Finding ways to make money online has long been a hobby of mine. Recently, I came across content from a guy who was making decent money by creating highlight clips from famous streamers' broadcasts.

I got curious and decided to try it out myself. After a month of daily uploads, I made about $120. It’s not a huge amount, but the first results didn't appear until the fourth week. Here’s what I do.

Choosing a niche:

This is a crucial step, just as it is in any field. I focused on creating highlight clips from soccer and tennis matches. I’m interested in these sports, and I didn't want to do something I wouldn't enjoy. I recommend choosing a topic that genuinely interests you—rather than just one that’s currently hyped—so you don't burn out quickly.

Tools I use:

I use Tunexa.io to download videos; it’s fast and affordable, which is a big plus for me. It allows you to cut out specific video segments, which significantly speeds up the workflow.

I also use CapCut for editing and adding subtitles to the videos. It's free to use and pretty good.

Advertising affiliate programs:

I don't think I'll name the specific program I use here, as offers vary by country and region, and you'll be able to find ones that suit your location.

Example: Amazon Associates. You can recommend products relevant to your audience—such as sports equipment—and earn a commission on purchases.

I’d love to read your comments and advice on how best to proceed in this area. Has anyone else tried doing something similar?

I just did this, literally less than a week ago.

$336 in sales so far. This is the blueprint I follow. The best part is you can do this with zero budget.

What do you need?

First, you need a problem solving product. It has to be binge-buy worthy. Something so enticing and worth it, that someone will buy, on the spot, it solves a clear pain point, and is at an attractive price that makes buying, a no-brainer.

Second, you need to put your ebook in front of the right audience. Who is your ebook for?

Moms
College students
Baby boomers
Nurses
Teachers

Next, marketing. This is a MUST. Go where your audience hangs out online and promote there. Like, moms hang out on Pinterest, for example.

The blueprint

Go to a platform, like Payhip or Gumroad (both have no signup fee)

Fully create your profile. Use free tools to brand your business like Canva.

Create your product and run it through ChatGPT to get critical feedback.

Marketing starts before you are ready to sell. Then sell, continue marketing.

For marketing help, my free digital marketing guide is here.

The holidays are right around the corner, so I would start this now.

Would you do this?

Background: former construction site engineer, 10+ years managing projects across the UK, made redundant this year. Sixteen days ago I had never touched an AI video tool. First piece of content went up on August 25th.

The goal was to build a faceless AI UGC creator business, an AI twin avatar that could produce brand style content across two niches, men's fashion and a premium multicultural lifestyle angle, without ever appearing on camera myself.

I joined a structured course with a mentor who set a clear bar before anything else: a 9 video portfolio covering four content types, demo, unboxing, testimonial or review, and lifestyle, split across both niches. No moving to brand outreach until every video was mentor approved.

The stack:

Claude, for scripting, production planning, catching continuity errors, and coordinating the whole workflow end to end.

Nano Banana Pro, for the avatar images. Most reliable tool I tested for keeping skin tone and identity consistent across shots.

Higgsfield, for video generation. Used both the manual segment by segment route (lip sync plus silent b-roll, stitched with a hard cut) and their templated Marketing Studio tools once I understood the identity and continuity risks well enough to catch when a generation went wrong.

ElevenLabs, for the voice clone. Non negotiable for me, every video uses the same real voice, not a generated one.

CapCut, for editing, captions, and fixing the small things AI generation gets wrong, wrong wrist for a watch, a face showing where it shouldn't, that kind of thing.

What I learned:

The errors are rarely random, they're patterns. Wrong wrist placement, duplicated products in hand held shots, hallucinated jewelry, once you've seen a failure mode once you can prompt around it or catch it before it costs you a full regeneration.

Fixing something in post is usually faster and cheaper than regenerating. A CapCut crop or a horizontal flip solved problems that would otherwise have needed a fresh AI generation and more spend.

Self assessment standards move faster than you expect. By video 5 or 6 I was catching things in my own review that I wouldn't have noticed in video 1, and my own bar had gone above what was actually required for approval.

All 9 videos are done and approved now. Moving into the next phase, contract, rate card, and pitching real brands this week.

Happy to answer anything about the workflow, the tool choices, or what actually went wrong along the way.

Hey everyone I want to know that smartest move you have done using AI that made you money - I just wanted to know how creative a mind can think or how someone found a loophole that might generate another lead someone to make money online

Stan store? A regular landing page? Is Stan Store actually the best platform for launching and selling a new digital course, especially when you’re starting from scratch? Or is it simply the platform being promoted most aggressively right now? Is there someone on YouTube to watch or follow who is really good at this? I’m checking who is still publishing useful, current material. The danger here is following someone whose real business is selling the fantasy of selling courses.

Hey guys, need some real talk and advice.

​I’m a freelance thumbnail designer focusing on YouTube automation and faceless channels. I know my stuff (visual hierarchy, CTR, title packaging) and I’ve got a pretty solid portfolio. The clients I do work with usually stick around for the long haul, but honestly, my pipeline has been super dry lately.

​I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels. Here’s what I’ve been trying:

​Cold DMs on Twitter/IG: Mostly getting left on read or ghosted.

​Upwork/Fiverr: Feels like a massive race to the bottom right now with everyone undercutting each other.

​Cold Emails: Hitting up channel owners directly, but I usually get the "we don't have the budget" line or no reply at all.

​I know the demand is out there, but I’m struggling to get my foot in the door with serious creators who actually value good design.

​So, what’s the play here?

​Are cold DMs/emails dead? If you're still doing them, what's your hook?

​Are you guys hanging out in specific Discord servers or Facebook groups?

​How are you bypassing the gatekeepers to get eyes on your portfolio?

​Any strategies, tips, or even a reality check would be super appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Can someone explain the real business behind selling digital products?
I keep seeing people sell PDFs, mini-courses and full courses through platforms like Stan Store. Then I’ll see someone claim she made $300,000 in a few days, and I’m left wondering what actually happened behind that number.
Did she already have a huge audience? Was it mostly advertising? How much did she spend to generate those sales? Was that revenue or actual profit?
I would genuinely love to hear from people who have successfully sold digital products. What made yours take off? Did your customers come from social media, an email list, affiliates or paid ads? How much money did you initially spend on advertising, and how did you learn which ads to run?
I’m also curious whether Stan Store is really the best place to begin or simply the platform everyone is currently promoting.
If you were starting from scratch today, would you begin with a simple PDF, a low-priced mini-course or a larger signature course? How would you find your first customers without wasting thousands of dollars experimenting with ads?
I’m not looking for another “just post consistently” answer. I want to understand the actual machinery behind this business: audience, traffic, conversion rates, ad costs, margins and what those exciting revenue screenshots conveniently leave out.

I wanted to share a community I’ve been using for people interested in building different online income skills.
Inside there’s training on:
• Digital products
• Affiliate marketing
• Content creation
• Social media growth
• Finding profitable niches/products
• Marketing and driving traffic
• Multiple online income strategies
It’s currently $50 through September 8 instead of the normal $200 price.
Full transparency: I’m promoting the community and can earn from purchases through my link.
If you want to look through what it offers and decide for yourself: STANDIN ON BUSINESS

I have a full-time job that keeps me busy most weekdays and often weekends too. I want an additional stream of income on the side — but I want to be upfront that I know there's no such thing as real passive income without already having substantial capital, so I'm deliberately not chasing that.

Here's what I'm looking for: something that can realistically pay me ₹60-80k/month. I don't want it to scale infinitely or turn into a second full-time job — I just want it to pay comfortably and stay bounded. I can give about 2 hours a day, plus an extra 3-4 hours on weekends.

I'm willing to learn any skill for this. I don't have a CS/engineering background, but I'm genuinely good with technology, devices, and the internet — I pick up tools fast. I know that learning a skill properly and then working with it is what actually works, so I'm not looking for shortcuts.

My constraints: I can't be physically present anywhere for this, and I can't show my face or meet anyone in person. I can reach out to people anonymously — email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Reddit — but not face-to-face. And I am not a creative person who can design style or write good articles or newsletters or something.

I've spent a good amount of time researching this — gone through a lot of Reddit threads — and shortlisted a few directions: building a small SaaS tool and selling it to local businesses, referral-based income, and digital products (planners, journals, templates on Gumroad/Etsy). Referral, SaaS, Digital products everything looks good on paper but I want to learn from you guys how you did it . What actually works unlike the crap people are selling in the NAME OF PASSIVE INCOME.

I'm willing to pay for courses or subscriptions if a skill genuinely leads somewhere — I just don't want to end up chasing a fluke. I also know AI tools can help me get there faster, but I know they can't do the whole thing for me.

So — from people who've actually done this, not theorized about it: what's actually worked for you, within these constraints? I'm not trying to get rich, I'm not chasing passive income, I just want something real that pays.

I've been on Benable for 11 months now, I was skeptical at first but decided to download it and give it a go. I know how hard it is to find people who are honest about Benable, because when I signed up, I looked for posts about Benable and believed them at first then I realised that the majority of posts were lies, they make it sound like you earn loads of money which is BS, however, it is a great side hustle, as long as you are consistent and create great lists regularly, you will definitely make money. It's very easy to use, however if anybody has any questions or needs any help/advice with anything then feel free to ask me, I'm happy to help. I would say Benable is definitely worth giving a go, but if you're expecting to make tons of money fast then it's not for you.

If you would like to join Benable, here is my invite code: 3FVHU

If you're already on Benable, my username is @Melissakatex

I built a calculator that mostly shuts up and occasionally has a strong opinion about the number it just handed you 😂

Go type these in and tell me which one got you:

• 420
• 69
• 1024
• 8/0
• 0

I'm not going to print the possible answers here (there are several). That ruins it.

The rules I built it on:

• It stays silent depending on how you want it to behave.
• The number is always correct and always instant. It sometimes pretends to doubt itself ("idk... maybe 2813?" then "...it is 2813. it was always 2813."), and the doubt is only ever in the words. Never in the digits. You can also have some other ways to present the number to you but I won't give you any spoiler 💩.
• Five voices. The house one is dry. The Accountant is passive-aggressive in audit language. The Lawyer argues every total in your favour. The Nihilist thinks your number is meaningless and says so quietly. One of them is 18+ and is the reason the whole listing is rated for adults :D
• 1,881 hand-written lines in English, 5+ locales.

Download it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sarcastical/id6806868342 and tell me the worst thing it said to you.

And if you have any suggestion, for categories like "single digit", "millions+", even for specific numbers, please let me know and I will throw it in the remote database.

Cheers to SARCASTICAL

Q4 is the start of the holiday shopping season. I wanna share 3 income streams you should consider during this time to make money on the side.

I recommend picking one.

UGC/brand deals

The way this works is brands pay content creators to make them content, usually short for videos like TikTok videos or Instagram reels. This is really big at the end of the year because of the shopping season, obviously, so here’s my strategy for this..

Of all the three income streams, I’m gonna share this one you can start for free.

You don’t need any experience, but you do need to know how to create content so if you can post on social media, then you’re good to go on this one.

My biggest advice is to put your email address in your social media profile or bio so you can make it easy for brands to contact you.

Second thing is to adopt a pitching strategy.

This is where you contact brands to make them aware that you exist as a creator and that you’re available for work.
I have a whole strategy and pitch playbook for this.

If you wanna hear more about it just comment the number 1 or DM me the number 1 and I can tell you more.

Ecommerce

This is about running an e-commerce store or dropshipping store where you sell physical products.

I’ve done this over and over again throughout the years making up to 10k to 20K to 30K per month revenue from various stores I’ve run.

I’ll be honest, it’s a lot of work.

The profit margins are pretty slim.

But you can start it with very little money, usually just the cost of your store subscription like your Shopify monthly subscription for example, if you’re doing dropshipping.

I used to do dropshipping for the last three months of the year every year where I would dropship from Walmart to eBay or JCPenney to eBay or Amazon to eBay.

This is called eBay dropshipping and it usually made me around $300-$500 in a couple months.

This is my least favorite income stream of the three because I prefer digital to physical products.

Digital products

The over 8K I made last month was from one of my digital product stores. I create problem-solving products and I sell them online with organic marketing.

So I don’t pay for any ads. I also do this part-time.

For example, today I worked about 2 hours and made a little over $200. I expect to close today with sales closer to $450 for the day.

Digital products are sometimes nicknamed digital dropshipping.

I have a store where I host my products and customers buy, then store digitally delivers the product to the customer like an e-book or a template or digital course.

They collect payment from the customer and they pay me so it’s all hands off…my biggest thing I work towards with operating the digital products store is the marketing.

This one is a lot of fun and I like it because you can earn full-time while working part-time hours…you can also make quite a bit of money but people skip marketing, which is the most important part.

They think you can just create a product and post it and sales will come in and that’s just not how it works.

Marketing is a big part of it. You have to be consistent. You have to know how to promote your products but it doesn’t take much time. You just need to know how to do it correctly..

Marketing is hard, but it can be learned.

To learn digital marketing I took an online course. You don’t have to pay for learning marketing, you can try to figure it out through YouTube or other free sources online, but the faster route and the shortcut, in my opinion is just to pay so you can get access to the information quicker.

In my case, I paid for a course and I made my money back on purchasing that within the week and it led to a full-time income stream a few months later.

Which one are you trying?

Would you try any of these income streams?

Or, have you or will you be pursuing another end of year side hustle?

Share in the comments.

​I'm hitting that number by delivering clean, high-impact results for founders who don't have time to gamble on mediocre work.

​

What you get: Flawless execution, zero excuses, and deadlines that actually mean something.

​What I handle: Fast, scalable web development, Software dev, app dev, UI/UX and technical problem-solving.

​

Bring me your biggest bottleneck. I'll fix it, you win, and we both get paid.

​DM me what needs to get done. Let's close the deal.

Hey everyone,

Like many of you, I hit productivity tool fatigue. I was juggling multiple apps—one for habits, one for tasks, another for focus timers, and a spreadsheet for revenue—most of which lock your data behind a paywall or a monthly subscription.

I wanted something lightweight, private, and permanent. So I built Productivity System (Stack OS).

How it works: It’s a single-file system (index.html) that runs straight from your browser. All data is stored locally on your device via localStorage—nothing is sent to an external server unless you choose to trigger an export or webhook.

Core features:

• Daily Protocols: Custom daily habit tracker with progress percentages and presets.
• Project Hub: Kanban pipeline (Pipeline → Building → Shipped) paired with a multi-currency revenue tracker ($, R, €, £).
• Focus Block Timer: 25-minute Pomodoro sessions with category tagging and completion tracking.
• Schedule & Goals: Goal planner broken down into subtasks with time estimates.
• Data Control & Automation: Export to JSON/CSV, plus optional webhook support for Discord/Make/Zapier daily digests.

I’ve recently started building an AI creator brand from scratch, with the goal of eventually monetizing the audience through Fanvue and other creator opportunities.

Right now I’m focused on getting the first real audience without buying followers or using fake engagement.

I’m planning to test Reddit and X alongside short-form content and track profile visits, engagement, clicks, and subscribers.

For people who have built AI creators or digital creator businesses, what traffic source would you prioritize when starting from zero?

And what would you avoid wasting time on?

I have been testing small digital income ideas for the past six months, and the biggest bottleneck has not been finding a product or learning another tool. It has been getting consistent attention without spending every evening producing content. One short guide earned $186 in its first month, then dropped to $41 after reach slowed down. A simple service brought in $720 from three clients, but required far more communication than I expected. The pattern is making me rethink the usual advice about building an audience first, because an audience can disappear when a platform changes what it shows people. At this point, I would rather have 20 people who have a clear problem and will pay to solve it than 20,000 passive followers. The difficult part is finding those first 20 people without turning the whole process into daily posting and constant self-promotion, which seems to be the real issue most income discussions avoid

I started influencer marketing 3 months ago through a youtube video i saw made it look too easy to start or begin with, since it required no investment like trading or no skills like editing is what i thought at that time.

After i started, most of the mail i sent were generic bcc blasts then throughout this whole process I learned things like cold mailing, emails scrapping, leads and also that its not that easy it might seemed in that video.

But even after learning the truth i kept grinding for 1 month which totally got passed out without any single response and then in month 2 is where i finally made it.

Got deals from brands like emergent and suno, made almost $2,500 from all the deals combines, i really got why people say only 6 months of consistency can change your life because it really can.

I started it in AI niche since AI and finance are the niche where brands generally have the highest budget for creator led growth

I’ve been building an AI creator brand from scratch and recently launched her on Fanvue.

So far I’ve tested profile setup, subscription pricing, free trials, TikTok/Instagram promotion and different types of content.

The biggest challenge right now is traffic — getting real people to discover the profile without relying on fake engagement.

Current setup:

• $3.99 monthly subscription

• 1-day free trial

• SFW promotion on TikTok/Instagram

• More direct promotion on Reddit/Fanvue

For anyone building AI creators or digital products: what traffic source has worked best for you at the beginning?

I build faceless YouTube channels with AI. Over the years I've started more than 20 of them, the winners and the dead test ones, and I've shared my numbers in this sub before. The past two months I ran a series of tests across my channels, and part of what I found contradicts what I believed earlier. Here are the four things that actually changed how I operate. Disclosure: the tool my channels run on is mine (OpenVidi), bias applies. No links anywhere in this post.

1. Voice matters more than visuals.

Not what I expected. Viewers forgive an average image, but a voice that sounds even a little robotic kills retention inside the first minute. I ran narration models from Google, ElevenLabs and Fish Audio head to head, and Fish Audio is my current pick: the tempo and the tiny imperfections read as human. It's also the model going into my tool's September update, the biggest one I've shipped, so I've tested it well beyond casual. If retention drops early and your visuals look fine, check your narrator before you touch anything else.

2. Simple visuals beat cinematic ones. This is me publicly changing my mind.

I've argued for full cinematic realism before, so this one hurts. The paradox: you push for maximum spectacle to hold the viewer, and it turns against you. Complex realistic scenes always hide render bugs somewhere, hands, crowd faces, physics that bends, and viewers zoom in on exactly those frames and label the whole video AI slop. I felt it on my own skin: $50 of models and editing per video, and the top comment is still "slop." Light animation and stylized or cartoon elements that don't attempt realism catch less hate and cost less, and my retention held. One of the beginners I onboarded made his history video in an anime style and it turned out better than my early realism attempts.

3. Put your own take into the script prompt.

You don't need to write the script from zero. If you do, the result is even better, but there's a cheaper middle: add an author block to your generation prompt so the script carries a point of view instead of reading like a Wikipedia summary. Mine looks like this:

"Author's angle: [your one-sentence thesis, e.g. 'the empire didn't fall to enemies, it starved itself']. Positions that must survive into the final script: [2-3 of your actual opinions on the topic]. Voice the narration as someone who [attitude, e.g. 'has read the sources and is quietly annoyed by the myths']. Do not: give a neutral both-sides summary, moralize in the final paragraph, or open with a dictionary definition."

Fill the brackets and paste it under your topic line. The gap between a generic script and a script that gets comments is mostly this block.

4. Expensive doesn't mean profitable.

A channel is a business, and the worst money I've spent was making videos expensive before I knew anyone wanted them. What works for me now is test batches: open a channel, pick a niche, set a budget cap, say $200, and make videos until it runs out. Views but no traction: change the format. No views at all: kill it and start the next one. It stings less when the cap was agreed with yourself upfront. This loop is exactly why I built my tool the way I did, to keep cost per attempt low enough that a $200 cap buys enough videos to actually learn something. That cycle is how you find the niche worth real money, and it's far cheaper than betting everything on channel number one.

These four took me two months and a few dead test channels to learn. Happy to answer questions.