7 Side Hustles That Will Make Thousands in 2026

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Happy Friday! It has been a hectic week, but I hope everyone is ready to take a short break for the holidays. There’s a lot to get into this week, so enjoy the content! If you find anything useful, respond to this email and let me know what caught your eye. I respond to everyone!

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🔥 Headlines of the Week

• 7 Side Hustles That Will Make Thousands in 2026

• McDonald’s AI Christmas Ad Backlash

• AI Ads Agents Are Here

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📈 7 Side Hustles That Will Make Thousands in 2026

1. AI Workflow Builder for Small Businesses

AI isn’t replacing businesses in 2026.
It’s replacing bad systems.

Every small business wants to automate scheduling, follow-ups, invoicing, reporting, and customer service. They just don’t know how.

You become the person who maps their workflow and sets it up in Zapier, Make, or ChatGPT Workflows. Charge $500–$2,500 per setup. Most businesses will keep you on retainer for updates.

This one is a goldmine.

2. Email Deliverability Consultant

Email is still the highest-ROI marketing channel, and most brands have no idea why their messages keep landing in spam.

If you understand warm-up, domain reputation, DNS records, list cleaning, and segmentation, you can charge $750–$5,000 for “fixing” someone’s deliverability.

Demand is exploding because everyone uses email and almost nobody understands the technical side.

3. Local SEO Specialist

Local businesses don’t care about backlinks or skyscraper content.
They care about showing up when someone Googles “chiropractor near me.”

Learn Google Business Profile optimization, local citations, map pack ranking factors, and review systems. Offer a $500–$1,500 monthly service.

It’s one of the easiest ways to stack recurring income in 2026.

4. Automation-Ready Newsletter Setup Service

Newsletters are becoming the new storefront.
But most creators and small businesses don’t know how to set them up correctly.

You build the landing page, lead magnet, welcome sequence, tagging, segmentation, and automation… then hand it off.

Charge $300–$2,000 per setup.
People are paying for the system, not the emails.

5. Client Onboarding Systems Designer

If you’ve ever worked with clients, you know 90% of headaches come from bad onboarding.

Businesses will pay real money for someone to build a clean, automated onboarding system using Notion, Airtable, Zapier, and forms.

You can package this as a $497–$1,500 service. Agencies will pay even more.

6. Niche Audit Business

Audit businesses are taking off.

You pick a niche:
Restaurant websites.
Chiropractor funnels.
Creator email systems.
Real estate Google profiles.
Gym social media ads.

You offer a paid audit ($97–$497), show them exactly what to fix, and upsell the implementation.

High trust. High demand. Low competition.

7. Community Builder (Paid Discord or Slack)

People are tired of endless social feeds. They want smaller groups of people who “get them.”

If you can build a tight micro-community around a specific topic—marketing, real estate, fitness, AI tools—you can charge $5–$25 per month per member.

Only 100 members = $500–$2,500 per month in recurring revenue.

2026 will be the year of small communities with high engagement.

Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays

Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.

Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.

Learn more.

Riddle break 🧠
I speak without a mouth and hear without ears.
I have no body, but I come alive with your words.
What am I?

(Answer at the bottom)

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🤖 McDonald’s AI Christmas Ad Backlash

McDonald’s rolled out an AI-generated Christmas ad last week.

It lasted about five minutes before the internet tore it apart.

The ad wasn’t “offensive”, it was just… off.

It felt hollow. It felt engineered. It felt like a brand choosing efficiency over emotion.

So they pulled it.

AI can write scripts and generate visuals, but it can’t feel the moment.

The human part of marketing still matters. In fact, it matters more now that AI makes content easier to produce.

The brands winning in 2025 aren’t using AI to replace creativity. They’re using it to amplify creativity.

So when you use AI for ads, storytelling, or brand campaigns, keep a human editor at the end of the assembly line.

Creativity still comes from people.

AI just helps you move faster toward the idea — not replace it.

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✍️ AI Ad Agency Are Here

The biggest shift in digital ads right now isn’t better dashboards or smarter automations.

It’s AI agents that actually manage campaigns the way a real media buyer would.

Fluency just raised $40M to accelerate this, and investors didn’t throw that money around for fun.

They’re betting on a future where brands use AI agents to run campaigns that optimize in real time, fix bad performance instantly, and adapt spend without waiting for a human to notice.

This is the beginning of ads that run themselves.

And the opportunity for smaller teams is huge.

You don’t need a full media department. You need a lightweight setup that lets AI run 80% of the operations while you focus on strategy and messaging.

If you want to test this today, start simple. Use AI to build variations of ad creative, generate targeting hypotheses, or run daily performance summaries. Then layer in automation tools that adjust budgets or pause underperformers.

You don’t have to go full “AI agent” on day one — but you should start behaving like you will.