5 AI Side Hustles for Busy Business Owners in 2024

Using AI to Create Content and Blog Posts

With your business taking up all your time and energy, it can feel impossible to take on a side hustle for extra cash. But in 2024, AI is opening up new opportunities that make side income more accessible for busy entrepreneurs like you. These AI side hustles let you leverage technology to make money with minimal effort on your part. In this article, we'll explore five of the best AI side hustle ideas that can work for your schedule and skills. Generating Leads and Marketing Campaigns With AI

AI tools are getting crazy good at generating blog posts and other content. As a busy business owner, why not put that technology to work for you? Here are a few ways AI can help create content for your company.Automated Blog Post Generation

AI writing assistants can generate draft blog posts for you based on a topic and headline you provide. The quality varies but the technology is improving all the time. Give the AI a shot at creating a first draft, then review and revise it as needed. This can save you hours of work and allow you to blog more frequently.

Repurposing Content

If you have a library of blog posts, whitepapers or other long-form content, an AI tool can analyze it and repurpose elements to create new pieces. For example, it may pull paragraphs from different posts to craft an entirely new article. Or it can rework sections into social media posts, infographics or video scripts. AI-powered content repurposing is an easy way to extend the reach of resources you've already created.

Optimized Content

AI can also help optimize your existing and new content for search engines and readers. Tools can analyze content and suggest ways to improve readability, add related keywords and include internal links between posts. Some AI writing assistants also provide suggestions on how to restructure or reword content to make it as compelling and impactful as possible. Letting AI optimize and refine your content is an simple step that can lead to big benefits.

AI may not be able to match human writers and content creators yet, but it can absolutely help generate drafts, repurpose resources and optimize content in valuable ways. As a business owner with limited time, using AI for these types of content creation tasks is a smart time-saver that lets you focus on the high-level work of developing your company's voice and mission. The future of AI and content is bright, so start experimenting today!

Building Chatbots to Provide Customer Service

AI can help busy business owners like yourself automate lead generation and marketing campaigns. Instead of manually researching your target audience and crafting campaigns, AI tools can analyze customer data to determine the best ways to reach new leads.

Identify Your Best Customers

AI examines your customer records and spots patterns to determine your ideal clients. It finds common attributes like location, age, income level and interests among your most loyal and highest-spending customers. AI then searches for lookalike leads with those attributes so you can focus your marketing efforts on the people most likely to become long-term customers.

Craft Targeted Campaigns

Once AI has identified your best potential leads, it can generate marketing campaigns tailored to them. AI may suggest promotions on social media platforms where your target audience spends time or recommend partnerships with complementary businesses that share the same types of customers. AI can even draft customized emails, social media posts and ads to send to your lookalike leads. All you have to do is review and approve the content.

Track Performance and Optimize

The best part about AI marketing is that the technology learns from the results. It tracks how people respond to your campaigns and uses that data to make improvements. If some messages or platforms don't resonate with your target leads, AI will try different approaches to increase engagement and conversion rates over time. AI may even discover new segments of your best customers that you can target for future campaigns.

While AI can handle much of the tedious work involved in lead generation and marketing, human oversight is still important. But by delegating the initial research and campaign creation to AI, business owners have more time to review, refine and optimize their marketing strategies. The end result is higher quality leads, more effective campaigns and ultimately, higher customer acquisition and retention rates.

Automating Administrative Tasks With AI Assistants

Providing 24/7 customer service is challenging yet crucial in today’s business world. As an entrepreneur, one solution is developing AI-powered chatbots to handle common inquiries and complaints around the clock. Designing the personality and responses

When building a chatbot, think about your brand’s personality and the types of friendly, helpful responses you want to provide customers. Do you want a casual, humorous bot or a more formal one? Determine the kinds of questions and issues your chatbot will handle, like order statuses, return policies or tech support. Create a list of possible customer questions and draft appropriate responses for your chatbot.

Choosing a chatbot platform

Next, you’ll need to choose a chatbot platform to build and deploy your creation. Many are low-code, requiring little technical expertise. Options like Anthropic, Chatfuel and Flow XO let you create bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, SMS and your own website. They offer templates, response libraries and integrations to get started quickly. Some platforms charge monthly fees while others are free to use.

Testing and optimizing

Once your chatbot goes live, monitor how customers interact with it and look for any issues. Track how people respond to different types of answers to see what’s most helpful. Make sure there aren’t any gaps where the chatbot fails to address a question. Update the chatbot to strengthen its knowledge and abilities over time based on these insights. Providing a seamless customer experience should be an ongoing process of learning and refinement.

With some work upfront designing your chatbot and choosing a platform, you can build an automated system to handle basic customer service needs. While not a replacement for human agents, chatbots are an efficient way to respond to simple inquiries, freeing you and your staff to focus on more complex client questions. The future is here, and AI is poised to change how we do business.

Developing AI-Powered Mobile Apps and Products

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. AI assistants can help take some routine administrative chores off your hands so you can focus on high-impact work. AI assistants use natural language processing to understand common requests and handle tasks like scheduling, emailing, and more.

Email Management

AI assistants can take over managing your inbox. They can filter emails, respond to common questions, and schedule emails to be sent at a specific time. An AI assistant may be able to handle 50-70% of your emails, freeing you up to focus on more important messages. They can also analyze your inbox to surface important emails you may have missed.

Calendar Management

Keeping your schedule organized is key to productivity, but it can feel like a full-time job. AI assistants excel at managing calendars. They can automatically schedule meetings, block off time for focused work, and suggest convenient meeting times based on attendees’ availability. Some AI assistants can even generate a daily agenda to keep you on track.

Expense and Invoice Processing

No one enjoys slogging through expense reports and invoices, but AI assistants can take over these mundane accounting tasks. They can categorize business expenses, flag any incorrectly submitted receipts, and even submit expense reports on your behalf. For invoices, an AI assistant can check that details like totals, dates, and PO numbers match before submitting payment.

While AI won’t replace your human employees anytime soon, AI assistants are adept at handling routine administrative work. Leveraging their skills can give you, as a business owner, precious time back in your day to focus on growing your company. AI may just be the side hustle you’ve been looking for.