Enough talk. Let's make money

Hard to believe, but if you received the first edition of this newsletter, that was more than two years ago. Looking back, I’ve talked about various aspects of technology and how it relates to business. I’ve tried to identify good technology and how it can help in our daily lives. I’ve done my best to separate wheat from chaff.

Today, I'll aim higher. Today, I'll let you know how you can make millions by using AI.

If that sounds too good to be true, bear with me. After you get to the end of this post, you tell me.

In order to start, you will need a computer, an Internet connection and some spreadsheet skills. If you want to get fancy, add a dose of creativity. If you have a tiny quantum of ability to do a little bit of programming, you could even automate the whole process. (Worse case scenario, you can hire your neighbor's kid).

What are we going to do, exactly? We will build a media empire.

How will we do it? We will identify topics which people search for. We will create all the content to meet their needs. We’ll package it for different distribution channels and attract the advertisers. Then we'll just wait for the money to roll in.

Yes, it is that simple. We will use all the technology I’ve talked about in Recurrent Patterns.

Step 1. Pick topics

Let's pick the health category and our first topic will be about losing weight. How popular is this topic? Fortunately we can ask Google in the Trends section. We can see that all over the world, South Africa, Ireland, USA and Canada are places where this topic is frequently searched, especially around January. We could have guessed it, but now we have hard facts in front of us.

Within that topic, we can see that related topics are:

• Ketogenic diet

• Caloric deficit

• Intermittent fasting

Good to know. We will use this information later.

Step 2. Use AI to create an article (or article stub)

The next step is to create an account on OpenAI - the organization which produced GPT3. In the section called Playground you just enter the initial text and the computer types the rest.

I typed ‘Lose weight’ and asked for 200 words of content.

OpenAI produced this:

In order to lose weight, you need to create a calorie deficit. This means that you need to burn more calories than you consume. There are a few different ways that you can do this. One way is to reduce your calorie intake. You can do this by eating smaller meals or cutting out certain foods from your diet. Another way is to increase your activity level. This can be done by exercising more or simply moving around more throughout the day.

It looks and reads reasonably well. It is not Shakespeare, but we are not creating a theater company. If we wanted, we could create much longer content. But for now, the 200 words will do.

There are a number of tools we can use to quickly identify keywords and topics in our text. Let's use Cortical.

To no one's surprise, the keywords are: 

• Calorie

• Diet

• Intake

• Foods

• Calories

• Eating

• Meals

• Deficit

• weight.

Step 3. Illustrate the story

Our content will need some images and videos. For that, we will go to ShutterStock. Entering the keyword 'diet' gives us over 14 million available images. But we are not only interested in images. We also need videos. BTW: They are royalty free.

Step 4. Add a voice to your content

Further, we need to get the content audio with a simple text-to-speech system.

One of many systems available is Natural Reader. You can copy and paste the content, choose the voice (male, female, accent) and you are done.

Step 5. Get the content ready to publish across multiple channels

To review, so far we’ve identified the popular category and the topic. We’ve validated the popularity of the topic and gotten the content into various forms. Now, it is the time to package the content so we can publish it through various channels.

You can start with a website, Twitter account, and YouTube. Pick a catchy publication and domain names and in minutes, you have your website and all the other accounts. (Too difficult? I told you about the kid next door.)

On your website, you publish your first article: How to lose weight in 5 easy steps. The content is ready together with your images. YouTube has a Studio tool, where you upload and combine the images and videos with a voice over and some upbeat music.

Once published, you can embed the video on your website and publish it to Twitter. All the hashtags (or keywords) are already generated for you.

Not counting the initial setup, you can create and publish a new content piece every 5 minutes. And with the help of the neighbor kid, you can completely automate this process. You now have your media empire and can cover any popular topic.

Step 6. Time to turn on the money tap

But, wait. Where is the money? Can you really make money off content like this? Yes.

Here is an example for you. Check out the YouTube channel WaysAndHow. It has videos about losing belly fat, exercising, high blood pressure, etc. The list is very, very long. The videos are produced in a very similar fashion to what I just described.

All the videos over the years have gathered close to 500 million views. Doing a rough calculation, the advertising will get you somewhere between $3 to $5 per thousand video views. That's about $2 million give or take. That's the AI cashflow for you and it’s fully automated.

Is there value in this? I don't know. Obviously for 1.83 million subscribers to that channel, there is some value. But value aside, there is money to be made.

With this post, I’ve tried to demonstrate how much technology is available to us. I’ve shown how we can quickly find information, transform it and connect it in new ways.

Perhaps we can even make some money. But more importantly, this is a way to have a little bit of fun and play time. Make that your recurrent pattern.