3 Ways I’m Using Claude to Make Money

3 Ways I’m Using Claude to Make Money

A lot of people are talking about how to make money using AI, but not a lot of people are actually doing it. So, in this article, I want to break down the three practical ways that I’m actually using AI on a daily basis to make money.

Selling Digital Products on Marketplaces

If you’ve seen me before or read any of my articles, then you’ll know that one of the businesses I’ve been doing for the longest is selling products online.

Now, all the way back in 2018, one of the first ways that I ever made any money online was building and selling digital products on marketplaces like Etsy. I’ve just made a search for budget trackers, so you can sort of see what I’m talking about here. But people will build and sell digital products and digital tools like budget trackers and planners, and they make anywhere from a few hundred dollars all the way up to thousands of dollars in profit per month.

This is one of the most obvious ways to use AI, but it is also one of the most powerful. The thing about digital products specifically is that you can target so many different niches while still building out essentially the exact same product.

Niches and Variations in Digital Products

In the case of this budget tracker, people are building all sorts of variations targeting different niches, from paycheck planners, 50, 30, 20 splits, to even selling more mega packs like these ultimate budget bundles that have a bunch of different other tools bundled inside of them. Now, there’s a ton of different digital niches that all work really well, like digital prints, journals, clip art, recipes, tutorials, and planners like these ones, but the main idea here is that now AI is able to help you build out the actual product that you’re selling to the customer.

This spreadsheet, for example, is built inside of Google Sheets and Excel, and it targets wedding planning and sort of wedding budget tracking as well. And as you can see, 29 people purchased it in the last 24 hours, making an estimated $4,500 per month. Keep in mind that’s just from this one digital planner listing.

Profit Potential and AI Efficiency

So, a shop like the shop that’s selling this planner might sell hundreds or maybe even thousands of these planners. And this one specifically is making quite a lot of money every single month just selling these simple digital downloads. And because this is a digital download, they’re going to keep most of the sale in profit.

You can see on this particular listing that they’re looking at around an 85% profit margin. So, if they’re bringing in an estimated $66,000 per month, 85% of that is around $56,000.

Claude has completely changed this business because instead of it taking you multiple hours or maybe even days to build out even one of these listings, you can build it out in a single sitting.

How to Build Products with Claude

Make sure you switch your model over to Opus 4.8. It was literally released about 15 minutes ago. And then in the chatbot, we can say something like, I want to build out a wedding budget planner that I can sell on Etsy.

And because I’ve set up custom instructions in my cloud, it’s going to ask me questions about how I want to actually build this out. You can see it even specified where I wanted to build this product out. And so, I selected Google Sheets because I know that’s what’s already proven to sell.

I think, especially for beginners who are just getting started making money online, selling products on marketplaces like Etsy and TikTok is an excellent place to start because it’s so low-risk. It doesn’t take too much time relative to a lot of other businesses that you might be looking at starting. And AI enables you to basically create and sell almost any type of product that you’d want to.

Examples of AI-Built Products

I’ve got a full article on this, but just for a few simple examples, I was able to build out these beautiful budget trackers that are fully functional, by the way, inside of Google Sheets. And these are basically full, robust digital products that solve real problems that people face. It’s almost completely perfect right out the gate. And with just a few extra styling tweaks, this would be a full digital product that I could post for sale in my shop for $5 to $10. And over time, if we built up a catalog of this type of digital product, it’s something that could turn into a real income over time.

This was built entirely using the AI. By the way, if I came in and modified things, I could maybe make it a little bit prettier and a little bit better. But this was basically a one-shot prompt that created the entire budget tracker, similar to the ones that you just saw selling on Etsy.

Proven Process for Digital Products

I’ve used this process to sell millions of dollars’ worth of products over the last seven years. And it’s really simple. You find a product that’s already selling well, so that you have a proven idea before you go build something that isn’t going to work. You then tell Claude what you want to make. Have Claude ask you questions about how it thinks you could make a unique and original product. And then you have Claude build out the actual product for you.

You refine it with a little back and forth until you get something that’s high quality and actually valuable. And then you post it for sale on marketplace platforms like Etsy and TikTok shop, where you don’t have to worry about running paid ads to drive traffic to those products because customers come to buy those exact types of products on those marketplaces every single day.

Live Demo and Quality Check

And after a few minutes, you can see Claude took my prompt, and it built out this XLSX file, which I could add to my Google Drive to open up in Google Sheets, or I could open it up in Numbers. And if we just take a quick look at this, it even gives us a live demo right inside the Claude app. So, this is my modern wedding budget planner, and it looks pretty incredible for a first draft.

I can come over to the dashboard and see how it’s laid out and how it looks. We have a few lists here. If I expand, we can see all of the content. And we’ve got the actual budget tracker here as well. There’s a ton of different columns and rows and categories here, but the main thing is that it one-shot this product based on an extremely simple prompt that I gave it.

If I had spent even a little bit more effort on the actual prompt, we could have gotten an even higher-quality product here. And with a little bit more work, this would be something that we could post for sale. Even if you’ve never used Excel or Google Sheets before, let me know what you think in the comments. For a first version, I think it looks really good.

Using Skills for Business Operations

Now, outside of using Claude to build products that I’m directly selling to customers, skill files are helping me in all of the other business operations that I have. Now, you might be wondering, what even is a skill? So, essentially, it’s a type of file that your AI is going to reference when you’re completing specific tasks that you instruct it to.

So, if you just drop a prompt into your AI and you don’t have any skill reference file, the AI agent is just going to process it like it would any other prompt, and it’s going to give you a generic result based on that prompt. a skill file, which is called a skill.m MD, which is just a markdown type file, contains a bunch of instructions to your AI for when to trigger that skill, what to do when it’s triggered, some examples of the output, and most importantly, it gives it guardrails for how to behave when it’s using that skill. And the goal is just to get you more consistent, repeatable, and tailored results for repeated workflows.

Automated Customer Service with Skills

Now, one of the best examples of this is using skills to handle automated customer service agents. I’ve grown up several businesses over the last few years, and with any business, you’re going to get customer inquiries. For all of my businesses, we collect all of those inquiries through Google Workspace, specifically into a Gmail account.

And we can collect all of those emails through the Google API. What this essentially allows us to do is feed all of those emails to an AI agent. Now, if we just have the AI agent respond to all of those emails, it would essentially give them slop. It wouldn’t know how to respond to those customers because it wouldn’t have the proper context.

And that’s exactly where skills come into play because we can feed it all of the policies, all of the terms of service. We can feed it the tone and basically everything that it needs to know about that business, so that when it actually replies to the customer, it’s a sensical and rational response. So, we’re able to collect customer inquiries 24/7, pass them to an AI agent, and have it draft replies that are ready to send, all without any human intervention.

Value of Contextual Responses

The value here is not just the fact that it’s automated and can run 24/7, and that we get responses that are ready to hit send on. It’s the fact that all of those responses are curated based on our actual business. We can spend a lot less time modifying each email because the AI agent that’s drafting all of those responses has all of the context and knows exactly how to behave every single time it drafts an email.

If I didn’t have AI agents doing it, I would either have to pay someone to do customer service, or I would have to do it myself, which either way would cost me a lot of money.

YouTube Idea Scraper Skill

Hopefully, you can start to see the logic behind when to build skills and how to build them out. But one other skill that I wanted to share with you is this YouTube idea scraper.

This one’s really cool, and I actually got it from a friend of mine. I’ll try to leave their uh YouTube channel link in the description, but we can scan YouTube for outlier video ideas, which are just videos that have a really high amount of views relative to the subscribers on that channel. We then read through the comments to see what common ideas, struggles, or basic complaints the viewers have.

Automation and Scheduling Benefits

Now, the reason skills are particularly so useful is that you can schedule and automate them. So, not only can you get predictable results, but you can also have it run on autopilot without you.

The scheduling aspect is what makes this so powerful because every single day, I’ll wake up to a new database of fresh video ideas. So, if a specific video is doing super well, I’m going to see how much of an outlier it is, I can go read that video, and I can see if it’s a fit for my channel.

But more importantly, this agent’s going to read through the comments from all of these outlier videos, and it’s going to create a new database and give me additional ideas based on the comments from those videos. So, you can see it basically referenced in this case, we have like seven different videos here. It’s going to give me some high-level topics, but it’s also going to give me content angles that I could use for not only YouTube videos, but I could also use them for shorts, tweets, or any type of content imaginable. It’s organized them by niches that my content targets, different keywords that they hit on.

Harvesting Content Ideas

And it’s essentially just constantly harvesting all of these really high-quality ideas for me, and I get a fresh list every single day. There’s a ton of different applications for this, but obviously, since I’m a content creator and make a bunch of videos here on YouTube, it’s always helpful to see which specific videos are doing super, super well relative to the channel size.

And it’s even more helpful to see what people are struggling with or what they really liked in the comment section of those videos. And that’s what this skill does for me. The simplest way to think about skills is that they’re essentially just prompts saved in a special type of file that you can also schedule to run autonomously.

You can set these up really simply by just going into Claude Co-work and going into the scheduled section. It’ll walk you through building out the skill file as well as the schedule for that skill to run on. Then, once you get a little more comfortable, you can set up the actual automations that run inside of Cloud Code or set up some agents.

But we’ll save that for another article. There are some other really simple automations I have set up, like organizing my downloads folder. This will be organized every Friday at 5:00 p.m., and all of my downloads. I have the same one for my desktop, and that way I don’t just have a ton of files all over my desktop and in my downloads folder.

It’s a simple automation, but sometimes it’s a lot of little automations that make a big difference over time. Skills aren’t just powerful because they give you a predictable output. They’re also powerful because you can run them on a schedule. If you’re new to AI, this is probably one of the most important things for you to learn because these automated tasks are where you can save real time every single day.

Building Small Tools and Automations

Now, the third way that I’m using AI to make money is by building out small tools and automations. So, let me just show you how this works. In a new chat, I can say something like, “I need you to help me build out an invoice generator that I can use for my various businesses so that I can quickly generate an invoice and download it as a PDF.

” Once again, I’m going to answer a few of those questions just so it can figure out exactly what type of invoice generator I actually want to create. It’s going to think and then build me that tool. And just like that, we have a full invoice generator. It’s got my listing view business selected right here. But this would essentially just allow me to build out an invoice in real time.

So, we could add a custom name. We could change things like the price. So, maybe it was $80, and they bought four of them. There are a bunch of different fields that we can edit here. You can obviously customize these using Claude, but the most important thing is that we can generate this as a PDF.

Practical Tool Examples

And I can just open this in preview so you can see exactly what this would look like. It customized the name, the amount, and all of the invoice details we’d need. This is obviously a really simple tool, but the point is that I don’t have to go out and search for an invoice generator every time I need to do something as simple as making an invoice.

This wall art cropper was another example of a simple tool that I built right inside of Claude that just worked out of the gate. You can use AI to generate and sell wall art and digital download prints similar to those I was talking about earlier in the article. But when you sell a product like this, you typically have to crop it down into multiple aspect ratios so that your customer can print them in the exact size that they need.

And this tool lets you do exactly that. I’ve generated some art here in Midjourney. So, I’ll just download one of these paintings, and I can upload it directly into this tool, and it lets me automatically crop this painting into basically any aspect ratio that I want. I can hit generate crops. It’s going to process that image into five different sizes that I can download and upload to my listing, so that when I sell this specific painting, the customer gets access to download any aspect ratio that they need, depending on the size that they want to get it printed in.

Logic Behind Building Tools

Hopefully, you can see the logic behind building small tools. Now, sometimes it does make sense to buy a pre-made solution to your problem. But in other cases, where it’s such a niche problem that you might be trying to solve, it can make sense to build out a simple tool right inside of Claude that you can use over and over again, completely for free.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it makes sense to pay the money to get a more robust, fully built solution because Claude can’t one-shot a perfect tool every single time. You can ask yourself, if you keep doing a repetitive task, is this simple and repeatable enough that Claude might be able to build out a small tool for me? If the answer is yes, you can try building it out with Claude.

And if it’s not, then maybe it makes sense to look for a full-stack solution and just purchase it directly. Either way, this is a good exercise to get you thinking about how you can actually use AI in your everyday workflow. Even if you’re building out something small, it saves you 15 to 20 minutes every single day.

That time savings really adds up, and that’s why I’ve included it in our list. But I’m also curious to hear from you. So, let me know in the comments section what your favorite automation or way to use Claude is cuz I feel like even though I’m spending a ton of time in Claude every single day, I’m still barely scratching the surface.

But I hope you enjoyed. I hope you found something in this article valuable. And if you’re interested in AI, make sure you join my free AI community right below the subscribe button. I just opened it up, and I’m going to share all of the resources like the skill files and all the prompts that I’m using and absolutely everything that I know about AI, all in one place.

So if that interests you, you can check it out below.