Discover the laziest way to make money in 2025 — effortless, practical, and proven methods to earn without working harder.
Table of contents:
Introduction
As someone who has made millions with AI products at my business, Martell Ventures, what is the most indolent method for a novice to profit from AI in 2025? Here are the five ways I would use AI to generate income.
Let’s start with number five. If I were starting from scratch, I would even teach you how to find and sell it to customers and show you the cost, effort, and potential for each one. I’m not talking about a quick scheme, though; these are legitimate business ideas where AI handles the majority of the work for you.
Ways to make money:
- AI Automation Agency.
- AI Website Building.
- Faceless YouTube Channel.
- AI Blog Generation.
- AI Thumbnail Designing.
So, let’s start from the Fifth way !
5. AI Thumbnail Design
What It Is
AI thumbnail design: Using AI tools like Midjourney, you may get paid to create the high-converting YouTube thumbnails that you see on YouTube and that you must click to view the video. Canva AI and Photoshop This is the issue. It’s not what I mean when most people think of it as something like vibe designing, where you’re like, “I’m really good at prompts and I just touch it, and it creates images.”
Cost, Effort, and Potential
On the low end, you can make fifty dollars a day doing, say, five thumbnails for ten dollars. On the high end, which is what we invest in, it’s two hundred to four hundred dollars a day where we’re paying for four to eight high-quality thumbnails at fifty dollars each. The cool thing is that the cost is low to get started, the effort is medium—it’s not that hard—and the potential is actually fairly high right now with the rise of personal brands.
Why People Pay for This
I was visiting my friend Sean at the space station when I remember walking down the hallway and he introduced me to a man who was in a room and he said, “That’s our thumbnail designer.” You may be wondering who would pay for this, and I’ll be honest with you: I had no idea this existed. He worked on five different channels while testing various ideas and revisions on two monitors, which let me realize that the YouTube pros who are truly successful will pay for this; Consequently, you must become an expert in it.
How to Learn Thumbnail Design
So, here’s how to learn how to make a lot of money with thumbnail design:
- In order to stand out on YouTube, you must examine hundreds of viral thumbnails in your area. You can use tools like One of Ten and View Stats to locate these various websites and examine their current activities.
- Is to create a portfolio of thumbnails. To create a body of work that you may utilize as inspiration when creating your own, simply gather your favorite thumbnails.
- Are the model’s top-performing This may seem like a lot of sense, but the reality is that you can use ChatGPT to submit the thumbnail portfolio you found and use it as a starting point for creating new and improved ones.
How to Find Customers: The Audit-to-Deal Process
You may be asking yourself, “Well, this sounds great, but how do I find customers?” at this point. Allow me to share with you my audit-to-deal method, which is how all of my agency buddies effortlessly market their services.
- Is to pick a niche. I don’t care if it’s personal development or automobiles; the doctors who make the most money are in the niches, so choose a field that you are passionate about and would enjoy making thumbnails for.
- involves getting on LinkedIn, conducting research, and just creating a huge spreadsheet that I refer to as “mapping the universe for your market” in order to scrape the leads and create a targeted list of possible customers.
- If you’re working on AI thumbnails, conduct an audit by visiting their YouTube channel, going through all of the videos, and offering suggestions on how to improve them. Then, record yourself doing a brief Loom video (60 seconds or less), and if you can, include some examples of how you would work with them and improve their lives before you ever ask for money.
- is providing a service, so this is a quick, fast-action bonus, a guarantee to lower the risk to get your foot in the door, something very basic and inexpensive so they can decide; they may receive your email with the video and respond, “Sounds like a deal; take the payment.” Believe me when I say that you should call them after they have paid so that you may give them items that could extend your stay if you perform some excellent work.
4. AI Blog Generation
What It Is
Which brings us to number four. Since the search function is now the new chat prompt, businesses want to rank inside the AI language model so that their company is recommended when people ask the universe how they should solve their problems. This is what AI blog generation basically means: you create content that is highly specific for your customer that gets them awareness in their market. Top of funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom of the funnel—each piece of content serves a different purpose, and that’s what makes it different, even going as far as—and this is where you get paid the big bucks, which I’ll share in a moment.
Cost, Effort, and Potential
There is very little initial expense; you simply begin using the free tools without the need for any other tools. The effort is minimal; you simply ask the AI what you should do to collaborate with these clients, and it will tell you that the potential is medium. This is because blogs are long-term, and as AI becomes more proficient at this, they might not be as relevant as they are now.
On the high end, you could earn 200 to 500 dollars a day by creating five excellent blogs at around $10 each for some of the larger SEO farms out there. If you get good at it, you can also get paid to help people rank in some of these new AI language models or earn money through affiliate revenue by writing content that links to products that you get paid for when people buy.
Real-Life Example
Since the most compelling stories still come from the human experience, I believe AI can supplement human processes rather than replace them. One of my clients, Timmer, uses AI to generate SEO blog posts from podcast episodes for clients, earning over $100,000 per month in the process.
How to Get Started
So this is how you get started:
- After the model has been modified, you want to use tools like Semrush or Ubersuggest to identify the top 10 blogs in each niche. This will allow you to determine where the outliers are located and identify any patterns.
- To ensure that it will work for you, you should actually use ChatGPT or another AI to generate a portfolio of writing examples using the top blogs as inspiration. Don’t copy; instead, use it to train the outputs to look precisely like you want them to.
- Your blog post must rank in search, which is why there are tools like rank.ai AI that can help it rank in both Google and the major language models like ChatGPT.
Finding Customers
And while this may seem very straightforward, the problem you’re thinking about is where to find the client who will pay me to do their SEO, conduct the audit, and handle the process. It’s the same thing; it’s so straightforward and effective that if you just put in a little effort up front and demonstrate your expertise to the buyer, and They will purchase from you, as it is incredibly simple for them to do so.
3. The Faceless YouTube Channel
What It Is
The faceless YouTube channel This one’s crazy because I thought, “I don’t think AI can really replace somebody like me.” I was unaware that there are YouTube channels with a human speaking and a ton of B-roll describing the concept, but with no one on screen, that generate hundreds of thousands of views. It turns out that I’ve been viewing YouTube videos made by AI for years.
Why It Works
Those individuals are earning fifty, sixty, or seventy thousand dollars a month from YouTube advertisements, if you understand the CPMs.
Cost, Effort, and Potential
Since there are more tools needed to get started, including editing software, the initial cost is medium. The effort required is also medium because it requires some skills to develop storytelling in the narrative arc, as well as how to make effective hooks, clips, and packaging. The potential is high.
It takes a lot of effort up front to reach the first 10,000 subscribers, and on the lower end, small channels may only earn $10 to $50 a day. but on the high end, you could be making $500 per day or more by monetizing not only through the YouTube ad network but also affiliate links. This is what I love about it: it lets you build and keep stacking income because the more it grows, the more you’ll make.
How to Get Started
here’s how we get started:
- Pick a niche. Considering what consumers are now paying for other YouTube videos with that type of material, I’m considering categories in which I know I can either sell affiliate brand deals or earn top CPMs (cost per thousand).
- Write your scripts, and once more, this is the time to outline them and truly identify our narrative style using tools like ChatGPT. Everything is dependent on the screenplay. including the language, rhythm, opening, and exploration. You want to determine what your distinctive video genre is. Try to come up with a distinctive voice for your anonymous YouTube videos.
- Once more, you can create a faceless avatar in which no one is seen, or you can use 11 Labs or Synthesia to create a virtual AI avatar of you speaking so that it reads the scripts without ever seeing you on camera.
- Post and iterate: Most people talk about putting in 10,000 hours to get extremely effective at something, but it’s actually 10,000 iterations, which means that every time you upload a new video, attempt to improve it by 1%.
2. AI Website Building
Why It’s Important
When a business first starts, it needs a website. There are 22 million small businesses in North America, and they are used to paying $5, $10, or $25k for a website. However, you can use AI to build it. There are literally new no-code building tools that use AI to generate not only the copy and the imagery but also the entire code structure. If you are good at what you do, you can still charge a lot of money, and you can use the tools we’ll discuss later to get top dollar from businesses that recognize the importance of a website.
Cost, Effort, and Potential
At the low end, you might only make $100 per day, which might be equivalent to creating one new website per day, but on the high end, you could be earning $500 to $1,000 per day. The cool thing is that the cost is low because there isn’t a lot of software you need to pay for or people you need to hire. The effort is medium because there are some technical skills you might need to learn, like hosting. Finally, the potential is enormously high because if you perfect that one offer, you can scale it.
Check out AI SEO, hosting, and AI automations because you have a relationship with the customer and you are upselling to several clients. It’s a little concerning that many of these design businesses will lose all of their work to a 17-year-old using AI.
The Bigger Picture
In 2025, the most valuable real estate will be created with artificial intelligence and be found online rather than on Earth.
How to Get Started
so here’s how we get started:
- You need to choose a no-code builder and master it; for beginners, I recommend Relum or Frame AI Bolt.
- if you want to utilize Midjourney to visualize the custom copy and ChatGPT to generate it.
- The final step is to create two or three sample websites that showcase your abilities to potential customers. For example, you might create things for yourself or your parents that you think are cool and show off the caliber of your work.
How to Sell It
You’re undoubtedly asking yourself, “How can I sell this thing?
1. AI Automation Agency
Why It’s Powerful
This leads us to the top AI automation company, which is now quite popular.
Cost, Effort, and Potential
The effort is medium because there is a learning curve if you’re new to this, and the cost is medium because you might need some software and pay for pro versions of it for some projects. However, the cool thing is that I taught it to my 12-year-old son, so anyone can learn it if they’re willing to put in the time, look for information, and take in that knowledge rather than losing themselves in personal development podcasts. The potential is high.
You will discover new opportunities and assist companies in simplifying their operations because you will be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. You could earn $200 a day by working for those low-end companies; all it takes is one or two small clients whose workflows you automate once a week. However, you may earn $1,000 to $2,500 per day if you only work on the upper end.
The problem you’re solving is for larger, wealthier clients, so they will pay you because the issues you resolve increase their revenue. You’re also helping them generate leads, integrating their current toolkits with other software integrations, and figuring out how to enhance the back-end workflow so they can work with more clients.
Real Example
Here’s my rule. In any case, everyone on my team needs to know how to do this; even my head of finance, who likes spreadsheets and is ignorant of AI automation, spent three weeks creating a comprehensive end-to-end procedure to automate all bookkeeping.
It’s not about replacing people; rather, it’s about giving them more time to concentrate on what truly matters, which is being creative, concentrating on outcomes, and determining which part will make a difference. Anything that involves merely processing data or advancing the cause can be completed by a computer.
How to Get Started
so here’s how we get started:
- Create a course of action. If you want to start an automated agency, ask ChatGPT what the top ten stages are. Be specific and succinct, and it will tell you.
- Is the use case for master one automation Because experts are paid, most people who get into this start thinking about all the amazing things they and you could do with AI. However, you’re not really delving deeply into any of the topics I’m referring to, such as cold outreach, team training, creating bots, and onboarding automation.
- Join a community; you’ll learn more quickly if you’re around other people who are doing the same thing. If you’re more technical and want to construct things like aic systems, I like Dave Eelar. If you want to learn about automation and content, follow Stephen Pope and join their groups.
How to Get Clients
Now I understand this one’s a little harder to run the audit to deal with because we’re talking about internal workflows but what you do instead is you just reach out to customers and say, “Hey, I’m new i’m looking to build some case studies i will go fix this problem for you for free; it costs you nothing all I ask is that if I overdeliver on what I promised, that you allow me to use this project as a case study so I can share with other customers going forward.” You get a case study and they get a free problem fixed. Do five to ten of them, and I promise you that if you’re good, they’ll want to keep you on board and recommend you to people they know.
Final Note
Now if you’re actually building real AI technology, like real products and real software, and not just doing this automation stuff, and you want to see if I might be interested in partnering with you, then just comment below with your contact details, and we’ll have a chat to see if what you’re working on makes sense but if you want to learn how I go from zero to a million this year, read this article here.
You can also contact us, if you need any assistance !
