How to Make Money Online With AI in 2027 (3 Ways, What Each Costs to Start)

If you want to start making money online in 2027, AI has made it faster than ever to start. So I'm going to set up three ways that you could make money side by side with the same hundred dollar limit on each one. We're gonna do drop shipping, print on demand, and making AI ad videos I'm just going to be scoring the setup for these different side hustles. I'd love for you to pick one of these three for other people's stores. and just follow along with me. Just give it a $100 test, see if this is something you enjoy, something you can run with. For all three, we'll do the same amount of money, and I'll show you exactly where each one leaves you when we get set up. So here are the rules for this test we're going to do. Every lane gets the same $100 limit. That's usually when I'm starting a new side hustle or testing an income stream. I don't want to put a lot of money into it upfront because I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if it's, you know, I'm going to lose motivation and hate doing it. I don't know if I'm going to be able to find customers. So rather than trying all these different income streams and putting, you know, thousands of dollars into each of them and ending up in the negative, we're just going to put in We're gonna put in $100, dip our toe in and see if this is something that we can turn into a revenue stream for us and for most income streams i'm not looking for you know a million dollars i'm looking can i make an extra 500 a month let me know in the comments would an extra 500 a month a revenue stream that brought that in that you know that can be life-changing for a lot of people and i'm going to score each one of these three what it What it costs to get going, where it's stalled, And what's still on you every week after AI does its thing? I'm OK putting in some time to get something set up in the beginning. But if it's like, OK, now you've got an extra five hour task that you have to do every week, I don't have time for that. Each lane has a finish line for the two store lanes. It's a product page that's ready to take an order. For the ad videos, it's a finished ad. I could send us some. Okay, now we have these three income streams set up. How do we grow them? How do we actually get people to see them? We'll do that in a separate video. This video is sponsored by AutoDS. All three lanes are gonna be running their tools. AutoDS connects your e-commerce store to suppliers. So you pick a product and it brings it into your store with the photos, the title, the descriptions already filled in. So it just makes getting your e-commerce store set up a lot easier. And it keeps an eye on the supplier's price and stock, and it updates your store when they change. So you don't have to be, you know, once a week, let's go in and make sure our pricing matches the supplier. AutoDS takes care of all that for you. And then when someone puts in an order, it can place that order with the supplier for you automatically. It makes your life a lot easier. So AutoDS also has these hand-picked products, which are the products their team picked out. Um, so that these are the ones that I would start with. If starting from scratch, rather than you doing all the research, their team has done the research for you. So they have these handpicked products. You can just pick your category and Hey, these are the ones that are selling well right now. And they have print on demand stuff in here as well. That's going to be one of my, uh, lanes that I'm going to try today. So, uh, we'll keep that in mind. You can try out AutoDS for $1. If you don't have a store already, their product, Build Your Store, We'll get it built for you. For free, this AI Store Builder, and it hooks right into AutoDS. So very easy to get going. I'll leave links down below for all this. So that leads us into lane one that we're going to be trying is dropshipping. By far, what I get the most requests about, people have been interested in this for a long time, but AI has made it a lot easier. But you sell a product online, but you don't store any inventory. When someone orders it, the supplier ships right to them. So it's a lot easier than regular e-commerce. Your margins aren't quite as good, but it's a lot easier. You don't have to buy any inventory and you don't ever have to do any shipping or touch a box. So this is a real store. I've been going through a journey of getting a dropshipping store out, up, and running. So again, I'll leave links. I'll put up on the screen here, actually, if you want to follow along in that journey. But I've already got this set up. Build Your Store built it for me in my last video. You pick a niche, and it's AI builds the store, the theme, the pages, the products. Makes it very easy for you to get started. So you can check out this video on getting started this way. So now the question if you've been following along in that series is what should go in the store next? And I'm going to let AI do the research for me. So they have a connector with Claude where I spend most of my day is in Claude. So I can connect into AutoDS and then I can tell Claude to go do things on my store. So with that AutoDS connector there, this is the prompt I'm giving Claude. Use my AutoDS account. Find one product in the AutoDS catalog for my gadget store. And then I'm given some criteria costs under $15 ships from the U S and under 10 days. Just the things that I've seen work best for drop shipping. You can see AutoDS is connected. It's using their connector to pull up. Here are the products that it recommends putting in for the gadgets. And Claude goes through a bunch of the products that AutoDS gives back and kind of looks at, you know, competitors and looks at how well it's selling. And at the end, it came up with its answer. Here's what they think I should add. It's this $10 Astronaut Galaxy projector. Which my kids have had things like this and they really love them. So I do know that these sell pretty well. And it cost me $10 and most stores are selling it for $25 to $40. So this probably is, that's a big profit margin. It's a US warehouse, six days. So this actually is like the perfect product. In fact, I might make a landing page just for this and sell it. This is great, especially for the holidays. I could potentially undercut. And go cheaper than what these other stores are selling it for. And maybe it could make some money. I can click here to see the product in AutoDS. Then I can import it and change the settings as I want. Or I can import as draft and enhance with AI. And I'll let AI take care of it. Okay, then I'm going to have AutoDS just import this into my store. It's just a click. And now in my store, again, just a couple clicks. And it is now listed on that store. So I'm actually, I'm kind of excited about this product. I might do a video specifically about a landing page for this product and see what we can do with it. But it was just those two clicks and this is already on the store. It's already, I can add it to my cart and I can buy this right now. So done lots of videos on drop shipping. Again, I'll put them up on the screen here if you want to check them out. But lane one drop shipping cost to start about $2. So a dollar for my Shopify store and then a dollar for the AutoDS trial. And that's That's all I need to get going. And both are just the intro prices, then there'll be normal monthly plans after that. But your goal is to succeed or fail early before you decide, hey, am I going to start investing in this monthly? And the next steps for this lane would be, hey, you have a store, but no one knows about it. Again, getting traffic to your store, to your product, that would be next steps here. Then the work that you would still need to do, you still have to pick products. It's pretty easy here. You can even chat with Claude to do it, but then you need to get people to see them. You need to look after customers. People might contact you with, hey, where's my product and things like that. You're going to have to handle that. Getting seen is going to mean ads or posting videos and we're going to talk about that here in a little bit but that can take some time. That can take a money investment. So that's what's left in this drop shipping lane. Lane two is print on demand. So print on demand is the supplier still prints it and ships it but the product has your design on it. So you can sell like a mug or a t-shirt or a hoodie or whatever. You're selling something that no one else has and putting your Design on it. The way the money works is very similar to dropshipping. You don't have an inventory of hoodies, you know, in the back or anything like that. Someone orders the shirt or the mug or whatever. It gets printed and shipped and then you keep some of the profit. And in print on demand, what you're really selling is the design. And with AI, we can do some cool designs. And the ones that usually work well are like very niche, very specific. Like you design a shirt for nurses who work nights or a mug for people who restore old cars, like something, you know, very well, an inside joke that only people in that niche would know that's an opportunity for you to print on demand something. So again, we're going to use AutoDS. So this is nice. If you want to try drop shipping, you don't need a separate tool. You can use AutoDS for print on demand as well. So here are the different products that you can print on demand. And you see you can put your design to replace the AutoDS. Let's just do a normal t-shirt. We'll say we make a t-shirt for people who love gadgets. Maybe that's something I want to put on my gadget store here. So I've got this robot mug shirt. Little robot with a mug. I think it's pretty cool. But you can choose what colors you want this to be in. And you might as well do the more the merrier. Because it doesn't cost you anything until someone actually buys it. You do have to be careful. Make sure you don't do anything copyright. Like I can't put Mickey Mouse on here. I don't, can I even say Mickey Mouse on YouTube? I'm not sure. But this was AI generated. So this is my design. So that is fine. So now this product is ready to go on my store, ready for me to sell. So easy to do. But yeah, different variants, the different sizes, the different colors. Gives info about the shirt itself. The shirts cost me $9.75 and there's a 3% fee. The sell price is $12.37, so that's 20% profit plus a $0.30 flat profit. So I make about $2.25 for each shirt sold. So again, when you do drop shipping, the margins are not nearly as good as if you, you know, bought them and sold them yourself, but I don't have to do anything. And hopefully you see you can make a store just full of designed t-shirts that you've made. You can make a t-shirt store. Just a lot of cool stuff that you could do with this. And here on the store is my t-shirt now. So again, that easy to get t-shirts, a t-shirt store running. Lane 2, print on demand, cost to start, nothing on top of Lane 1. If you're already doing Lane 1, you might as well give Lane 2 a try. It's free. It's in the same AutoDS plan, and I use the same Shopify store. But we'll call it the same $2. If you weren't doing drop shipping, you'd still need the Shopify store and the AutoDS subscription. The tool makes the shirts, you know, in two seconds. You can use AI like Leonardo or ChatGPT to make the designs. But deciding what to put on the shirt, deciding, hey, what would people actually buy? Again, that's on you. That's something you have to do. And then the same, you have to get eyes on it. You might have the coolest t-shirt design of all time, but if nobody sees it, you're not going to make any sales. All right, so we did drop shipping. We did print on demand. Last one we're going to do, we're going to do something different. This one does not involve you having a store at all. We're gonna make AI videos for other people who are selling something. So we'll let them do the selling, we'll let them do the marketing, and we're just gonna provide the ad videos for them. A lot of online stores run video ads and hiring real creators costs a lot of money and people, you know, you can use AI to do it, but a lot of people don't know how to do that. Or they just are, they're not at that spot to do that. So that's an opportunity gap where you have AI tools that, you know, they could have access to them, but they're busy doing other things. So you can provide videos for them and take some money from that. And one that I'm using right now is create UGC. It starts with a free trial. Then it's a monthly plan with credits each month, but you can start it for free. And again, that's what always what I'm looking for is start for free. So you can try it out before you lose any money. And let's just use, since I have my store that I just created, let's just take a product from that store. We can kind of demo this for you. But let's say a store owner was looking for a 10 second ad made for phones that shows the product in the first two seconds. That's my brief. So we're going to do product reaction. It only needs to be 10 seconds. So we're going to use Gemini's Omni. This is a newer model. Let's do it for this astronaut galaxy projector. So I'm just going to paste in the link to that and create UGC goes to that link. So that's all you have to do is it will go look at the link and it'll gather in the images that it needs and see, uh, to put together the product's name, the product description. You can select what images you want to use in the video. I kind of like this one, select your aspect ratio. So if you're running on computers, you want it 16 by nine. I want this for mobile. Most of them will be for mobile. So nine by 16. I'm going to make it 10 seconds instead of 8 seconds. You can even do it in other languages if you're looking to sell somewhere else. But I'm going to do English. Then you select the avatar that you want. Who looks like they would be selling this product? I'm going to go with Pieter. They give you the voice for Pieter. I think that voice sounds pretty good. So they put together, you can do a funny script, a selling script, or professional script. I'm going to do selling. Let me just improve it with AI. So go ahead and generate. And this will take just a few minutes. Video generation always takes a little bit, but we'll see what it came up with. All right, so we finished. Let's go ahead and watch what it came up with. Stop sleeping in the dark. This trending astronaut galaxy projector is selling out fast. Grab yours now to transform your room instantly. Click to buy. All right, so that's a pretty nice, simple, easy ad that you could send over to somebody. And you know, maybe you're not charging $500 a video, but maybe you say, hey, here's a video for $50 that you could use as an ad to sell this on Facebook. And people will pay for that. You can open up the editor too, and you can run changes on it, add captions, you know, whatever you're looking to do. You're basically a video editor now and how I would usually do a side hustle like this is don't just cold outreach to people with no value, but make a video for one of their products, send it to them and then say, hey, I can make you 50 of these if you would like for $500 or whatever, you know, you work out the pricing on your end. So lane three AI ad videos cost to start is zero. You can do the free trial and, you know, just start making some of these, send them out for no cost at all. The manual work is the selling of this. So you have to reach out to people and that can be, you know, and then negotiating and things like that. It can be a little time consuming, but once you find a few customers, you'll find out what works and the pitches, what doesn't work. And then hopefully you get Get repeat customers. Hopefully you're doing such a good job. Maybe you can turn it into a monthly retainer where, hey, pay me $200 a month and I'll make you five of these or whatever. So here's the whole board. So if you want the most done for you, it's probably drop shipping. The store was built for me. AutoDS brought the product in and priced it. It can place the orders. What's left is getting people to see it. And you're gonna notice that the distribution is the hard part in most side hustles now. If you want something that feels more like it's yours, you can do print on demand where you get the benefits of drop shipping, but you get the creativity of it's kind of your own products. It's your own designs. So it's a little bit more work up front. You have to decide on the designs, put the designs together, build a brand. But if you already have a following or you know a group of people pretty well that you think, hey, I can market to them, this might be a great option for you. And if you've got zero dollars, Maybe you want to start with these AI ads. Honestly, I think they might do the best. It's probably the least amount of work too. The hard part again is just going to be finding eyes, finding potential customers. But once you get them, it's not going to be too hard to get this put together. So let me know in the comments, which of these three are you going to take action on? Again, hard work brings profit. Mere talk leads only to poverty. Don't just talk about side hustles. Don't talk about extra income streams. But we have AI as an opportunity. Let's take some action and actually get going on one of these three. Links will be all down below for you to get started. Thank you so much for watching. God bless you all and have a great rest of your day.