0:00 All right, so in the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through five cloud AI passive income ideas that actually work. We're talking about the boring, honest versions that are already paying real people right now while you watch this video. And I would know because I make hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income every single year. And that is not a flex, but that is the reason that this is realistic for you because the same passive content engine that paid me has been documented in dozens of real-life case studies that I'm actually going to show you in this video. These are regular people I'm going to show you that are pulling $97,000 a month, $40,000 a month, $77,000 a year. These are not gurus, these are not theory, these are real people and real numbers that I'm going to show you. Now, one thing I want to say is this is not another AI passive income hack video. Most of them are pure And the truth is there really is no such thing as fully passive income. But what I'm going to show you is the closest thing that you can get to passive income. Typically, it's going to involve some setup, right? You so you're going to have to actively do something, 0:56 but then once you set it up, you can actually make passive income. So, if you appreciate me making this type of video and you want to see me make more of them in the future, then let me know by gently tapping that like button or gently cheesing that like button. And let's go ahead and jump into it right now. >> [snorts] >> So, passive income idea number one is self-publishing books on Amazon. This is also known as Amazon KDP, and you get paid what is known as royalties. Now, royalties are basically the closest thing that you're ever going to get to actual passive income. And typically, royalties are only paid out to musical artists and maybe people who make movies or TV shows. But there is one type of royalty that you can get that is accessible to normal everyday people, and that is Amazon KDP. So, basically, what you do is you write a book one time, then Amazon handles the printing, the shipping, the customer service, the platform, and you just keep getting royalty checks forever. So, the books pay royalties forever, every download, every paperback sold, and every audiobook listen. And let me say that 1:57 again, because there's actually three different ways you can make money for every single book you make. You can make money from the digital downloads, you can make money from the actual physical books that you sell, and you can make money from the audiobooks that you sell as well. Right? So, this is very similar to songwriting royalties. Dolly Parton wrote I Will Always Love You back in 1973, Whitney Houston re-recorded it in 1992, and every single time that song plays on the radio, in a movie, at a wedding, Dolly Parton gets paid. And she wrote the damn song one time in 1973, and she gets paid every day for the rest of her life. Amazon KDP works the exact same way. And the proof is everywhere. So, just as an example, CNBC Make It covered a woman named Rachel Richards, who is the perfect example. She self-published two books on Amazon KDP, Money Honey and Passive Income Aggressive Retirement, and in one year those two books netted her over $97,000 in royalties, and that was years after she initially wrote the books. And she literally retired at 27 off of the back of those royalty checks. And she sold 2:57 about 25,000 copies of each book through that point. And she spent $75 advertising the books. $75. So, she wrote the books one time, she listed them on Amazon, she spent $75 advertising them just to get a few people to try them out, and then she just let them sell. And she's been collecting royalty checks ever since. And by the way, there are creators doing this exact same KDP model and adding YouTube on top of it to amplify it. So, a community member of mine named Sean Dollit, for instance, runs the number one KDP channel on YouTube. And he basically became a millionaire through his Amazon KDP business, but then he decided to show everyone else on YouTube how he was doing it. And when I first started working with him, he was making about $30,000 a month. And we started working together, and his profit went from 30,000 all the way up to a max of $500,000 in a single month. So, yeah, same KDP model that Rachel used to retire, he just bolted a YouTube channel for amplification. And Claude AI can now be your ghostwriter. Now, historically speaking, you'd have to be very, very good at writing books in order to make this work. But now, Claude AI can be your ghostwriter. The outlines, the 3:57 drafts, the edits, the work that used to require 6 months of grinding on a $30,000 ghostwriter, Claude does it now. So, here's how to start. Open Claude and use this prompt. I'm going to put the prompt on the screen. You can literally just copy and paste it into Claude, then just make sure you fill in the blanks, and then at the end say, "Interview me until you have enough information to give me a great answer." So, that'll get you started in the right direction. Then you need to do a human pass, fact-check it, add your voice and stories. Right, it needs to be edited by a real human, then upload it to KDP, do one book per quarter, and it can compound for a few years. Now, one pro tip here that is really true for this, and it's true for probably all the ones on this list, is make sure to niche down. Generally speaking, nobody's going to buy your book if it's on a mass-market broad topic. But if you niche down and make a book about something very specific, like productivity for medical workers, for instance, instead of just productivity in general, it's going to have a way better chance of success. Now, by the way, if you're watching this and you're 4:51 like, "Shane, I love these ideas. I want to promote these on YouTube, but I have no idea what niche to pick." Well, I'm actually doing a live training this week where I'm going to be giving away the niche validator Claude skill. And this has been trained on thousands of hours of helping people pick their ideal niche, and I'm doing this live training this week. So, click the link in the description and the pin comment below to check it out. Quick break. I'm going to be doing a live training this week on how to start YouTube step-by-step for beginners. This is going to be for people who want to start a channel, but they don't know what niche to pick, what videos to make, or how to actually get started the right way. So, this is a completely free training, no strings attached. In fact, I'm giving away even more bonuses at this training. Just as an example, I'm going to be giving away my niche validator, which works for ChatGPT as well as Claude skills, which is a super valuable piece of software where you can finally figure out what the best niche for you is. So, do not miss out on this training. Make sure you sign up for it down in the description and the pin comment below because you 5:41 only get it if you join the training. So, if you don't join now, you might miss out on it forever. With that being said, in the workshop, you'll get to meet me, and you get to ask me questions directly. So I look forward to seeing you. So click the link in the description and the pin comment below. This week, make sure you put on your calendar. And if for whatever reason you missed out on it or you weren't able to attend, make sure you still click that link because we might be having workshops in the future as well, and you'll be the first to know about it. So yeah, hope to see you there. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. All right, the next one is going to be an affiliate niche blog. So I call this category the vending machine, and here's why. You build a niche website that recommends products, and when someone clicks an affiliate link from your site and buys, you get a commission. The articles that you wrote years ago keep paying you forever as long as people are landing on them through Google search. So you stock the machine once, and it runs forever. So think of a vending machine in a busy hallway. People are already walking past, ready to spend. 6:33 You just got to stock the machine one time, someone drops in some change, they get the candy bar, and they walk away happy. Then you keep the commission. And year after year, the machine runs without you. And this is exactly what a woman named Michelle Schroeder Gardner did. She runs a personal finance blog called Making Sense of Cents. She started it 10 years ago tracking her student loan payoff, and then she just kept writing. Article after article, year after year. One post she wrote about stay-at-home jobs still pulls in tens of thousands of new readers every single month, and she makes about $40,000 a month semi-passively from that blog. And she literally ran the entire business from a cruise ship for 4 months while it kept earning. So she stocked the machine, it kept dispensing while she sailed around the world. And by the way, there are YouTubers doing the same exact affiliate model on video instead of blog posts. And we'll get to those here in a second. But Claude AI absolutely changes the math here. Articles that used to take days for a professional to research and write, Claude can outline, draft, and even structure the SEO for you. You add your 7:24 voice, your real opinions, you fact-check it, and you hit publish. So here's how to start. Open Claude, put this prompt in. Again, copy and paste it, put it in there. And then again, at the very end, make sure that it interviews you until it has enough context to give you a really good answer. Then, pick the products you actually use, write honestly, and drop your affiliate links, and you are done. You've officially gotten started with it. And that brings us to number three, which is almost the same exact thing, but you're doing it on YouTube instead of on a blog. Now, by the way, what do you think these first three all have in common? See, Rachel writes books, but they only sell because Amazon search engine sends people to them. Michelle writes blog posts, but they only earn because Google search engine sends people to them. Both of them are using other people's traffic, and both eventually leverage social media to scale. Rachel through Facebook groups, and Michelle through Pinterest and email. So, the pattern is this: passive content plus a traffic source plus social media for distribution. But what if there was one platform that was a search engine and a social media 8:20 platform at the same time, and it paid you per view from ad revenue all at once? Well, that platform exists. You're watching it right now, and it's called YouTube. So, YouTube is of course owned by Google. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Google is the first. So, they basically have all the data. And every video you upload becomes a permanent search result both on YouTube, but also on the home page of Google as well in many cases. But, it's also a social platform. So, your videos get pushed to people even if they didn't necessarily search for it, because Google and YouTube are basically wizards, and they know exactly when someone might want to see something. So, your videos get suggested to new people like a feed. And the part that most people miss is YouTube pays you directly from ad revenue per view. So, you don't have to wait for someone to buy a book, you don't have to wait for someone to click an affiliate link, you just need eyeballs on the video. So, I'm going to show you my own numbers with this one because this is something I personally done and made a serious amount of money from. And I'm not theorizing here. I've 9:13 literally lived this one. And this is what happens when you make videos about things people are already about to buy. So, same model as Michelle's affiliate blog, but on YouTube, where you also get paid per view from ads on top of affiliate commissions. So, you don't sell anything, you just put yourself in between people and the product that they were already going to purchase. So, it's kind of like a toll booth. Cars are already going to go somewhere. You install a booth in the middle, collect a small fee, and let them keep going. Here's my own example. A few years back I noticed that thousands of people every single week were Googling questions about a school called Western Governors University, also known as WGU. And this is a university that I really liked. It was an accredited university we can graduate in less than a year because you can test out of most of the credits. So people were searching for this stuff constantly, but nobody was doing the boring spreadsheet work of figuring out which partner programs let you test out of which credits. And the reason for this is because it's hours of cross-referencing and nobody wanted to do it, but I did it. I made a series of 10:05 videos breaking it down, just me, a spreadsheet, affiliate links in the description, and the last one of those videos was published about two to three years ago. And they still pay me thousands of dollars every single month right now. And at the peak, that series brought in over $10,000 a month passively. Same exact model with Coursera certificate reviews. I've posted dozens of those videos, and overall from affiliate marketing I've made over a million dollars. Plus with AdSense I've made over a million and a half dollars. And nearly all that money was passive and I still make six figures a month from these years of videos that I've uploaded to YouTube. whole point is people watching those videos were going to buy WGU and Coursera anyways, I just got in the middle of the transaction, I made it a little bit easier, and I got my cut. Here's how to start with this. Open Claude, copy and paste this prompt. Again, let it interview you until it has enough context to give you a really good answer, and then again, pick the products that you actually use or products that you really like, be honest, and drop your affiliate links, and you're done. And this brings me to 10:56 the next one, which is also YouTube related, and that is evergreen answer videos on YouTube. So this is content that answers a question that people will always be searching for. So math problems for instance at 11:00 p.m. when you have a math test the next day, tax questions in April when you're filing your taxes, plumbing repairs when the toilet overflows. The kind of stuff that people either Google or YouTube at the exact moment that they need an answer. And evergreen content is the closest thing to a real-world oil well that exists on the internet. You drill the well once, you don't pump it manually, and you let the well do what wells do. So a great example of this is a channel called the Organic Chemistry Tutor. It's just a guy drawing on his iPad with kind of bad audio to be honest, solving chemistry problems and math problems with no fancy editing. In fact, I don't think he does any editing at all. And according to view stats, he's making $79,000 a month just from AdSense alone, and he hasn't posted a video for 3 months. Right? He posts a video like once every two to three months or something like that, and he's making this money passively. And again, that's just from 11:54 AdSense alone. He's probably making way more money than that from affiliate marketing cuz he's got lots of different links in his description and in his about section as well. So yeah, a lot of the time this type of content is very boring, but it's evergreen. People are going to be looking it up for years. It's going to keep making you money for a very, very long time. So, here's how to get started with this. Copy and paste this Claude prompt into Claude. Make sure you let it interview you so you can get the best possible answer. Then pick five, record five, upload five, then another five, and you're not chasing virality, you are drilling wells. This is not the type of content I typically do, but I posted this type of video before just as an experiment, and it was called What is marketing in 3 minutes? Marketing for beginners. This video has made me $7,840. It has continued to get views for literally years now. Every single day it makes me a few dollars, okay? Now, this is the only one that's kind of like that no face style, but I've got a lot of videos like this that still get views years and years later. All right, so the next type of passive income is to 12:49 document your job on YouTube. So, this is one of the simplest ones on the entire list, and if I'm being honest, this is one of the easiest ways to make money. So, whatever you're already doing for 40 plus hours a week, just record it. All right, do what you already would have been doing, just record it on camera. So, if you're a nurse, document your nursing job. If you're an electrician, document your installs. If you're a tax preparer, document your tax process. And if you're a damn dog groomer, document the grooming. Now, you can quite literally document what you do in some cases, or you can just talk about the things that you're telling your patients, your clients, customers, co-workers, etc. on a day-to-day basis. So, think about a car mechanic who's been turning wrenches for 25 years. Oh wait, you don't have to think about it, it's right here. Scotty Kilmer. He's been helping people save money on their cars, get the right cars, repair their cars, telling people all different types of car-related tricks for years now. And it says that he's making $24,000 a month just from AdSense alone. Now, this right here often times underestimates how much people are making, but if you do a 13:44 little bit of digging, you can find an article that says that he made more in 1 month on YouTube than he saved in 40 years as a mechanic. And if you scroll down just a little bit, it'll say that he's made $24 million from YouTube. And all he did was just document stuff that he's already does on a day-to-day basis. This stuff is dead simple for him, but it's something that can help a lot of other people out. And he estimates that he's probably saved people billions of dollars on their car repair or just making bad decisions when it comes to their car in the first place. Now, here's another example, my brother Zach. Zach is 50 years old, he spent close to 30 years in the trades, and he has his own HVAC business. But his body was breaking down, and he came to me one day and he said, "Shane, I can't break my back forever, man. What do I do? I want to be able to earn money without having to use my body." And I told him to start a YouTube channel about trade careers. And when we started, Zach could barely even use his webcam on his computer. He's a total beginner, he's not very technical, he's never made a video in his life. But his very first video that 14:36 he posted blew up, and 29 days after posting his very first video, he had a $214 day. So, he went from zero to a full-time income in less than 1 month. And by month three, he was averaging $450 a day. And just this last month, he had a record month, he made over $18,000. And he did all of this just by helping people choose the right trade career for them. So, yeah, this is one of the most underrated ways of making money. And I could give you example after example after example of other people that have done this. So, just as an example, Davis helped people get into management consulting careers. And I helped him grow his YouTube channel and optimize his business, and he got to over $100,000 a month. And by the way, I'm going to be going to Davis's wedding here pretty soon, so super excited for that. But yeah, I think you get the point here. Very boring, but tons of opportunity. And there's also lots of opportunity for affiliate marketing, sponsorships, selling your own products and services, etc., etc. And then again, if you want to learn more about how to do that, learn more about how to pick your niche, etc., go ahead and attend my live training this week. Click the link 15:29 in the description and the pin comment below. We will be giving away the Claude skill niche validator. It is an AI that's been trained on thousands of hours of us helping people pick their niche in our community, and it is yours for free at this live training. So, definitely don't miss out on it. And then at the end, you can literally ask me any question that you want, and I'll answer it. With that being said, I know that 99% of people who watch my videos are just going to enjoy the free value. They're going to enjoy all the free Claude skills and the free prompts that I give it out. They're even going to attend my live training, dial their niche in, get tons of value from me, but they're never going to end up working with us one-on-one, and that is completely okay. But, for the 1% or 0.1% of you out there who are very busy, and you want to work with somebody one-on-one to get results as quickly as possible. Or, if you want us to literally just do the work for you, go ahead and click the link in the description and the pin comment below to book a call. Only do this if you're very serious about growing and making money on YouTube. We're only accepting five 16:17 people right now, and we typically only accept less than 18% of people who apply. But, these are the types of people we work with, okay? We work with a lot of physical businesses that want to grow and make money on YouTube. And typically, these are the types of businesses that get clients. And typically, these are businesses that are in the seven-figure range. But, we also work with online businesses, too. So, coaches, consultants, online service providers, agency owners, etc. Then, we work with YouTubers who are getting a lot of views, but they're struggling with monetization. YouTubers who are crushing it, but they want to crush it harder. And people who are professionals, experts. They're typically a little bit on the older side, and they have a lot of value to give to the world, and they want to do it through the amazing medium of YouTube. But, all these five people have one thing in common, and that is they want to treat YouTube like a business. So, if that sounds like you, go ahead and book that call. And also, check out this video right here and exactly how we helped Davis optimize his business, totally outsource himself from YouTube, and get to 100K per month.
