5 Steps to Create Passive Income Out of Thin Air

Today I had a member in the AI Business Plans community who's starting from zero and they have no idea. They have no customers. They have no clue where to begin for making money online.

And they want to take that blank slate and start turning it into income.

And so today I created a video that shows a dead simple repeatable way that you can go from nothing and build a revenue stream online even if you feel like you're totally stuck right now.

And so I'm going to share most of that video from our membership area because I want you to know exactly what I've been doing to make money online.

This could be the shortcut that'll save you years of trial and effort.

Hi, I'm Doug from AI Business Plans. And after 20 plus years of building businesses online, I've helped hundreds of businesses and built many different communities like my new school community I'm building now.

And I've seen what actually works by serving as an editor for a very large publication that has thousands of followers and over a hundred active contributing authors.

What I share in the video to follow are the steps that I've actually tested and used to make money myself. It is my mission to do it and then show it so that you can follow along with the same thing without having to figure everything else out.

And you don't have to take my word for it. You can take Heather's word where she says, "Thanks for your guidance, Douglas. I feel I can finally cut through the noise and the distractions and stop, you know, watching a ton of YouTube videos and focus on the one thing. This is super important."

How to Overcome the Blank Slate Paralysis

I hope the tutorial that follows helps you overcome that paralyzing feeling when you have no product, you have no customers, maybe even no idea where to start.

This is what a member asked in our community, and this is the answer that I gave him in this video, and I hope it really helps you, too.

Hello everybody. I am grateful to have each one of you here and I really want to help make sure that your ideas turn into a revenue stream.

But sometimes you'll come into a community and you may not have an idea of where should I even start. So one member says

• I have no revenue models, no customers, no system. He wants to make money from GPT5 and he wants to prepare to make money for example from content creation.

• So tell me in detail from the basics step by step what to do from the beginning.

The Four Legs of the Financial Chair

We'll start off with the four legs of the financial chair.

The first leg of the financial chair is you working for money and you pay your bills.

The second leg of the financial chair we all know about is that you take a part of your money that you earn and you save it and you put it into a compound interest account and it grows money over time. So, as you work throughout your career and you're putting money aside, it'll continue to grow and compound over time.

And by the time you're retirement age, this nest egg should have grown to be enough that you can retire and it will pay for your living expenses. So, those are the two legs of the financial chair.

But now in this day and age, we can take our work—that stuff that we normally do and that we have skills in, our hobby or whatever—and we can write about that and now our work can work for us.

We can create content that works for us. So the content has to solve a problem for somebody and give them a solution. And then the fourth leg of the financial chair is when other people are working for our work.

So if I create a product that has a referral program and you write about that referral program, you could earn money by referring people to buy my stuff. So it turns into a revenue stream for you.

There is my fourth leg of the financial chair where other people are working for me while I'm doing something else because it's a benefit to them.

Why Content is the Ultimate Passive Income

So in our setup of making money online, we want to know about those four legs of the financial chair.

And the second leg we're not going to deal with here in this community. You can just put the money into get compound interest. There's other communities for that.

But what we're going to do is we're going to create content that is going to work for us and we're going to create content in a way that people can benefit us by working for our content. Okay.

So, the easiest way to do that is to create social media profiles. So, you could get a free website over on Beehiiv to start out with. You could get a free account on Medium.

And I would recommend that you get the paid account on Medium so that you could have your own publication on Medium where you could invite other people to write for your publication. The next thing is to have social media profiles all in all of the different places that match the name of your publication.

So then when people write for your publication, this is the fourth leg of the financial chair, they are benefiting by writing for your publication because you have an automation that shares every article from your publication out to your social media profiles.

So then the writers benefit from writing for you and you benefit from having them write for you without you having to do much of anything because they're submitting the articles.

Turning Your Passion Into a Sellable Product

So the next thing is to create something that is going to be a valuable product for other people first. Once you've decided on your topic area, here we go. A topic area has to be something that moves money. It's emotional for people.

So then you're going to research what are the problems that people are having in that area and you can write about those problems and give them a solution and link to the product that solves that problem.

So one of the fastest ways to make money is to create your own free Whop store and to create a simple $19 PDF that we can sell and give away.

Discovering Hot Niches and Affiliate Opportunities Fast

As you're creating your store, you can also discover other stores.

So, if I was interested in fitness and I wanted to make money from the fitness area, I would look for those fitness shops that are monetized.

Here's $266 front splits for beginners. Wow. So, I could sell this and I could earn 30% income. 30% of that $226.

So, if I could use artificial intelligence to help me write 10 different articles about this content, then I could earn money from writing about this one.

There she is. From here to here, there's the proof. So, I could open up any of these different communities, monetized WHOPS.

Well, that's free. I don't want to even talk about the free ones.

All these ones that have $197, uh, $97, I want to make sure that they're reoccurring revenue. So, it's a membership. Here's 150 pounds.

So, each one of these now is a potential revenue stream for me.

And my fitness publication over on Medium would match on this. So, um, I would find a name that I could use over on a Medium publication that matches fitness or whatever topic that you want to talk about.

So what do we do?

How do we actually take this and turn it into money?

Now I can add this to my affiliates dashboard.

The Step-By-Step AI-Assisted Research System

But first of all, I'm going to copy his whole sales page. And if I'm doing this for sure, well, actually, yeah, that's copied.

So, what I'm what I would do for sure is I would unmute this. I would record that video. I would take the transcript from that video and I would include it in my research.

So, then we're going to go to Perplexity. And I'm going to say, give me research and about this. And I could give it a more detailed prompt, but it goes out and it researches more about this.

And it gives me a, okay, it'll give me a great report that then I can use a different tool to write it into a first person article that I could use to sell this product.

So now I have a nice basic outline here that I could rewrite and use for a blog post as it is.

I could create some images and this would be my blog post.

• So, what I'm going to do is just copy this and I can go to ChatGPT and I could use one of my rewriting articles here.

• It already knows to take anything that I put into it and change it into the format that is good to read online.

So now you can see that I have instantly found things that I can sell and make 30%. Maybe it's reoccurring revenue. I didn't even look into it.

I can take that sales page, get Perplexity to give me more detail.

Then I can take it over to a custom GPT and have it written into a story.

And there's a lot more that I could do with this content.

We could turn this into a 90-second video script that is really clickbait and builds curiosity. And then we send them to this first person story post. And this first person story post links off to the factual information.

And all of those would have a link back to that sales page.

So, here's another guy, a one-on-one coaching, like he clearly knows what he's doing. So, we could copy and paste this. And he offers a 10% reward. So, I'm actually not going to promote him because he doesn't pay enough. He doesn't understand where the money is coming from, where he should be giving that away to get members in there to build it up so that other people could make money from promoting him.

So, this in this one for 50 plus I might get into this actually, but it is in Portuguese. So, I could write it in Portuguese. I could have AI write it in Portuguese for me. I don't do Portuguese, though. Maybe it's Spanish.

Here's a fat loss program.

All right.

So, is it reoccurring revenue 30% reward? All right. So, I could add that to my dashboard. Only one review so far, but I could do those articles about him and he becomes part of all the different revenue streams that I could earn from inside this.

So, here's another one.

Train for better shoulder health. Right. Those are some stories you could have for for so anything that you're getting into. You could go over to the marketplace and you could find it in here.

You get the idea.

You could find anything that you want that has already people making money.

There's already shops already making money about it.

The Content and Platform Assembly Line

So now I'm going to create my website, my social profiles, and my publication on Medium that matches my topic area.

I've already got content that I can write and I can turn it quickly into informational posts that would go onto my Beehiiv website and then a first person story that I would post onto Medium.

I would take this and I would turn it into a clickbait video and maybe use HeyGen or Pictory to create some, you know, some animated pictures with some voice over and put that up to draw in traffic.

There's endless things you can do once you have this overall plan.

And that's what the 30-day plan is for. If we go to the classroom and we go into the 30-day plan.

So, week number one is for setting up all of your profiles to set everything up so that you're all prepared. So, that includes researching the topic that's going to make you money. Where are the people who are already selling this and making money?

They're there.

Or we could just start selling their stuff as a base for our content.

It starts us out, gets us money right away, and we can learn from them as we're setting up to build our own profile, our own first digital product, so that we could do in the simplest way by again researching what everybody else is doing, find a little angle, and say, "Here's a report that I learned about building strength.

And inside that report, there would be links to Busy Dads.

There's the five different fitness places in that I think would help you as a fitness person.

So, that giveaway that you say is worth $19.95, it is the revenue stream for you.

So, you're going to start writing about all of these people.

You're going to put that up into your Medium post. And inside that Medium post, you're going to have your own product, your own giveaway.

So, you'll say, "Here's my 1995 report on how to build fitness after 50, how to lose fat and feel good so you can spend time with your grandchildren and, you know, and keep up with them.

This would be a great thing." And inside there, you would give a real report that you generated from researching.

And down at the bottom, you say, "Here's my five recommended fitness places to go and check out online." All five of them are revenue stream for you.

So, your giveaway becomes a revenue stream for you once you've hooked it up this way. 

And you're also setting up your own publication on Medium, which establishes you as a credible expert in the field.

Growing Your Audience and Automating Your Workflow

As you get people writing for you, you start to see what they're writing. You get to know more about that.

➤ You get the automation sharing it out in your social profiles.

➤ Tell them that you've shared their article. They go and reshare your new social profile with their larger social profile, bringing you a whole bunch of people to build your social profiles so that when you do put out something that you can make a lot of money from, another blog post, another, you know, then you've got a larger audience, a more established credibility, and it's a continuous cycle that you continue to build by adding new content to it.

➤ And it continues to grow and produce more places where you can capture email addresses because as you have people join your Beehiiv newsletter.

➤ So, you can see the subscribers that you have in here. As you publish, you can send out your stuff to these people. It's automatically sent out to them.

➤ As you publish on Medium and you focus on getting email subscribers, you grow your list there as well. So, you can put out an article on Beehiiv and it goes out to your email subscribers and you put it out onto Medium and it goes out to your email subscribers there as well.

➤ And if you have a publication that works out well, you will have a publication that has thousands of people who also get your notifications. 12,200 people now following this.

So when I feature my own content, it really goes out to a larger audience now that I've built this up over time.

The Power of Automation: Let the Systems Do the Work

And then once you have everything all set up and the heartbeat is running manually, then we can set up something like this, which is the automation that takes the RSS feed from your publication, has ChatGPT write an article about it, has Flux AI creates an individual image about it, and then it's formatted for LinkedIn, and there's a post sent out to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit.

So all of this is automated for my publication so that I don't have to do it.

And then we can also have the social media listening automations running where if somebody comments below these videos, they get a reply back that gives them a link that takes them to my Whop Landing Page.

1. So when my YouTube videos reply or the automation replies to those videos below the YouTube, it's sending people to a specific Whop.

2. So, I set up a whole bunch of individual Whops to test this out to see how it would work.

3. If anybody's looking for passive income with AI art, I can go to the store page and you can see that there's 65 users in the dashboard.

4. When I'm sending people through to this free then they get the passive income research report.

5. So they get all of these PDFs and within those PDFs there's referral programs so that anything that they're doing from this research is a potential revenue stream for me.

6. The welcome ‘start here’ has is a PDF that has revenue streams for me.

So as I'm setting up my basic free giveaway um I'm how to get started. I can build a little course here that has the first step, deeper learning, what's next, and inside each of those, I can build revenue streams, get to know me, where to connect up with me, where to find my links or whatever I'm teaching them in there.

So, even the free thing that I'm giving away turns into a revenue stream when I'm setting it up this way.'

Turn Your Interests and Hobbies Into Money Streams

So, now it's back to you.

I want to hear what your interests are, what your hobbies are. And it could be flying drones, you know, it could be how to animate video.

You could find courses about how to animate video and write about those courses and earn money referring people to those courses. Flying drones, and you could write about all of the different drones that are out there as part of your content.

You could go to Amazon, find the Amazon link, write about the drone that's for sale and write articles about it. Your first person experience articles, your—it just goes on and on.

The Facts About Building Income: Focus on Problems, Not Perfection

So now I want to hear what is your interest.

I hope this gives you some really concrete ideas because I've been there myself where I had no idea, no product, no audience. I only had the drive to figure everything out.

Now, what changed for me was realizing that there's a formula to building an online income.

And it doesn't mean that you have to build everything from scratch.

Instead, you can focus on solving the problems that people already have and promote existing offers and gradually build your own assets at the same time.

If you'd like to get more of this kind of tutorial, then jump into AI Business Plans. There's a 7-day free trial so you can check everything out.

And if you go through and you do this for 30 days and you don't make income in two different places, I'll refund your course money. So, let's get busy. I'll see you on the inside. Stay safe, everyone, and here's to your success.