7 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Skills With AI

You already have skills that people can benefit from. That bit is not up for debate. But knowing how to do something and actually using that knowledge to make money is where most get stuck.

You may not necessarily lack ideas. It’s just that everything about the idea of online income might feel heavy. Writing or creating your own content takes way too much time. Organizing it feels like another daunting ordeal. Marketing may as well seem like a whole new added job.  

That’s when using AI to make money can be a good solution. While AI content creation has become a pretty casually thrown around term, what it simply means is you rerouting in the simplest way. Not starting from scratch. Not becoming a tech geek. Simply integrating AI to remove the friction that keeps you from earning online. 

In other words, it has to do with letting AI tools create, market, and share your knowledge out there much faster. There’s no part like replacing your skills or thinking, or giving you a bogus personality online. Instead, AI skills monetization is about freeing you from the tedious and time-consuming steps, including the never-ending customer hunting work or content creation struggles.  

Research is also promising. One McKinsey report shows that generative AI can contribute 2.6 to 4.4 trillion US dollars to the global economy every year, with marketing and sales experiencing the most notable changes. Many freelancers, coaches, solopreneurs, or parents with limited time are already on it. They are earning from AI-powered side hustles in different ways, like selling digital products, using AI for freelance services, or automating marketing and sales funnels with AI.  

These aren’t theoretical possibilities. These are actual approaches working for ordinary people like you. No massive following or tech background is needed. Just skills people will pay for, and interest in trying AI tools that make all the hard parts easier.

What Does Monetizing Your Skills With AI Look Like?

You might be assuming you need to start with a big launch or some polished and recognized brand. However, in reality, monetizing skills with AI starts with something way more simple and grounded.

You already have expert knowledge about something useful. AI helps you:

• Turn that knowledge into easily interpretable and structured content
• Repeat that same process without burning out, and even upgrade it when needed
• Reach people who may benefit from your knowledge without you having to manually intervene

That’s about it.

How AI Actually Benefits You When Earning Online?

While managing online side businesses, you may end up hitting the same wall often, feeling like there are just not enough hours in the day. Burnout and hiring stress come next. AI can help you avoid that in different ways and compress the timeline of anything that feels consuming:

Turning skills into sellable content

Let’s say you are a freelance designer with an already busy schedule. You may typically spend a week drafting an outline for a template guide. Tools like the AI Cofounder can help you create that in just an afternoon.  

Finding potential customers  

If you are a mother interested in establishing yourself as a successful mompreneur but are short on time to search for potential clients and send thousands of cold emails, you can use AI tools to find customers. They usually have features that can help you get 50+ potential customers through just one search.

Marketing and promoting materials

For coaches or solopreneurs wanting to sell their online courses, they can use AI tools like Magic Ads by Nas.io to automate the process. It launches ad campaigns and runs them independently. No need to hire marketing teams or spend hours building an ad campaign.

The State and Impact of AI Adoption  

AI isn’t just a hyped-up word anymore or a corporate digitization trend. Many solopreneurs, coaches, creatives, and freelancers are now using it to remove obstacles between the skills and information they want to share and people willing to pay for it. That ultimately helps increase their online revenue as well.

The numbers are showing the change. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that 20% of freelance workers now regularly use generative AI tools for different purposes. It helps them avail opportunities faster and improve market resilience.

On Upwork alone, 71% freelancers are using AI to augment their tasks, especially those related to marketing, customer communication, and content creation. 29% of them also use it for automating certain aspects of their work to ensure a stable online income.

 7 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Skills With AI

If you are someone already doing a 9 to 5 or juggling parenthood and busy schedules, here are some fuss-free ways you can monetize your skills with AI:

1. Create and Sell AI-Enhanced Digital Products

Selling digital products is an easy way for you to generate skill-based income. It works because you only have to build these products once and then sell them repeatedly.  You won’t even have to put in more time or money as you try scaling the business.  Just choose the format based on your expertise and platforms to sell your digital products, and AI can help in different parts of setting up the side business.

Digital products that typically sell well

Educational products:

• ebooks
• Templates
• Mini courses
• Guides
• Checklists
• Worksheets

Practical tools:

• Spreadsheet templates
• Design assets
• Brand kits
• Email sequences

How AI tools can help with creating and personalizing your products

AI can help you cut down the time you’d typically spend on creating your products considerably.

If you want to write an ebook about project management, AI tools can generate a detailed book outline for you, down to sections within chapters. By giving AI super-specific and personalized prompts, you can also use it to draft sections. In simple words, you still get to decide the direction of your work, but the blank page problem goes out of the picture.

You can make templates work similarly, too. If you want to become a business coach and sell promotional email templates, you can use AI to:

• create different variations
• test different tones
• make multiple customizable versions for different industries

All of this in just a day’s time instead of the usual week-long duration it takes to write everything from scratch.

The key to ensuring customers will willingly pay for your digital products is customization. Generic copy-pasted AI output doesn’t make money. But AI that helps you create specific and personalized content faster is the real deal. For example, if you want to sell lunch prep guides for working parents, you can use AI to generate dozens of recipe ideas and variations and then customize the best ones. This way, the time required shortens while the added personal touch creates value.

2. Offer AI-Assisted Coaching and Consulting

For any coach or consultant, time is the real limit when it comes to growing the business. That’s because becoming one requires you to be present for each session. Given there are just finite hours in a day, you might hit an income ceiling after booking a certain number of sessions or clients.

But with AI-assisted coaching, everything else that requires your presence, except for sessions, can be handled and managed by AI. It is not about having a substitute, but rather a supporting partner that helps you offer your services without burning out.

What tasks AI can handle for you

• Booking and scheduling appointments
• Making summaries from intake forms
• Sending follow-up emails
• Creating and customizing your resources
• Writing session notes and identifying themes
• Personalizing action plans
• Tracking clients’ progress
• Advertising to increase your reach

By using AI automation in these aspects, you can free more of your time to listen to your clients and make decisions that benefit them as well as your business.

Why this works

Your clients won’t be much interested in paying for the documents you provide them. Most opt for consulting or coaching sessions to get clarity. AI will help you provide that clarity to them consistently.

For instance, as a career coach, you can use AI to identify repeating themes across sessions you take with people from different walks of life. Based on those themes, you can prepare reflection prompts that resonate. This way, your sessions stay human. The preparation becomes much lighter and quicker.

Moving from One-on-One to group sessions

AI tools don’t just help you start an online coaching business or manage clients already on board. The bigger shift happens when you try to scale your business.

With AI being able to handle routine communication with your clients and content creation, you can easily move from 1:1 exclusive work to more accommodating hybrid models. You can have group sessions with personalization enabled through AI. Clients can still receive individual attention. However, you don’t have to be directly involved every minute of the sessions.

AI can help you:

• Generate personalized tasks for each participant
• Write feedback on their work
• Create customized resources based on progress
• Send reminders when needed

All you’d need to focus on will be live sessions, high-value conversations, and strategic help. Everything else can run in the background without your manual effort.  

3. Use AI for Automating Social Media and Content Marketing

Increasing your following or keeping it engaged takes consistency. A lot of it. You have to post regularly, be mindful of your target audience’s peak activity hours, and engage with them over comments and posts. It works. However, at the same time, it becomes draining pretty quickly as you also try to deliver your work or build products your clients need.

Before marketing becomes your first point of burnout, as is the usual for most people with online income streams, you can automate your social media and content marketing with AI. This keeps your message flowing without the idea of staying visible seeming relentless.  

How AI makes marketing manageable

• Turning long-form content into shorter and engaging posts with interesting graphics and design elements  
• Scheduling posts so you don’t have to spend time every day deciding when to publish
• Give content suggestions based on your post history or common comments and questions coming from your audience.
• Writing post captions or summaries that you can then edit to align with your voice and style
• Generating social posts in bulk for weeks based on a few ideas
• Analyzing audience engagement patterns to adjust publishing time and volume

Growing reach without manual effort

Using these ways, you can keep your business visible consistently and remove the start-stop friction that follows manual content creation and marketing. If you feel like posting twice a week is a good pace for your business instead of daily, AI tools can help you support that rhythm.  Just give it prompts, and it will make and post your content accordingly.

4. Use AI for Freelance Services Like Writing, Design, Strategy

As someone skilled in writing, designing, or strategizing, you can use AI to offer freelance services online. These jobs and projects normally require your full attention from the beginning to the end. AI doesn’t fit as a substitute for your skilled work. It instead fastens how quickly you meet your project deadlines and milestones by handling other aspects of your work.

Ways AI can help enhance your skill output

As a writer, you can use AI to:

• Research and gather credible data
• Generate outlines
• Create rough drafts
• Edit and polish your work
• Make sure it’s error-free  

Being a designer, you can use AI to:

• Generate ideas and brainstorm better
• Test different versions of your designs
• Create assets and design elements for presentations
• Make drafts for client communication
• Make basic templates that can be edited later  

 For strategists, AI can help with:

• Data analysis
• Making reports
• Carrying out competitor research independently
• Writing strategic recommendations

Quicker turnaround, more offerings

You still can lead the core of your work and put your skills out there. AI just helps you make various options quickly and decreases your turnaround time. So, you get to scale conveniently and offer more services.

For example, if you are a writer, you can deliver added design services. AI tools can generate graphics for you based on text. This will help you turn your new clients into returning ones. Plus, you get more discipline, productivity, as well as flexibility in your work cycle.

Research from Fiverr also shows 76% of freelancers on the platform use AI tools. 64% of them reported their productivity increased due to AI.

5. Build Automated Sales Funnels Using AI Platforms

Reading the term ‘sales funnels,’ you might assume it’s some complicated tech stuff.  In reality, they are just simple and clear paths. It’s like someone:

• Discovers your online business
• Figures out what you are offering
• Decides if it’s something they’d benefit from
• Buys your service or product

AI tools simplify this entire process, especially for solopreneurs who have limited time. No need for you to send emails or schedule calls manually. From attracting people to making sure they buy from your business, anything that facilitates the process, like lead magnets or email sequences, AI helps you create it.  The structure stays intact. You just no longer need technical knowledge or added time investment to make the funnels work.

How AI can simplify funnel building and customer acquisition

The first thing that can give you a tough time while building your sales funnel is setting it up. Traditional funnels would require you to:

• Hire website builders
• Find and subscribe to email marketing platforms
• Set up payment processing tools
• Use advertising platforms
• Buy analytics software

Every tool you add would come with its own learning curve. And every time you integrate something new, you’ll face another breaking point. AI platforms remove the chance of that happening. They can now handle all these demanding parts of funnel building for your business almost entirely.  

On AI platforms like Nas.io, you just have to enter what services or products you are selling and who you are primarily selling them to. It will help you generate landing pages, ad copy, and email sequences. It also has features like Magic Leads, which search for people that share characteristics with your ideal customer profile and save their contact information. You can also use features like Magic Ads on it to run ad campaigns automatically.  

6. Create Subscription or Membership Models Powered by AI

Recurring revenue without added investment sounds like the perfect plan to make a predictable income every month. AI can make that a reality for you if you use it to create subscription or membership models that deliver content or resources periodically. Instead of finding new customers all the time, you build your resources just once and then serve continuously.  

The real problem with such models, though, has always been sustainability. AI addresses that too.

How AI makes membership models sustainable

• Create and post content

As a solo creator, your biggest challenge isn’t getting subscribers. It’s ensuring they stay subscribed. And that depends on your content volume.  Your members would expect fresh value regularly, which can burn you out when you are manually drafting and designing each resource.

With AI, that’s unlikely to happen. AI tools can help you write and design discussion prompts, resources, weekly updates, and content, and always have enough to share regularly.

• Help personalize learning resources

Another thing that will ensure retention is how personalized your services and resources are. With the help of AI, you can create general templates of your resources that can be quickly customized in line with your client’s personal requirements. Automate your engagement  

AI can send messages for updates and progress, and celebrate your clients’ milestones without requiring any repeated manual effort from your end. Your community will still need your presence, but not in every interaction it has with your business model.  Replying to comments, common queries, and sharing next steps can all happen automatically with AI.

This way, you don’t sell your time repeatedly. You just maintain a system that serves your subscribers or members continuously.  

7. Offer Paid Newsletters or Micro-Courses Using AI Insights

You write well and have specific knowledge about certain topics? Use AI to sell paid newsletters and micro-courses online. These are shorter in length and more focused. Customers will pay you for condensed and actionable versions of information they can’t find elsewhere.  

How AI can support creating newsletters and mini-courses

AI can help you:

• Generate topic ideas based on your audience’s search history
• Segment your subscribers to deliver relevant content to different groups
• Optimize prices after analyzing the market
• Create drafts based on your prompts and research

All you’ll have to do is take out some time to write once a week. AI will give you drafts and research within minutes. You can refine them, add your personal touch and examples, and use AI tools to send them to your subscribers regularly. Your analytical voice remains central. The production time reduces appreciably.  

Challenges When Monetizing Skills With AI and How You Can  Overcome Them

Overwhelm Due to Options

There are a lot of AI platforms, each with its own big branding and promises. To avoid overwhelm from so many options, pick just one tool that addresses the very problem that’s slowing down your work.

For example, if content creation takes a lot of your time, use simple generative AI tools. If you struggle with finding customers, then focus on AI tools that have advanced lead generation features. Do not try to integrate different AI tools at once. Just take it one tool at a time and then decide the next steps.

Worrying about Technical Expertise

Tech intimidation is real when it comes to using AI. Prior to exposure, you might feel like you do not have enough tech expertise to use these tools. However, most AI platforms these days are built for non-tech users. They have very simple interfaces, almost like your messaging apps. You can type what you need, see what it generates, and then adjust answers accordingly.  

The best way to go about it is to begin with free tools with easy interfaces. For more complex ones, you can use templates and guides.

Limited Budget

There are free basic plans in most AI tools that you can use when you are just starting with your online side business. Later, when you are able to make money and need advanced assistance, you can shift to paid versions or premium tiers if needed.

The subscription charges are usually  $10 to $50 monthly. It is still very low compared to what you’d normally spend on hiring humans for the same work.

Quality and Authenticity Concerns

A lot of people have this notion that using AI can make their work less genuine or seem generic, but most of these tools learn as we go. How you use them, the kind of prompts you enter, and how you polish the drafts it gives impacts your work’s quality.

Just use AI as a helper. Solve the blank page problem with it. Let it research for you, build outlines, and create initial drafts. Then get down to real work: edit and refine it with your own touch and expertise. This way, you can produce high-quality content that carries your essence instead of a robotic one.

How to Get Started

1. Find Out Your Main Point of Friction

Analyze what’s keeping you from having a stable online income? Do you not have a clear offer or product? Can you not find customers? Is content creation taking too long? Be honest about what is it that’s actually blocking you from having a successful income generator.

2. Choose One Method of AI Skills Monetization

Pick the method that addresses the very problem that’s keeping you from having a side income. For example, if you’re struggling with offering clarity, start with method one, like offering digital products. Or if you are having problems attracting leads or generating sales, opt for AI-powered sales funnels.

Similarly, if you are a coach struggling with scaling your business or time constraints, choose AI-assisted coaching or AI-based subscription models and memberships. This will help you receive a predictable side income without you doing more.

3. Test it Out For a Week

Test your approach for at least one week. Do not plan, do not research more tools. Just use one AI tool to produce something that actually makes a difference. Make something concrete, like a landing page, lead magnet, or a week’s worth of social posts.

4. Figure Out What’s Actually Working

After one week has passed, try to understand:

• What did AI handle well, and what difference did it make in your workflow?
• What else still needs your constant or direct involvement?
• Did it save you time and effort, or create more work and confusion?
• Did using AI add value for the paying customer or reduce it?

You can adjust based on answers to these questions. Once you find that AI is adding value to your work, you’re good to proceed.

5. Put Your Offer Out There

After figuring out the method and ways to use it for earning, don’t delay putting your services out there.  Once the friction is out of the way, everything else is simple.  

Just choose one skill you possess that people already value. Pick an AI tool that helps you sell that skill faster. Start by building something small out of it and see how interested people are in paying for it.  

You’re In Charge Now!

You’ve got the blueprint. The gist of what all AI skills monetization entails. It doesn’t magically turn your skills into income. Instead, it does something quieter. Makes earning online more accessible by removing friction.

When friction leaves the room, you’re able to deliver consistency.  And once you’ve mastered consistency, monetization follows.

So, pick one method, test it out this week. Your expertise is already valuable. Now you have the information to make money with it. Start building your online income stream today with AI platforms like Nas.io. You can sign up for a 7-day free trial to see how it fits your goals and get one step closer to having multiple income streams.

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