Laziest Way to Make Money with AI (Starting From Zero)

What's the laziest way to make money with AI in 2025 as a beginner? As someone who's made millions with AI products in my company, Martel Ventures, I'm going to share with you the five ways I would make money with AI if I was starting from zero. I'll even teach you how to find and sell it to customers and show you the cost, effort, and potential for each one. Now, I'm not talking about a get-rich-quick scheme. These are real money-making ideas where AI does most of the work for you. So let's get into it. Starting with number five, AI thumbnail design. You can get paid to design those thumbnails that you see on YouTube that you have to click to watch the video. It's designing high-converting YouTube thumbnails using AI products like Mid Journey, Photoshop, and Canva AI. Here's the problem. Most people think that it's just like vibe designing where you're just like, I'm really good at prompts and I just chat, chat, and it creates images. That's not what I'm talking about. The cool part is, is the cost is low to get into it. The effort is medium. It's not that hard. And the potential is actually pretty high right now with the rise of personal brands. On the low end, you can make 50 bucks a day doing like five thumbnails for 10 bucks. But on the high end, and this is what we invest in, is 200 to 400 a day where we're paying for four to eight high quality thumbnails at 50 bucks each. And you might think to yourself, who would pay for this? And I'll be honest with you, I didn't even know this was a thing. I was visiting my buddy Sean at Space Station. I remember walking down the hallway and he introduces me to a guy that's in a room and he says, that's our thumbnail designer. He had two monitors testing different things and iterations, and he worked on five different channels. And it made me realize that the pros that actually make money with YouTube will pay for this. And that's why you got to get good at it. So this is how you learn thumbnail design to get paid the big bucks. Number one, you have to analyze dozens of viral thumbnails in your niche. There's tools like one of 10 and view stats that will help you find those different sites and study exactly what they're doing today because it will change to stand out on YouTube. Number two is create a portfolio of thumbnails. Literally collect your favorite thumbnails to build a body of work that you can use as reference material when you're designing your own. Number three is model best performers. This might make a lot of sense, but the truth is, using ChatGPT, you can upload the portfolio of thumbnails that you found and then use that as the base foundation to design new and better ones. Now you're probably thinking to yourself, well, this sounds great, but how do I find customers? Let me teach you my audit to deal process. It's how all my agency friends sell what they do easily. Number one is to pick a niche. I don't care if it's automotive, personal development, doctors, running, the riches are in the niches. So pick an industry that you personally love that you would love to create thumbnails for. Number two is scrape the leads. Build a targeted list of potential buyers. And I'm talking, go on LinkedIn, go do your research and just build a massive spreadsheet. I call this mapping the universe for your market. Number three, run an audit. So if you're doing AI thumbnails, go to their YouTube channel, run through the whole video catalog, give them suggestions on how you make it better. Record yourself doing a quick loom video, 60 seconds or less. And then if you can add some examples of what you would do, if you worked with them, add value to their life before you ever ask them for a dollar. Number four is offer service. So this is a quick, fast action bonus, some kind of guarantee to reduce the risk, to get your foot in the door, something very simple, not expensive. They can make a decision. They might get the email from you at the video and reply and say, sounds like a deal. Take the payment. Trust me, get on the call after they've paid. Now, once you do some great work, you can offer them stuff that might keep you around longer. Which brings us to number four, AI blog generation. Essentially, you create content that's highly specific for your customer that gets them awareness in their market. So top of funnel, mid funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Every piece of content serves a different purpose, and that's what makes it different. Even going as far, and this is where you get paid the big bucks I'll share in a second, is to make it work for AI. So now, with the search being the new chat prompt, companies want to rank inside the AI language model so that their business is recommended when people ask questions of the universe for how they should solve their problems. The cost to get started is very low. There's no tools involved. You just start using the free tools. The effort is low. You literally just start asking the AI what you should do to work with these customers. It'll tell you. The potential is medium. And the reason why is because blogs long-term with AI getting so good at this, it just may not be as relevant as it is today. Because you could create five really good blogs per day at about 10 bucks a piece for some of these larger SEO farms out there. On the high end, you could be making 200 to 500 a day. Because if you get good on this on the high end, you can get paid to help people rank in some of these new AI language models, or get paid through affiliate revenue by creating content with links to products you get paid when people buy. One of my clients, Timmer, is actually using AI to create SEO blog posts from podcast episodes for clients. And he makes over 100,000 a month doing this. This is why I think AI can support but not replace the human process. Because the most powerful stories still come from the human experience. AI just helps us tell them better. So this is how you get started. Number one, model, then modify. And what you want to do is you want to find the top 10 blogs in every niche using tools like SEMrush or Ubersuggest so that you can see where their outliers sit to find the patterns. Number two is to actually use Chad GPT or some other AI to create a portfolio of writing samples using the best blogs as inspiration. Don't copy, but use it to train exactly what you want the outputs to look like. So it's going to work for you. Number three is you got to rank in search. So that's why there's these tools like rank.ai to help your blog posts rank not only in Google, but also in the large language models like Chad GPT. And I know this sounds really simple. The challenge you're thinking is, well, where do I find the customer going to pay me the money to do their SEO? Run the audit to deal process. It's the same thing. It's so simple, so powerful that if you just do a little bit of work up front, show the buyer that you know what you're doing and make it really easy for them to buy from you, they will. Which brings us to number three, the faceless YouTube channel. This one's wild because I was like, I don't think AI can really replace somebody like me. It turns out that I've been consuming AI generated YouTube content for years. I didn't even know. They're those YouTube channels that you've seen where there's a person talking and there's a bunch of B-roll explaining the concept, but there's nobody on screen and they get hundreds of thousands of views. If you understood the CPMs, those people are making 50, 60, $70,000 a month off of YouTube ads. Now, the cost to start on that one is medium because there's more tools to get started. You need some of the editing software. The effort is medium because there's some skills you've got to develop, storytelling in the narrative arc and how to create good hooks and clips and packaging. The potential is high because what I love about it is it allows you to build and keep stacking income because the more it grows, the more you'll make. On the low end, yes, small channels might only make $10 to $50 a day. There's a lot of effort up front to build to that first 10,000 subs. On the high end, you could be making $500 a day or more monetized not only through the YouTube ad network, but also affiliate links. Here's how we get started. Number one, pick a niche. I'm thinking categories that I know I can sell either affiliates, brand deals, or get paid top CPMs cost per thousand based on what people are paying today for other YouTube videos with that kind of content. The second is create your scripts. And again, this is where we want to use tools like and to really find our narrative style. See, what you want to figure out is what's your signature video type and it all comes from the script. It's the language you use. It's the cadence. It's the way you open up. How do you explore it? Try to find a unique voice for you to create your faceless YouTube videos. Number three, build your avatar. And again, it could be faceless where there's no person, or you can use Synthesia or 11 Labs to generate a virtual AI avatar of you talking so that it reads the scripts, but you're never on camera. Number four is post and iterate. See, most people talk about 10,000 hours and you get really good at something. It's not 10,000 repetition, it's 10,000 iterations, meaning every time you post a new video, try to make it 1% better. Which brings us to number two, AI website building. When a business starts, they need a website. And there's 22 million small businesses in North America. And in the past, they're used to paying $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 for a website that you can use AI to build it. There's literally these new no-code building tools. And you use AI to generate not only the imagery, the copy, but the whole code structure. And you can still charge a lot of money if you're good at what you're doing. And you can use these tools that we're going to talk about later to have businesses pay you top dollar because they understand a website is that important. The cool part is the cost is low because there's not a lot of software you got to pay for or people you got to hire. The effort is medium because there's some technical skills you may need to learn like hosting. And then the potential though is massively high because if you perfect that one offer, you can scale it because think about every new business that needs a website every day. On the low end, you might only make a hundred bucks a day. And that might be like generating one new website a day. But honestly, that's for very small businesses. On the high end, you could be making 500 to a thousand dollars a day because you have multiple clients and you're upselling them. Check this out, AI SEO and hosting and AI automations because you have the relationship with the customer. And it's kind of scary how many of these design agencies are going to lose all their work to some 17 year old kid doing it with AI. The most valuable real estate in 2025 isn't on earth. It's on the internet and it's going to be built with AI. So here's how we get started. Number one, you got to pick a no code builder and get really good at it. I like Framer AI Bolt or Reloom for people just getting started. Number two is you want to generate the custom copy with ChatGPT and then visualize the copy with Midjourney. And the last one is build two to three example websites to show buyers your skill. Like actually build stuff maybe for your parents or for yourself that you think is a cool idea that demonstrates the quality of your work. Now I know you're probably asking yourself like, how do I sell this thing? Run the audit to deal process, which brings us to number one, AI automation agency, which is like the hotness. Now the cost is medium because maybe for some projects you're going to need some software and pay for pro versions of it. And the effort is medium because there's a learning curve if you're new to this. But the cool part is, is I taught it to my 12 year old son. Like anybody can learn this if they're willing to just put their head down, search and consume that information instead of drowning themselves in personal development podcasts. Like it's time to go learn. And the potential is high because you will be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. You'll be helping businesses reduce the complexity in their business and you will find new opportunities because you're sitting in those companies. On the low end, you could be making 200 bucks a day. That only takes one or two small clients that you automate their workflows every week. You just work on it. On the high end though, you could be making a thousand to 2,500 a day because that's where you're integrating their current tool sets with other software integrations. You're helping them with lead generation. You're figuring out how to improve the backend workflow so they can increase their capacity to work with more customers. So the problem you're solving is for bigger customers that have more money, which means they'll pay you because the problems you solve makes them more money. Here's my rule. Every person on my team has to understand how to do this anyway. Even my head of finance sat down for three weeks and built a complete end-to-end process to automate all the bookkeeping. This person loves spreadsheets, didn't know anything about AI. Automation isn't about replacing people. It's about freeing them to focus on what matters most, about being creative, focusing on results, really figuring out what part's going to move the needle and anything that's just processing information or moving things forward can be done by a computer. So here's how we get started. Number one, create a course of action. Just ask Chad GPT, if I wanted to start an automation agency, what are the top 10 steps I should do? Be detailed, be very concise, and it will tell you. Number two is master one, automation use case. See, most people that get into this start thinking about like, oh, the freaking things they could do with AI. And you could, but then you're not really going deep on anything. I'm talking about like cold outreach, team training, building bots, onboarding automation, like pick one specific area and go deep because specialists get paid. The third, join a community. You want to be around other people doing the thing so you can learn faster. I like Dave Ebelar if you're more technical and you want to build like agentic systems. If you want to learn like content and automation, go follow Steven Pope and join their communities. Now, I understand this one's a little harder to run the audit to deal process 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 over deliver on what I promised, that you allow me to use this project as a case study so I can share it with other customers going forward. That's the win-win. They get free problem solve. You get a case study. You do five to 10 of those. Trust me, they'll want to keep you around if you're and they'll refer you to people they know. Now, if you're actually building real AI technology, like real products, real software, not just doing this automation stuff, and you want to see if I might be interested in partnering with you, then just find me on Instagram and send me the word venture 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, click here and I'll see you on the other side.