A Simple AI Strategy Anyone Can Copy — And Turn Into $13K/Month

Why a simple copy-paste system could become one of the most profitable AI side hustles.

So, I’m writing this story because I’m seeing a trend that I consider the best business model to get into in 2026. Yet, it seems like no one’s talking about it.

We’ve started seeing people make a lot of money through partnerships with micro-creators who leverage AI.

Now, when I say micro creators, I’m talking about people with 20, 30, 40, 50,000 followers. I’m not talking about superstar celebrities, Instagram famous, TikTok, this that.

No, we’re talking about micro creators. A place where most people aren’t even paying attention.

We just rolled out a payments feature that makes this model even easier. That is how much opportunity we’re seeing out there right now with this model, which is why we built out a custom solution literally just for this function.

This is the best business model leveraging AI to start in 2026. Especially if you don’t want to show your face, if you don’t want to be some TikTok dancing monkey, if you have no previous experience, and you are starting on a shoestring budget.

Now, before we get into the specifics and the details, I want to ask you a question. If you’ve been following me for a long time, I have been able to grow my business for 8 years, year on year on year, which has never been done in this industry.

And I did this by always focusing on one thing. What do you think that is? I’ll give you a few seconds.

So, I doubt that you guessed right. The answer is I focus on a hungry crowd. I focus on building an audience that is starving for what I offer.

Let me park up and give you another real-world example of how this works in practice. Let’s say you have a restaurant, okay?

And imagine you have the best food, the best staff, but none of that is actually going to guarantee that you’re going to be the most profitable in town.

You know what would guarantee it? Having a line of hundreds of people dying to get into your establishment. Because the truth is, if you have hundreds of hungry people, you don’t even need the best food.

You don’t need the best service. You could honestly be pretty mediocre at all that stuff, and you would still make so much money.

That is the power of a hungry audience. It trumps everything. That is why if I could choose any competitive advantage in business, it would be having a hungry crowd.

And that’s exactly what the very smart people inside of Monetize and WP realized. Now, you might be going, “What does this have to do with anything? Why are you telling me this?”

Microcreators already have a hungry crowd. They’ve already done most of the difficult work for you. Those who are smart and found this edge became what I call shadow operators. I call it this for a reason.

These people stay in the shadows. They’re not dancing monkeys on TikTok doing all the trend dances and all that stuff.

They’re not spending their entire day looking at their Instagram feed or deciding what thumbnail to post on YouTube. Someone else has done that for them.

So shadow operating is when you partner with these micro influencers with 20, 30, 40, 50,000 followers, maybe 78,000 followers.

These are the creators with a hungry audience. An audience that knows, likes, and trusts them. But they’re not the mega celebrities, okay?

They’re not the people with 2 million followers that have agents and get snobbish and aren’t excited by new opportunities. These people want to monetize. They just don’t know how to.

If you want any proof, just go look at their Instagram bio. They’re probably going to have an affiliate link to some supplement, or an affiliate link to some cutlery set, or they’re going to have their email for paid promotions or collabs. These people don’t know how to monetize.

So what you do is you take this gold mine, which is their audience, all of this pent-up demand that they’ve created, and you help these microcreators monetize, and you share the profits.

Look, building a personal brand in this hungry crowd takes a long time. I can speak from experience. This is my 10th year on YouTube. In the first four years on YouTube, I did not make a penny.

I can tell you from experience, I was doing this stuff for four years, making zero money, not knowing how to monetize, getting some free supplements, yet I had this audience.

I was a microcreator four years into a journey, and I just didn’t know how to monetize.

If you guys are thinking, well, how do creators not know how to monetize? Because they’re creators. That’s like asking a chef why he doesn’t know how to DJ. They’re two different things.

Content creators are content creators for a reason. They like making content, okay? They like building an audience. They like building a micro personal brand. They don’t want to think about monetizing.

That’s why they monetize with like crappy little promos or affiliate links that they post for other brands, because they don’t want to think about it themselves. They know how to create content. They don’t know how to sell anything.

By the way, it’s not even just the small creators. I see creators out there with millions and millions of followers scraping by with $5,000 a month with a tiny fraction of AdSense or whatever else these platforms pay them.

Now, even though you could actually help these people with millions of followers, we don’t want to work with those creators because it’s too competitive. They’re too big.

Even though they’re making no money, there’s actually far more opportunity with the micro influencers.

Just so you understand, in business, the highest cost for most companies is actually marketing and advertising. If it’s not the biggest, it’s definitely high up there.

This is why this is such an incredible opportunity for you.

You stay in the shadows.
You stay faceless.
You don’t have to build an audience.

All you do is partner with a microcreator, and you help them monetize.

What’s super cool about this is you just need one. Yes, okay. You’re not selling a thousand products here. You’re not signing 20 clients.

If you just work with one creator and help them monetize and take a cut, that’s enough to change your entire trajectory for 2026.

Obviously, being a co-owner, I see so much data. We just recently crossed $2 billion earned on the platform. The first billion took four years. The second billion took 6 months.

I can tell you people are going to be earning a billion dollars a month on the platform very soon.

The reason I say this is that I know there are a lot of shadow operators out there who personally make a million a month.

Of course, they work with much bigger creators. It’s a bigger operation. In no way, shape, form, or fashion am I saying that that’s something that you’re going to accomplish. But it just goes to show how far you can take this model.

Now, real quick, you might be wondering, okay, well, how am I going to help these people monetize? What are we actually going to sell?

I want you to be very observant as you watch YouTube and you go on Instagram. Go look at the people who are making the most money. What are they selling?

Coaching, courses, some sort of digital product, some sort of ebook, some sort of mini tool, some sort of AI version of themselves for a subscription. All of these people are selling knowledge. They’re in the knowledge business.

That is exactly what you are going to help these microcreators do. You’re going to do it using AI. The beautiful thing is that the reason they have their audience in the first place is that they’re experts or passionate about a topic.

They know about a topic. So it’s very easy to package that up into an info product, a digital product, a coaching program, whatever it is.

I’m going to give you a real-world example. Let’s take a creator with 30,000 followers. Let’s say that you don’t close this partnership at a 50/50 split.

Let’s say you have a 70/30 split with this creator, as in they keep 70% and you only keep 30%.

Let’s say that instead of 2% of their audience buying, things go horribly, and only 1% of their audience buys. Just to give you context, that means 99% of the audience that knows, likes, and trusts them decide not to buy.

Only 1% of their audience buys. Let’s say you make the product very cheaply.

In this space of coaching, courses, info products, and digital products, selling anything for under $1,000 is considered cheap in the knowledge industry.

Let’s say you help them launch a product for $150. In that case, that’s 300 people buying a $150 product, and that is $45,000 in earnings.

Your portion is $13,500. That is from one partnership in month one.

That partnership keeps going. You think when that microcreator makes $45,000 in a month, they’re going to stop promoting and stop selling the product that you guys built together using their knowledge combined with some AI tools that you’re going to bring to the table?

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why would a creator partner with me? Why would they not?

Remember, guys, we’re not being delusional here. We’re not saying go to someone with $17 million followers and help them.

We’re also not saying go to someone who’s already making $5 million a year.

When you go with microcreators, you’re not selling. You’re presenting a new opportunity. You’re helping them make money that they wouldn’t have had without you.

You tackle the part of the business they don’t want to do, which is monetizing. And by the way, this is very easy to do these days with AI.

My point about micro creators, you’re genuinely changing their lives here. You’re presenting a new opportunity that they’re excited about.

You’re not selling.

2. They already have the audience that knows, likes, and trusts them.

3. You now have specialized AI tools that will do the entire marketing and launch strategy for you.

SOURCE: This image was edited by the author

You also have incredible payment platforms like my company, where you can literally get paid out of your fair share automatically.

Remember how we talked about a 70/30 split. When $100 comes in, you can automatically have $30 sent to your account and $70 sent to their account.

That way, you get your shadow operator cut straight away without having to ask them for money at the end of the month.

Back when I was running my agency, this was one of the most annoying things. It’s kind of like paying taxes. Even though the money was never yours, the act of returning it is painful.

So when you get your cut automatically through the payment system, it changes everything.

I also want to touch on something because I was super against this model for years. The reason was my experience running an agency.

I had a full-time copywriter, a CMO, a junior media buyer, and a senior media buyer. AI didn’t exist. I also had to sell clients because they were paying monthly.

It was expensive and complicated. But now things are different.

All you’re doing is partnering with microcreators using specialized tools and basically helping them create their knowledge offer. From there, AI does the marketing rollout.

Many people just want to quit their jobs. They don’t care about driving Rolls-Royces or flying private jets.

I can tell you from experience that the biggest life changer is once you start making $10,000 a month. Everything after that doesn’t compare.

So, back to my point. This wasn’t possible before. AI has changed everything, and not enough people are doing it.

Many people are chasing big creators, but the real opportunity is with micro creators. That is where this becomes realistic for beginners.

There are tens of millions of micro creators perfect for this. Think outside your interests.

There might be a micro creator with 37,000 followers who only talks about matcha, coffee, jiu jitsu, or playing the harmonica.

Even though it’s not millions of followers, that’s still 37,000 people who know, like, and trust them.

All you have to do is present them with an opportunity that could change their life. From there, you take your share, maybe 70/30, maybe even 90/10 when you’re starting.

In the first month, who cares? Ten percent of $50,000 is still better than nothing.

As you gain experience, eventually you’ll be doing 50/50 splits. Some advanced shadow operators even take the majority share because creators are asking to work with them.