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- New business ideas: affiliate marketing after AI, $1000 postcards, $1M video 🤑
New business ideas: affiliate marketing after AI, $1000 postcards, $1M video 🤑
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eBiz Insider
Business Ideas Newsletter
Hey, it's Niall 👋
Over the years, I've earned $1M+ from affiliate marketing.
Unfortunately, AI has made it way harder to squeeze affiliate income out of plain written content.
But here’s the good news…
Video content is still earning big 💰
A new consumer report (linked below) found that when people are close to buying, short-form video + YouTube reviews "dominate attention."
Which tracks with some of the wins we’ve covered previously…
$130,000+ from one simple how-to video (Whitney Bonds)
$9,913 promoting a hoodie on TikTok (Keith Murphy)
$2,970 flipping through poetry books on TikTok (Angela Dawn)
So if you want affiliate income in 2026, there’s a straightforward path.
Download the free report below 👇 and steal the "what buyers actually trust" blueprint.
Then dive into my latest batch of business ideas.
Niall Doherty
eBiz Insider
TOGETHER WITH LEVANTA
Why AI Isn’t Replacing Affiliate Marketing After All
“AI will make affiliate marketing irrelevant.”
Our new research shows the opposite.
Levanta surveyed 1,000 US consumers to understand how AI is influencing the buying journey. The findings reveal a clear pattern: shoppers use AI tools to explore options, but they continue to rely on human-driven content before making a purchase.
Here is what the data shows:
Less than 10% of shoppers click AI-recommended links
Nearly 87% discover products on social platforms or blogs before purchasing on marketplaces
Review sites rank higher in trust than AI assistants
🔥👆
DIRECT MAIL
$1,000 Profit Every Time They Mail A Bunch of Postcards
📝 From Side Hustle Nation…
Here’s the idea: the Postal Service lets you deliver a postcard to every home on a mail route for about $0.25 apiece.
You can use that to advertise your own business — or you can do what Rachel and Dalton do and sell that exposure to other local businesses.
By stacking multiple advertisers onto a single oversized postcard, they spread out the cost, create an affordable local advertising product, and keep the difference as profit.
To find advertisers, they reach out to local businesses via Facebook Messenger 💬
Hey, I’m Rachel… We’re sending out a postcard to 2,500 homes in Miller Creek. Spots start at $150 — would you be interested?
The math 👇
16 advertisers × $150 = $2,400 revenue
Printing, postage, and fulfillment = $1,300
Profit per mailing = $1,100
Rachel and Dalton have done 20 mailings in about seven months, so they've likely profited $20,000 in that time 🤑
Pretty straight-forward business that could be replicated in many areas.
AMBIENT YOUTUBE CHANNELS
This One Boring YouTube Video Has Earned $1 Million
Shaan Puri and Sam Parr recently shared 4 dumb ideas that made people rich 💰
One of them is a 9-year-old video on YouTube…
It's a 10-hour video of a fireplace with 157 million views… they don't even add logs to the fire… it must be a 30-second loop.
The channel has 120,000 subscribers but just that one video.
Apparently it was created by someone in Romania and the video has earned an estimated $1M from ad revenue 🤯
Sam calls this an "ambient channel" and cites some other examples he's seen…
Old money Brazil music
1980s finance
Classical music that goes hard
But the most famous is Lofi Girl 👀
15 million subscribers, 2.5 billion views… making about a $100,000 a month
These kinds of channels are getting much easier to create now with AI tools.
Could be worth setting one up, adding a few videos, seeing what happens 🧐
VIBE CODING
Making "The Most Money" From His 1-Day Vibe-Coded Widget
📝 Jeremy writes…
On Sunday I hacked together a super simple, super cheap feedback widget for my own projects.
Everything I found was either buggy or 20–50$/month for basic stuff, so I shipped my own in a day and installed it on all my sites.
People started using it too and my first sales came in.
Now it’s the side project that makes the most money for me, even though it began as a “for myself” tool and the code is nothing fancy.
It's an embeddable feedback widget built with AI 🤖 and sold at a very low price…
1$/month per site. It’s so cheap that most people are too lazy to rebuild it / vibe coding it, and that’s the whole point.
Unclear how much money Jeremy has made from it, but sounds like those $1 sales are adding up nicely 📈
Someone commented…
This is the way. I've also built 3 mini saas which are ridiculously inexpensive. Many long term users beats few short term users
Got me thinking: what other simple tools could you build in a day and sell for $1? 🤔
Worth brainstorming with AI, see what you come up with.
For building, try Claude Code, which seems to be the best vibe coding tool out there right now 💪
MEME BREAK
Criminal Life Hack
TOGETHER WITH MASTERWORKS
Investors see ANOTHER return on Masterworks (!!!)
That’s 3 sales this quarter. 26 sales total.
And the performance?
14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% → The three most representative annualized net returns.
(See all 26 at Masterworks.com)
Masterworks is the biggest platform for investing in an asset class that hasn’t moved in lockstep with the S&P 500 since ‘95.
In fact, the market segment they target outpaced the S&P overall in that time frame.*
Not private equity or real estate… It’s contemporary and post war art. Crazy, right?
Masterworks investors are typically high net worth, but the point is that you don’t need to be a capital-B BILLIONAIRE to invest in high-caliber art anymore.
Banksy. Basquiat. Picasso and more.
80+ of the world’s most attractive artists have been featured.
511+ artworks offered
$67.5mm paid out as of December 2025
$2.3mm+ average offering size
Looking to update your investment portfolio before 2026?
*Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd
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