if I had to make my first $1,000 online again in 2026, I wouldn't build a startup fyi: in August alone, I paid $37k to affiliates and creators who market my products with their content one of my users has even made over $75k just by setting up my $99/month product so here are the 5 things I'd do instead: 1. set up AI agents for boring local businesses a dentist doesn't want "an AI agent". he wants his phone answered, his reminders sent and his reviews replied to I run 8 agents across my own companies, and most local businesses still run zero At Squad, we have partners getting paid $3k every time they set up Squad for a client 🤯 (dm me if you want to do this btw) knowing 20 plumbers is what actually takes work 2. remake ads that already work, for businesses that can't make their own search your client's competitors in Revid's Meta and TikTok ad viral search and save only the ads that have been running for 30+ days nobody keeps paying for an ad that isn't working, so those are the proven winners remix those ads with Revid for your client, and they get to skip months of testing 3. get paid per view, not per follower on Clipatra, brands pay creators for every verified view. in the first 3 weeks of beta, creators posted 38 videos, got 500k views and earned $4,266, which works out to roughly $8.50 per 1,000 views you don't need a big account for this, you just need one video that works 4. promote the tools you already pay for most of that $37k I paid in August didn't go to professional marketers. it went to people who already used my products every day and just said so in public if you're paying for a tool you love, you're probably sitting on an affiliate link you haven't claimed yet 5. start a blog on one boring niche and let it pay rent pick a topic you’ve actually lived. it doesn’t need to be ambitious, it just needs to be something you understand better than almost everyone searching for it. it can be as simple as coffee. if you know coffee better than 99% of the world does, you can start a blog about it once the blog hits DR 30+ and 100+ clicks a month for 3 months straight, you can plug it into Outrank it finds the advertiser, writes a full article in your tone with one link inside and publishes it on your blog you get $1 per DR point per article, paid straight to your bank through Stripe so a DR 60 blog makes $60 an article. at 3 a day, that's up to $5,400 a month without you writing a single word