not use it, totally up to you. So that is how you get reviews. It's truly the laziest way to get reviews because you literally turn on the campaign on Book Reaver and you just sit back and review starts

[11:00] coming in. Now let's talk about what to actually expect from all this. So after you get the book up on Amazon and you get some reviews, there is a good chance that the book will sell some copies here and there as long as you've done a good job picking a profitable topic based on other books

[11:14] already selling on it and creating a great book with an attractive title and cover. Of course, I cannot guarantee anything. I hope everyone has the common sense to know that this is a real business. Nothing is guaranteed, right? I've been doing this for 10 years now. And I've coached

[11:28] literal thousands of students in my community. I've published a lot of books myself. And this is typically what we see because Amazon is so big, right? Amazon, again, is by far the biggest online retail store in the whole world. We've got millions of people searching for books to buy on

[11:43] Amazon every single day. So just by being on Amazon and just uploading and waiting, there's a good chance that you're going to sell some copies here and there. However, very important to understand that selling some copies here and there organically, which each sale is going to be a

[11:59] couple bucks. So it's about like two to four bucks each sale. So that's great making that once in a while here and there, but we all know that's not going to make you 5k a month, 10k a month or more, which making that amount is possible. We got a lot of students making that amount. Some even made

[12:14] over a hundred thousand dollars in a single month, but you don't get there just by stacking this couple of sales here and there by uploading and forgetting. You should supplement with your own marketing if you want to scale further. It's very similar to the concept of exercising or trying to

[12:27] get fit, right? If you go from like never exercising to just doing whatever, like even jogging or basic pushups, even if the exercise is not effective, going from zero to something will get you some results but if you want to go from like kind of ripped to like jacked then

[12:42] obviously you have to improve your process you have to learn the actual science of building muscle you have to do more like optimize your dieting so it all those things are what takes you from here to here is not the same as what takes you from here to here So it just depends on what you want Anyways many ways to scale many ways to market your book The two way is running Amazon ads and doing social media marketing

[13:02] I have tutorials on how to do both on my channel. If you do all the steps required, if you optimize the process and scale this business, I want to show you what's possible by sharing some of our student results. So we have one of our students, Toby.

[13:15] He has a health problem, and he can only work a couple hours a day. In one of the summer, he put in only 13 hours total because he just couldn't work because of medical issues, right? And he still made over $5,000 in profit.

[13:27] So that shows how passive this can get. And that is because Toby built it up to that point, right? So even if he worked less, the income maintained because he already did all the work up front. So that shows how passive this business is. But on a separate occasion, Toby made over $100,000 in a single month.

[13:42] He did it twice, actually. Absolute beast. And I actually have an interview with Toby on my channel. So if you want to check it out, I'll leave a link to this video. So something I really want to talk about here is that I know that the title of the video is The Laziest Way to Make Money with AI.

[13:56] And, you know, because it's titled The Laziest Way, it's probably going to attract a lot of people who wants to make a ton of money without doing any work, right? Like truly lazy people. And although Amazon KDP, in my opinion, is the most semi-passive business that I know

[14:11] of, right? So it kind of caters to that lazy, you know, seeking crowd. It still is a real business. it still requires work, but you have to build up to that, right? Nobody uploads one book and just wakes up rich. That's not how KDP works. And honestly, it's not how any real business works.

[14:27] So in terms of what is realistic, a solid book might make you somewhere around 500 bucks a month on its own. That is nice, but it's not life changing, right? But then you publish a second one. Then you publish the third book. Then the books you already have keep selling while the

[14:41] new ones ranks and it's going to stack up to the income. And over time, your income just grows. So that's the compounding part that's cool. And it's really the whole game when it comes to this. Aim to publish around 10 high quality books. And you can potentially be in the range where this turns into four, even five figures a month.

[14:56] One of our students, Lan, started this completely from scratch. Never had any prior experience in the KDP space. She launched a few books. It took a while for it to rank. But over time, it turned around. Eventually, it got to $10,000 a month ever since.

[15:10] So in her words, she says KDP compounds like investing. So the publishers who went at this long term aren't chasing this one magic book or one magic niche, right? They're the ones who keep publishing and let the catalog stack up over time.

[15:23] So if you're a long term investor, if you do investing, you understand that if you put money into index funds and if you just wait for a long time, there's a very low chance of you actually losing money. I kind of see publishing very similarly because if you rank the book on Amazon, right, you now have digital real estate.

[15:38] That's specific real estate on Amazon for life until Amazon shuts down. which honestly, if Amazon shuts down, the world's probably ending, you know, so it's probably not going to happen for a very long time. So yeah, it's a very long-term business.

[15:51] It's a very lazy business over the long term because again, there are so many books that are published and I've never touched it in years, never thought about it. Not even a second have I thought about that book in years and every single month I still get paid from those books.

[16:04] So that is, in my opinion, the laziest way I've found to make real money with AI right now. But watching a video and actually doing it are two very different things. So if you want to skip the trial and error and have someone who's actually done this and is making a lot of money doing it themselves to look at your niche, your book, and your cover and tell you exactly what to fix, that's what my team does inside Road to Hero.

[16:26] Road to Hero is my mentorship program for Amazon KDP. You get a ton of one-on-one coaching from coaches who are verified to have earned over $10,000 in a single month doing this themselves. Over 2,300 publishers have gone through it with a 4.8 average rating on Trustpilot.

[16:40] So if you're interested, book a free discovery call with the team. It's 30 minutes. You walk away with a personal plan for your KDP business, whether you join or not. And there's a bonus just for showing up. So the people who make this actually work, the one who are succeeding in this right now,

[16:53] they aren't smarter than you. They just stopped guessing and they got a real plan that they can follow. So if you're interested, the link's in the description and the pinned comment. If you enjoyed this video, if you learned something, let me know by leaving a like, subscribing. I appreciate every single one.

[17:06] If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I try to answer as much as possible. With that being said, thank you so much for watching. and I'll see you in the next one.