5 Practical Ways to Make Money with AI in 2025

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Unlocking Your Income Potential: The Easiest Ways to Make Money with AI in 2025 (Starting from Zero)

Have you ever wondered how you can leverage Artificial Intelligence to generate income, even if you’re starting with absolutely no experience? According to an expert who has made millions with AI products through their company, there are five powerful ways to make money with AI where the technology does most of the heavy lifting for you. These aren’t “get-rich-quick schemes,” but rather real, viable money-making ideas.

Let’s dive into these five methods, along with the crucial “Audit to Deal” process for finding customers.

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The 5 Top Ways to Make Money with AI (Ranked by Potential)

5. AI Thumbnail Design

What It Is: This involves designing high-converting YouTube thumbnails that grab viewers’ attention and encourage clicks. While many think it’s just about “vibe designing” with prompts, it requires skill.

• Cost: Low
• Effort: Medium
• Potential: High, especially with the rise of personal brands
• Income Potential: You can make $50 a day designing five thumbnails at $10 each on the low end. For high-quality thumbnails, pros pay $200 to $400 a day for 4 to 8 thumbnails at $50 each.
• Tools: Products like Midjourney, Photoshop, and Canva AI are used for design.
• How to Get Started:
  1. Analyze dozens of viral thumbnails in your niche using tools like “one of 10” and “view stats” to understand what makes them stand out.
  2. Create a portfolio of thumbnails by collecting your favorites as reference material.
  3. Model best performers by uploading your portfolio to ChatGPT and using it as a foundation to design new and better ones.

4. AI Blog Generation

What It Is: This involves creating highly specific content for customers, aiming to get them awareness in their market across top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content. A key differentiator is making content work for AI, helping companies rank within AI language models so their business is recommended when people ask questions.

• Cost: Very low (you can start with free tools)
• Effort: Low (just start asking AI what to do)
• Potential: Medium, as blogs might become less relevant long-term due to AI’s growing capabilities.
• Income Potential: You could create five good blogs per day at about $10 a piece for larger SEO farms. On the high end, you could make $200 to $500 a day by helping people rank in new AI language models or through affiliate revenue by creating content with product links.
• Important Note: AI supports but does not replace the human process, as the most powerful stories still come from human experience.
• How to Get Started:
  1. Model then modify: Find the top 10 blogs in every niche using tools like SEMRush or Uber Suggest to identify patterns and outliers.
  2. Use ChatGPT or other AI to create a portfolio of writing samples, using the best blogs as inspiration (don’t copy, but train the AI).
  3. Rank in search: Utilize tools like rank.ai AI to help your blog posts rank in Google and large language models like ChatGPT.

3. Faceless YouTube Channel

What It Is: This involves creating AI-generated YouTube content where there’s no person on screen, typically featuring a narration with B-roll video explaining concepts. Many people consume this content without even realizing it’s AI-generated.

• Cost: Medium (more tools like editing software are needed)
• Effort: Medium (skills in storytelling, narrative arc, creating hooks, clips, and packaging need to be developed)
• Potential: High, allowing for consistent, stacking income as the channel grows.
• Income Potential: Small channels might only make $10 to $50 a day, with significant effort upfront to reach 10,000 subscribers. However, high-performing channels can make $500 a day or more, monetizing through YouTube’s ad network and affiliate links. Large channels can even make $50,000 to $70,000 a month from YouTube ads.
• How to Get Started:
  1. Pick a niche: Choose categories where you can sell affiliates, secure brand deals, or achieve high CPMs (cost per thousand views).
  2. Create your scripts: Use tools like ChatGPT to outline scripts and develop your narrative style, focusing on a unique voice, language, cadence, and how you open and explore topics.
  3. Build your avatar: This can be truly “faceless” (no person) or you can use tools like Synthesia or 11 Labs to generate a virtual AI avatar that reads your scripts.
  4. Post and iterate: Focus on making each new video 1% better, rather than just repeating the same process.

2. AI Website Building

What It Is: Businesses need websites, and previously they would pay thousands for them. Now, you can use AI and new no-code building tools to generate not only the imagery and copy but also the entire code structure.

• Cost: Low (not much software to pay for, no need to hire people)
• Effort: Medium (some technical skills like hosting may be needed)
• Potential: Massively high, as you can scale this service given every new business needs a website.
• Income Potential: On the low end, you might make $100 a day generating one small website. On the high end, with multiple clients and upselling services like AI SEO, hosting, and AI automations, you could make $500 to $1,000 a day.
• Impact: This field is rapidly changing, and many traditional design agencies may lose work to individuals using AI. The most valuable real estate in 2025 is on the internet and will be built with AI.
• How to Get Started:
  1. Pick a no-code builder and master it: Recommended tools for beginners include Frame AI, Bolt, or Reloom.
  2. Generate custom copy with ChatGPT.
  3. Visualize the copy with Midjourney.
  4. Build two to three example websites to demonstrate your skills to potential buyers.

1. AI Automation Agency

What It Is: An AI automation agency helps businesses reduce complexity, streamline operations, improve lead generation, and enhance back-end workflows to increase capacity and serve more customers. It’s about freeing people to focus on creative, high-impact tasks by automating information processing and routine tasks.

• Cost: Medium (some projects may require pro versions of software)
• Effort: Medium (there’s a learning curve, but it’s teachable to anyone willing to learn)
• Potential: High, as you’ll be at the forefront of AI, finding new opportunities within companies by solving problems that directly make them more money [6].
• Income Potential: On the low end, you could make $200 a day with just one or two small clients. On the high end, by integrating current tool sets, helping with lead generation, and improving back-end workflows for larger customers, you could make $1,000 to $2,500 a day.
• How to Get Started:
  1. Create a course of action: Ask ChatGPT for the top 10 steps to start an automation agency, being detailed and concise.
  2. Master one automation use case: Instead of trying to do everything, pick one specific area like cold outreach, team training, building bots, or onboarding automation, and go deep. Specialists get paid more.
  3. Join a community: Connect with others doing similar work to learn faster. Recommendations include Dave Ebbelaar for technical AI systems and Stephen Pope for content and automation.

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How to Find Customers: The “Audit to Deal” Process

For AI Thumbnail Design, AI Blog Generation, and AI Website Building, the “Audit to Deal” process is a powerful way to sell your services.

1. Pick a Niche: Don’t just target anyone; choose an industry you personally love. As the saying goes, “the riches are in the niches”.
2. Scrape the Leads: Build a targeted spreadsheet of potential buyers. This involves thorough research on platforms like LinkedIn to “map the universe” for your market.
3. Run an Audit: For AI thumbnails, go to their YouTube channel; for blogs, analyze their content. Run through their catalog, identify areas for improvement, and record a quick Loom video (60 seconds or less) explaining your suggestions. If possible, include examples of what you would do if you worked with them. The key is to add value to their life before ever asking for a dollar.
4. Offer Service: Provide a quick, simple, and inexpensive “fast action bonus” or guarantee to reduce their risk and get your foot in the door. The goal is to make it easy for them to say yes. Once they’ve paid, get on a call. After delivering great work, you can then offer services that keep you around longer.

Finding Customers for an AI Automation Agency

The “Audit to Deal” process is harder for internal workflows, so for an AI Automation Agency, a different approach is suggested.

• Offer to build case studies: Reach out to potential clients and say you’re new and looking to build case studies. Offer to fix a specific problem for them for free. The only request is that if you over-deliver, they allow you to use the project as a case study for future clients. This is a win-win: they get a problem solved for free, and you gain valuable case studies, which can lead to continued work and referrals.

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Final Thoughts

The opportunities to make money with AI are vast and growing. By focusing on these proven methods and applying smart customer acquisition strategies, you can begin to leverage AI to create significant income, even starting from scratch. Remember, AI is here to support human creativity and efficiency, not replace it.

If you want get more information on how to make money with AI in the future, please don’t forget to subscribe to TokenBae newsletter.

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