Why Getting Sales & Traffic Is Now On "Easy Mode"

[00:00:00]What if I told you that people are getting rich by starting new businesses and new side hustles despite having no pre-existing social media following and no money to buy ads or pay for marketing. Seriously, it's kind of crazy, but there are now new AI-powered traffic algorithms that you can piggyback off of. Because if we're just being honest here, I reckon that the true bottleneck holding most people back from business success isn't that they don't know how to start a business, it's that they don't know how to market it to make it successful. Because seriously, if you want to start a business, there are plenty of videos here on YouTube, including admittedly my own videos, that'll happily give you lots of ideas for ways that you could start one or start a side hustle, especially with AI tools. For example, like me, you could start an Etsy store and sell products.

[00:00:47]Or you could vibe code an app and make subscription or affiliate sales. Or you could start a faceless TikTok or YouTube channel and make money from ads. But here's the thing, most people aren't stuck for ideas for businesses. Instead, the part that they struggle with most is traffic. How do you actually get people to buy stuff like your t-shirts? I've seen so many people not even try to start a business because this question is paralyzing them. How do you get people to see your products? How do you get people to watch your videos? And it's a fair question because before there were AI algorithms to piggyback off of, popularity bias made getting traffic extremely hard. And if you don't know what that is, popularity bias, it's just another way of saying that before AI, all the big platforms like YouTube, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Amazon, TikTok, Etsy, all of them, would only recommend contents or products that were already popular. Like take Etsy for example, previously, when you came here and did a search for something, the search results heavily favored stores with thousands of pre-existing reviews, which made breaking in as a new seller very difficult. Because let's say that you created a new Etsy print-on-demand store selling fun t-shirt designs. Well, since your store was new and it had no reviews and no sales, Etsy wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but you think about it. Without Etsy recommending your store to anyone, it meant then that it also never had a chance to get those reviews or to get those sales.

[00:02:08]Essentially, it was an impossible chicken and egg situation. Without traffic, you can't get popular, but the only way that you can get popular is if you were given traffic. And so, you only had two real ways to get around this problem. One way was to already be rich and to have a lot of money so that you could spend it on paid ads to force sales and force popularity. Or another way was to already have a big social media following yourself on one platform, like say on Instagram, and direct reach your followers to go and watch your videos on other websites, like say YouTube, to force popularity on there. But now, everything has changed because new AI traffic algorithms have, in my opinion, made getting traffic much easier, even if you are a new content creator or you are a new store. And to understand why, to keep things interesting, let's use YouTube as our example this time since they recently released a research paper confirming that Google's AI is now integrated into its recommendation algorithm. And this has been making a huge difference. In YouTube's old algorithm, if you released a video on a new account with no followers, it would get no views. So, YouTube would not share it since it was not popular. So, it would die immediately. But now, when you release a new video on a new channel, Google's AI will use its artificial intelligence to scan your video. It will try to figure out who out of their 2.8 billion users might want to click on your video and watch it. And it will select a small group of test viewers, and it will put that video in front of them in their home page and video recommendations to see if they will click on it or not.

[00:03:41]There is a name for this process, and it's called test impressions. And here is the crucial part. If during this test phase, people scroll past your video and don't click on it, YouTube's algorithm will stop recommending it. But, if people from your test cohort do actually click it and enjoy it, your video moves up to the next phase. The AI will now expand your test group to a bigger group of people, and it will show your video to these people recommending it to them on their home page as a video that they might like to watch. And if those people click it and actually watch it, then the AI algorithm will keep expanding it, showing it to more and more people. And this is why getting traffic is now well and truly, in my opinion, on easy mode.

[00:04:23]Because YouTube's AI algorithm now does this for every single video. Every video now has a fair chance to go viral, and it doesn't matter if you, the creator of that video, has no social media following. And it doesn't matter if you have not paid for ads. Every video that is now released on the platform has a chance to go viral for free, which means that starting a successful YouTube channel is no longer gatekept to people who already have a following or who can pay for initial traffic. It's game-changing. And actually, there is a technical name for this type of algorithm, if you're nerdy like me, and it's called a multi-armed bandit recommendation algorithm. TikTok, I believe, was the first to really push this out, and it worked because it's a genius system. Because one of the previous problems with the old algorithm system of showing popular content or popular products to people was that it would be a bit fatiguing for users.

[00:05:17]They'd see the same products, the same videos, or the same content creators over and over again, and they'd get bored. So, test impressions are a huge win-win. They allow all the big content platforms or marketplaces, like Etsy, Instagram, X, TikTok, Amazon, Facebook, Google, all of them use their own version of a multi-armed bandit AI recommendation algorithm. This lets them find fresh new content creators and fresh new products to promote. For example, on Etsy, it'll do this by artificially boosting products it's testing on their app and home page personalization results page and within their search results. And if you want to see this in action, you can check out my case study where I opened a new Etsy store selling print-on-demand clothes focused on dogs that I designed with AI tools. And within 2 weeks of launching that store, despite it having no reviews and me not using any social media to promote it, I got two sales fast by piggybacking off of Etsy's multi-armed bandit AI algorithm. So, yeah. This is the best strategy I reckon right now for getting free traffic to your new business venture. Pick your favorite platform, then pick a niche to target, then try your best to create the best content school products within the niche, and then let the AI algorithm test it and find your audience for you.

[00:06:31]That's it. And actually, speaking of my stores, that reminds me of today's video sponsor, me. Yes, as my subscribers know, I am super picky with sponsors since there are so many shady ones. So, if I fail to find a trustworthy sponsor for a video, I'll just sponsor it myself, which is what I'm doing today to let you know that, if you were not aware, I have a free ebook which shares the six steps that I used to build my successful AI print-on-demand stores.

[00:06:57]So, if you'd like to get a copy of my free ebook, I'll include a link to it in the video description below. Plus, I also have a program called the Econ Clubhouse where I share in-depth tutorial videos along with my exact AI prompts and workflows that I am using in my business. And as a bonus, if anyone signs up for my free ebook today, as a special thank you, I will give all new readers an optional one-time coupon that lets you join the Econ Clubhouse for 7 days for just $1. But yes, sponsorship over, now back to the video. And onto three very important tips that I want to give you if you do want to try out the strategy for yourself. And my first tip is this. When you're just starting out with a new account, it's going to take time for an AI algorithm to figure out who your products or your content is for. And to show you why, let's come back to YouTube as our example for a moment. So, let me show you something. A while back, I secretly started a new YouTube channel as a test, and here's what happened. When I posted my second video to the channel here, you can see that YouTube tested some traffic on it, but it was a flop. The video died, but I didn't give up. I knew that each time I posted a video, I was triggering a new algorithm test. So, I stayed persistent, and I kept posting new videos until 3 weeks later, my persistence paid off. I posted my fifth video to the channel, and look, it was a small success. This was the first video I posted that actually had some real proper success.

[00:08:20]And this was very important because by having one video finally pass a test, it gave the AI algorithm some data. It now knew who my videos should actually be shown to. So, guess what it did? It went back and tested my old videos on this new audience that it found, and it worked. That second video that posted weeks ago that had flopped, now got tested on this new group of viewers that the algorithm found, and it went viral within them, monetizing my channel. But here's the thing, right? I could have posted a hundred videos, and if all of them were bad or boring to watch, none of them would have ever passed the test impression phase, and all of them would have flopped since people would have quickly turned them off after watching the first few seconds of them. So, persistence is not enough. Your videos or your content still needs to actually be good enough for people to click it, buy it, read it, or watch it when it's shown to the right group of people.

[00:09:15]Although, I can imagine a lot of you are now thinking, "Okay, Sarah. I thought you said that getting traffic was now on easy mode, and coming up with good content or products people want to watch, buy, and click on, well, that sounds hard." Which is fair enough. So, I'll tell you what, I found that it's much easier to create products or content that people want if you focus on low competition niches. So, to keep things interesting in this video, let's pick a different business as our example this time. We're going to go with Notion team plates on Etsy. Now, this is a very popular product on there. So, as you can imagine, it's attracted a lot of copycats, making it a very high competition niche to compete in. So, if you were to just go and copy the same Notion templates that everyone else is trying to make and sell, it's going to be really hard to stand out in the crowd, which is why it is much easier to pick a niche to make content or products in that's low competition. To identify these, you can use any AI LLM such as Claude. So, for example, I asked Claude here to do market research in the parenting niche for me to identify customers who are being neglected and who want to buy more digital products tailored to them. And check it out. The research report it prepared for me was very interesting because one of the gaps that it identified in the parents digital product space was that step parents felt like there were very few good digital products designed to help them. And when I did a search for it on Etsy, guess what I found? There were Notion templates specific to step parents. And so, here's what I did. To make this, I came back to Claude and I asked it to do research to identify what a Notion template specific to step parents should include in it. And I asked it to then create a Notion AI prompt for me. And that's exactly what it did. It completed the research and it made a Notion AI vibe code prompt for me. So, I copied this prompt, then I opened up Notion, and I pasted in this prompt to its AI chatbot and I let the AI do its magic. A lot of people don't know this, but Notion has an AI bot that can vibe code templates for you if you prompt it right. So, yeah, it was pretty cool. It created my template for me along with the databases for my template, too. And so, you think about it, right? If we were to now go and sell this on Etsy now, we will by default be the very best step parent Notion template because we will be the only one on the market. So, if you don't yet feel confident in your ability to create products or content, you can always instead just focus on finding low competition niches instead. And actually, this leads me on to the next very crucial tip, which is this. The best way to optimize your products and content for AI algorithms is to use AI itself to do it. So, let's take a stick parenting Notion template that we made before. We use AI to research the idea for it and to then create it. And now we're going to use AI to optimize it for the Etsy algorithm because remember, when we list it for sale, the way that these new multi-banded algorithms work is they will scan our product and try to pick a small group of customers to show it to as a test. And passing this test is important. So, it's in our interest to try and make it as easy as possible for the AI to be able to correctly guess who our target customers are. And there are two ways to do that. The first is to niche down like we already did. We picked the super specific niche, stick parents. The more specific your product or content is, the easier it is for the algorithm to figure out who in its user base will like it. But secondly, we can also package our products or content in a way that is AI-friendly. So, to do that for this Notion template, we can come to an LLM like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude like I've done here and get it to write our title and description in a way that makes it easy for an AI algorithm to understand who it's for and to maximize our chances of success.

[00:12:59]So, then, I hope that this video has inspired you. And if you'd like to learn about even more ways that people are starting online businesses using AI tools like Claude, be sure to check out my next video here on screen, and I will see you in the next video.