Transcript of How I’m ACTUALLY Making Money With AI (In 2026)

So, here's the reality. I actually have a oneperson AI business that can run with zero employees that also earns me passive income every day. And so, I was really inspired to make this video because, well, I have seen lots of other YouTubers on here talk about AI business ideas, but well, I've discovered that many of them are not actually doing any of them themselves. [music] And so in this video, I'm going to share the exact AI tools, workflows, and prompts I'm using right now [music] to make money from my oneperson automated AI clothing store. [music] And even if you've watched my previous case studies I've made about this, I highly recommend that you watch this video, too, because the AI world is changing fast, and I'm now using new, better tools and workflows compared to what I was using even just 3 months ago. But first, since I know a lot of you are new, let me quickly explain what my oneperson business is and how it makes me money. You see, one day I was scrolling through Etsy looking for clever, funny clothing designs I could give as a gift about specific animal and dog breeds such as corgis or huskys. And while browsing, I realized that while there were lots of generic dog themed shirts, there were very few breed specific clothes that were actually clever, such as specific clever clothes about huskys. So, I decided to make and sell my own breed specific clothing in my own Etsy store using AI tools to help me come up with slogans, ideas, and pictures. So, what I did was I came to print on demand apps, Printify and Printull, which let you customize blank products that they have in their cataloges by uploading your own images onto them. And then I listed these for sale in my Etsy store for a markup price. And I used AI to optimize my listings for free search traffic. And so now each time a customer buys a product from me, the print on demand print shop prints my design onto the product, packages it up, and ships it out to the customer. I pay the wholesale price for the product, and then I get to keep the rest as profit. And so, thanks to AI and these print shops, it's all pretty much automated now. Other than answering messages from customers, there really isn't much that I have to do day-to-day. And if you want even more information on how print on demand itself works, I recommend checking out my dedicated case study video that I made about the store here. Plus, you can also download a copy of my free ebook which takes you through the six steps that I followed to start an AI print on demand store. So, if you want to download a copy of it, you'll find a link to download it in the video description below. All right, so that's my oneperson AI business in a nutshell. Now that everyone is on the same page and knows how it works, let's discuss the actual topic of today's video, which is the latest AI tools that I'm using to automate it. And we'll start with the tools that I'm using to automate the design process itself. So, basically what I'm doing right now is I will come to an online marketplace like Etsy and Amazon and then browse through and find a popular style of design that I can repurpose. So, you see this print on demand t-shirt here on Amazon, right? It's had over 1,000 sales in the past month. People love it. And so, guess what? Others have tried to piggy back off of this success by copying it, making their own version featuring cats in the same pose, all fighting over the exact same customer base. But that's not what I do. I instead take ideas and repurpose them into new niches that target entirely different customers. And here's how. First, I do research. And right now, my favorite AI tool to do that is Gemini Deep Research, which is a tool that you can access for free right now inside of Google's own chatbot, Gemini. So, you take this t-shirt. It's actually based on a popular internet meme. The original meme featured cats, but it's gone viral when paired with other themes as well, such as dogs. So, what we can do is we can come to Gemini and click the deep research button. Then, we can get it to research anything we want. So, I explained that I wanted to research and find other niches and themes where this meme had gone viral before. Then I clicked submit. Gemini then created a detailed research plan for me. You can edit this, but I was happy with it as is. So, I let Gemini go ahead and start its deep dive research. It scoured the internet and also showed its thinking as it completed the report for me. Then, after a few minutes, the report was ready. And as you can see, the research iter completed for me was very detailed. Like take this for example. It created a spreadsheet for me outlining not only different niches that have gone viral with this meme, but popular visual motifs the images have used too. Then after that, I find it helpful to have a creative partner to turn this research data into fun ideas that I can actually use. And out of all of the AI chat bots, I find that chat GPT is the best right now at being creative and brainstorming. So, I like to upload my reports and screenshots of products for inspiration and ask it to use it to come up with ideas. And look, it read over the report, analyzed it, and came up with some cool ideas based on what Gemini researched and found. So, once I have come up with my product idea, I then need to actually turn it into an image I can sell. And it's interesting because while I still do like the original OG image generator, MidJourney, and I've also been playing around a bit with Chat GPT's image generator, ultimately my favorite is absolutely still currently Google's AI image generator, Nano Banana. Now, there are two versions. One is the free version included in Google's free version of their AI chatbot, Gemini. The other is the pro version included only in their paid versions of Gemini, which by the way you can currently access for free, too, because they're still giving away a free 30-day trial to Gemini Pro right now, which is pretty cool. Either way, though, to use Nano Banana, you just come to Gemini and select to generate an image, and then you just type in what image you want, and then that's it. It'll generate an image for you. And look, the image that it made was really great. But I did want to see a version of it without the trash can lid. So I asked it to remove it and check it out. Nano Banana removed it. No problem. I also got it to turn it into a pink image with hearts and sparkles to match with the trend. And I got it to make me the second image, which was a grayscale picture of a raccoon working in a fast food kitchen. So once I have generated the images that I need, I then move on to the next tool in my workflow, Canva, the AI powered graphics app to create the final prints. Just like with Nano Banana, Canva has two versions, a free version and a paid pro version. And to access the AI tools, you will need the pro version. Luckily though, just like with Gemini, Canva are still also giving away a huge 30-day free trial to Canva Pro. So, if you do want to follow along with this tutorial, I'll include my affiliate link to where you can sign up for a free 30-day trial account in the video description below. So, when I'm designing a new print like this one in Canva, I will upload any AI images that I have generated into it and then do any cropping to cut out any parts of the image that I don't want. So, for this design, I cropped each image so that they would sit nicely side by side with each raccoon roughly equal in size. Then, I will use AI tools to enhance the images. So firstly, for this design, I came to Canvas AI upscaler app and upscaled the images into high resolution so that they would print crisp and clearly onto products like shirts. Nano Banana Pro already upscales the images into pretty high resolution, so I just selected to double it. Then next, for each image in the editing settings, I use the auto adjust feature and let Canvas AI do auto color correction on them for me. And then if the design I'm creating uses text like this one here does, I will then use the built-in drag and drop text boxes to add the text or slogans to it. So for this example design, we of course have two lines of text. One on the top of the design with our first line of text born to dillydally and then the second line of text on the bottom forced to lock in. And then once I've got my design looking the way that I want, I click share, download, and make sure it's set to PNG and increase the image size so that it prints in high resolution when compressed onto a shirt. And then I tick to make the background transparent. And well, I download it. And that's it. That is my current full extended AI workflow for how I research and create new product designs like this example one here that I then sell onto print on demand products like shirts for a profit. And by the way, if you want even more research and design tips and tricks that I use, and you will find them inside of my free ebook that I mentioned earlier, the six steps that sixfigure online stores follow to make over $10,000 a month. It will go into even more detail than what I can include in this video. So again, I will include a link to this ebook in the video description below. But yes, something that's quite interesting is that at this point here, a lot of people have a super common question, which is this. Okay, Sarah, you've created your designs, but what about the traffic and the marketing? When you post your products to Etsy, how do you get people to find them and buy them? And well, that's a good question. And well, these days, I like to focus on free search engine and free recommendation traffic, which can come in multiple ways. One way, for example, is through Etsy's own search engine. People search for products, and products like mine show up highly in the search results. Because like this store here did for this search phrase, I optimize my listings by using keywords in places like my title, description, and tags to match search phrases. This is called search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, when you're basically optimizing your listing data to match what the search engines are looking for. But interestingly, another way I'm getting free traffic is by optimizing my products for AI searches. It's kind of crazy, but now people are increasingly using the new shopping features built into AI chat bots like Chat GPT, which recommend products to people. And I'm getting a lot of traffic from AI recommendations like this. But to get this traffic, it's important to optimize your listings for what AI wants, which is actually a bit different from what search engines want. And optimizing for this new form of AI traffic is called generative engine optimization, otherwise known as GEO. So yeah, I try to optimize my listings for both traditional SEO algorithms and GEO algorithms. And this is the AI workflow that I'm currently using to do that. And first up is Plexity. This is an AI powered search engine. What I do is I click the research button to perform a deep internet search. And I ask it to search for other similar products on websites like Etsy and Amazon that have proven to get traffic and sales because they have product reviews from previous customers. and I ask it to identify keywords that they are using. Then I let it do its magic and search the internet for me to create my report. And I'll tell you something, I genuinely think Perplexity is one of the most underrated AI tools out there if you need to search through a lot of websites quickly to answer simple questions like me with my keyword report. It's extremely quick, much quicker than Gemini Deep Research. So, it's a great alternative option to save time. In total, it searched over 130 different websites for me and it took less than 3 minutes to generate this report. So, I downloaded the CSV file which contained the keywords and I downloaded the text answer which contained Perplexity's reasoning for the choices that it made. Then once I have these reports, I come to the next tool in my workflow, chat GPT, and I upload the report that Plexity made for me along with a photo of the product I plan to sell on Etsy. And I tell it that I wanted to create a product listing title, description, and tags that are optimized for both Etsy search engine and recommendations and for AI chat bots like ChatGpt. Search engines and AI chat bots again each look for different things. And I find that chat GPT is great at balancing both when creating listing data for me. I like to get it to create multiple options for me as well to mix and match and edit. So then once I've created my draft listing data, I'll then come to the next AI tool in my workflow, Claude. This is another free chatbot like chat GPT. I make sure to switch it to the best latest version. And then what I do is I keep the title and tags I created with chat GPT, but I give Claude the description and I ask it to keep it optimized for both search engines and AI, but to try and make it sound more natural as though an actual human wrote it. And the reason why I get Claude to do this is because it's been trained in a specific way to prioritize being honest and helpful rather than just prioritizing user engagement, which chat GPT does. This means that in writing tests, Claude usually scores higher at chat GPT at creating natural sounding writing. But yeah, that's pretty much it. You can go back and forth with it too to help you edit it and to get it to make any changes that you want. And by the way, if you're watching this and you want even more in-depth tutorials on how I drive traffic to my products, I actually have a video course called the Ecom Clubhouse where I share in-depth and more technical tutorials on how I do niche market research, design products, and explain how I manipulate the Etsy algorithm to get free traffic. So, if you're interested in seeing if my course is right for you, I will include a link to it in the video description below. But anyway, back to the video and onto something fascinating. So, as I've mentioned before, something that I've seen a lot of people talk about recently is using AI to automate boring or repetitive tasks. When in reality, I think the most valuable way that you can utilize AI automation is to automate the super highlevel tasks like business growth strategy or CFO sales forecasting. And here's how. First, I come to Gemini and turn deep research on. And then I upload sales data from my store into it and then get it to create a research report for me. Both forecasting my sales and forecasting industry analysis as a whole to try and predict demand. So for the sake of this video, I created some example data for an example print on demand Etsy store and I uploaded it and I let Deep Research do its magic. And as I mentioned earlier, this is not a fast tool by any means. However, it is incredible at doing complex forecasting and analysis like this. So, I do think it's worth the wait. However, it is definitely a bit dry to read over the reports that it creates. So, something I like to do to make it easier to understand and read it is to download this report as is and then I come to this free tool here, Notebook LM, which is Google's AI powered research tool, and use it to simplify the report into easy to understand study materials. And it's simple to do. You just click to create a new notebook and upload any sources you want to study, which for me here was of course the business analysis report that Gemini made. Notebook alms AI will then read over the data and turn it into a new notebook for you. And now you can use it to create simplified study materials. So for example, I can click on the infographic option. Now notebook alm will take the most interesting parts of the report and turn it into a nice visual graphic for me. and I can click the video overview button. Notebook Alium will take my report and turn it into an explainer video for me that I can listen to and watch. And it's pretty cool. It even generates its own pictures and infographics as part of the video. So for visual learners, I'm sure this is super helpful for me though. There are two features that I find super useful. One is the fact that I've essentially created a custom AI bot now that specializes in this report. So, I can ask it any questions I have about Gemini's recommendations, and the AI will answer them for me very fast. But also, as someone who learns best through listening and discussion, I love the audio overview. If you click this, it'll turn your report into a chatty podcast between two hosts. I'll generate this and then listen to it around the house while I'm doing stuff like cooking or doing the dishes. It feels like I'm listening to two business coaches having a casual discussion about how I can improve my store sales and how I can also save and earn more money with it. Except unlike a human coach, I don't have to pay my AI coach thousands of dollars to talk to me. They'll talk to me for free. It's amazing. And here's a quick little snippet of my personal business analysis podcast if you are curious. >> Which design is the sleeper hit that needs a real marketing push? >> That would be design 29. It's not hoarding if it's books. What's crucial here is that the sales aren't explosive, but they are remarkably consistent. 50 to 80 t-shirt units a month all year round. >> So, a very stable, low volatility revenue stream. >> Exactly. And what demographic does this target that makes it so valuable? >> I'm guessing book talk. >> It targets the massive, highly engaged book talk community on Tik Tok. >> See, isn't that super cool? So, if you're interested in other prompts that I use to earn money online with Nano Banana, be sure to watch my next video here on screen.