AI-powered side hustles you can start today!

Hey AI Puppies, 

Welcome to part two of our AI-powered side hustle series 💪

But you might be asking yourself – why start a side hustle now? Per 2024 data from Side Hustle Nation:

39% of Americans report having a side hustle, and the average side hustle brings in $1,122 per month. 

Want a piece of this impressive pie? You’re in luck: AI makes it easier than ever to pull off the side hustle you’ve been missing. 

Last week, we kicked off the New Year by looking at how generative AI can help you…

👉Design and distribute educational content

👉Launch and grow your very own (faceless) YouTube series

Both of these are fantastic options, but they’re just the tip of the side hustle iceberg. 

This week, we’ve gathered a basic guide to starting two more side hustles, this time with a more artistic twist 🧑‍🎨

Keep reading to learn more about:

🐾 Selling artwork and digital products

🐾 Generating a consistent blogging platform

Get ready to hustle, puppies!

Selling Digital Art Products with AI

Digital products have been sold online for years, but what exactly are they? Per Shopify, digital products are intangible goods with a lower overhead cost, but a high profit margin. They usually come in the form of ebooks, music, digital art, software, and online courses. 

We’ve already talked about writing books and designing courses with AI, so let’s zero in on something a bit different: digital art. 

Here’s a list of the most popular forms of digital art people buy online:

🎨Logos

🎨Clip art

🎨Patterns

🎨Stock icons

🎨Backgrounds

🎨Stickers

🎨Posters

🎨Original artwork

🎨Powerpoint themes

There’s a huge market for these types of products on Etsy, Redbubble, Society6, Zazzle, and DeviantArt. The best part of selling them? Once they’re available to buy, you don’t have to do anything – if you play your cards right, the products rack in the passive income for you 🙏

However, selling is the hard part. Making them is a bit more complicated. 

We asked ChatGPT for the steps we need to take next, and here’s what it said:

The TLDR is this:

1. Practice with and get to know an AI artwork generator. Long-time puppies already know we favor Midjourney!

2. Play around with parameters and prompts. Over time, you should develop your own unique prompting strategies for bringing your vision to life. 

3. Get to know your market: research what sells well, what has high reviews, and how you can emulate that style. Explain to your AI art generator what you want to recreate, and go back and forth to get it just right.

If you’re using Midjourney like we are, here’s a refresher on commands and prompts that work best:

🖌️ /describe: upload an image you like, then use this command to get four example prompts that would generate a similar image. 

🖌️/shorten: this command helps you shorten your prompts when they start to feel too long

🖌️/tune: this command will generate a style guide base on your prompt, so you can re-use prompt elements that worked well 

🖌️subject: always start with the main subject of your vision

🖌️medium: don’t forget to prompt the format you’d like, such as digital, photo, painting, illustration, etc. 

🖌️lighting: light can completely shift the mood of the design, so include descriptions like soft, ambient, overcast, studio lighting, neon, etc

For example, if we wanted to make money selling stickers with puppies, we’d use a midjourney command like this:

[A cute dog sticker in the shape of a diamond, white background, detailed matte finish, cartoon style] 

With this prompt, we got:

And voila! We’d then upload this to Redbubble (here’s a quick how-to on signing up as a seller), and let it do its thing 🐶

Happy designing, puppies!

Become a Blogger with AI

Blogging isn’t the world’s most lucrative side hustle, but it’s a great way to advertise yourself with the chance of making $$$. 

Don’t think you have anything to say? The blogging world is infinite. You can share career advice, musings on your niche industry, updates on your gardening, a movie review site – the list goes on!

Let’s begin with ChatGPT’s advice. We asked what steps to take to become a successful blogger using AI, and here’s what we got:

Here’s the TLDR version:

1. Identify your niche. If you have ChatGPT Plus or an up-to-date chatbot, start a new conversation to talk out any ideas you have. 

2. Use AI writing tools to generate ideas for specific blogs, outlines, and a first draft. 

3. Use AI-powered SEO tools to optimize your content for search engines

To go the extra mile on growth, AI can also help with:

✍️Social media scheduling to build up an online presence

✍️Audience analysis to understand your readers

✍️Email marketing to distribute your blogs directly

Here’s a list of the best writing-focused AIs and what they can help with:

📚Jasper AI: AI-assisted writing for that first draft

📚Frase: outline generator, research assistant for finding sources

📚Scalenut: helps with SEO analysis (for less $ than the famous Surfer SEO)

If you don’t want to use additional tools, you can still get pretty far using your go-to chatbot. Here’s a conversation we had with Claude (which is known for creativity)  for a hypothetical first-time blog:

Don’t know where to host your blog? Pro-tip: go for something that has monetization opportunities. The easiest ones in 2024 are:

✍️Wordpress.Org (different than the website host Wordpress.com)

✍️Medium

✍️SquareSpace

✍️Blogger

✍️HubPages

Happy blogging, puppies!

Your Next Assignment

Side hustles don’t (usually) get launched overnight, so your assignment this week is to create a plan of action using ChatGPT!

For example…

As always, we’ll keep an eye out for your reactions and feedback on our socials! Give us a follow and tag us as you go on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok ⚡

That’s it for this week! Enjoy your weekend, puppies – we’ll be back next week with more 🐾👋🐾

Cheers,

The AI Puppy