So, I’m writing this blog because I’m seeing a trend pop up lately that I consider to be the best business model to get into in 2026. Yet, it seems like no one’s talking about it. We’ve started seeing people make a lot of money through partnerships with micro creators leveraging AI.
Now, when I say micro creators, I’m talking about people with 20, 30, 40, 50,000 followers. I’m not talking about superstar celebrities, Instagram famous, TikTok, this that. No, we’re talking about micro creators. A place where most people aren’t even paying attention.
And by the way, this is so serious that at a company I’m a coowner in, where people earned almost $200 million on our platform in the last 30 days. 200 million a month. Right now, we’re at one like trailing L30 GM is um 176. We just rolled out a payments feature that makes this model even easier.
That is how much opportunity we’re seeing out there right now with this model. Which is why we built out a custom solution literally just for this function. In my opinion, this is the best business model leveraging AI to start in 2026.
Especially if you don’t want to show your face, if you don’t want to be some Tik Tok dancing monkey, if you have no previous experience and you are starting on a shoestring budget.
The Power of a Hungry Crowd
Now, before we get into the specifics and the details, I want to ask you a question. If you’ve been following me for a long time, I have been able to grow my business 8 years, year on year on year, which has never been done in this industry. And I did this by always focusing on one thing. What do you think that is? I’ll give you a few seconds.
So, I doubt that you guessed right. The answer is I focus on a hungry crowd. I focus on building an audience that is starving for what I offer. And let me park up and give you another real-world example of how this works in practice.
Let’s say you have a restaurant, okay? And imagine you have the best food, the best staff, but none of that is actually going to guarantee that you’re going to be the most profitable in town. You know what would guarantee it? Having a line of hundreds of people dying to get into your establishment.
Because the truth is, if you have hundreds of people who are hungry, you don’t even need the best food. You don’t need the best service. You could honestly be pretty mediocre at all that stuff and you would still make so much money. That is the power of a hungry audience. It trumps everything.
And that is why if I could choose any competitive advantage in business, it would be having a hungry crowd. And that’s exactly what the very smart people inside of Monetize realized.
Now, you might be going, “What does this have to do with anything? Why why are you telling me this?” I’ll explain.
Micro Creators Already Have a Hungry Crowd
Micro creators already have a hungry crowd. They’ve already done most of the difficult work for you. So, those that are smart and found this edge became what I call shadow operators.
And I call it this for a reason. These people stay in the shadows. They’re not dancing monkeys on Tik Toks doing all the trend dances and all that stuff. They’re not spending their entire day looking at their Instagram feed or deciding what thumbnail to post on YouTube. Someone else has done that for them.
So shadow operating is when you partner with these micro influencers with 20, 30, 40, 50,000 followers, maybe 78,000 followers. These are the creators with a hungry audience, an audience that knows, likes, and trusts them, but they’re not the mega celebrities, okay?
They’re not the people with 2 million followers that have agents and get snobbish and aren’t excited by new opportunities. These people want to monetize. They just don’t know how to.
If you want any proof, just go look at their Instagram bio. They’re probably going to have an affiliate link to some supplement or affiliate link to some cutlery set or they’re going to have their email for paid promotions or collabs. These people don’t know how to monetize.
So, what you do is you take this gold mine, which is their audience, all of this pent-up demand that they’ve created, and you help these micro creators monetize, and you share the profits.
Why Building an Audience Takes Too Long
Look, building a personal brand in this hungry crowd takes a long time. I can speak from experience. This is my 10th year on YouTube. In the first four years on YouTube, I did not make a penny. In fact, that’s a lie. I’ll put it up on screen cuz I mentioned in one of my other posts, I had a supplement sponsor. So, I think I was making like 100 pound a month and like £125 in free supplements.
So, I can tell you from experience, I was doing this stuff for 4 years, making zero money, not knowing how to monetize, getting some free supplements, yet I had this audience. You know, I was a micro creator 4 years into a journey and I just didn’t know how to monetize.
And if you guys are thinking, well, how do creators not know how to monetize? Because they’re creators. That’s like asking a chef why he doesn’t know how to DJ. They’re two different things.
Content creators are content creators for a reason. They like making content, okay? They like building an audience. They like building a micro personal brand. And they don’t want to think about monetizing. That’s why they monetize with like crappy little promos or like affiliate links that they post for other brands because they don’t want to think about it themselves.
They know how to create content. They don’t know how to sell anything.
Even Big Creators Struggle with Monetization
And by the way, it’s not even just the small creators. I see creators out there with millions and millions of followers scraping by with $5,000 a month with a tiny fraction of AdSense or whatever else these platforms pay them.
Now, even though you could actually help these people with millions of followers, we don’t want to work with those creators cuz it’s too competitive. Okay? They’re they’re too big. Even though they’re making no money, there’s actually far more opportunity with the micro influencers.
And just so you understand, in business, the biggest cost for most companies is actually marketing and advertising. Or if it’s not the biggest, it’s definitely high high up there. This is why this is such an incredible opportunity for you.
You stay in the shadows. You stay faceless. You don’t have to build an audience. All you do is partner with a micro creator and you help them monetize.
You Only Need One Partnership to Change Your Life
And what’s super cool about this is you just need one. Yes. Okay. You’re not selling a thousand products here. You’re not signing 20 clients. If you just work with one creator and help them monetize and take a cut, that’s enough to change your entire trajectory for 2026.
Obviously, being co-owner in I see so much data. We just recently crossed $2 billion earned on the platform. The first billion took four years. The second billion took 6 months and I can tell you people are going to be earning a billion dollars a month on the platform very very soon.
So the reason I say this is I know there’s a lot of shadow operators out there that personally make a million a month. Now of course they work with much bigger creators. It’s a bigger operation. In no way, shape, form, or fashion am I saying that that’s something that you’re going to accomplish. But just goes to show how far you can take this model.
What You’re Going to Help Them Sell
Now real quick, you might be wondering, okay, well, how am I going to help these people monetize? What are we actually going to sell?
I want you to be very observant as you watch YouTube, you go on Instagram, go look at the people that are making the most amount of money. What are they selling? Coaching, courses, some sort of digital product, some sort of ebook, some sort of mini tool, some sort of AI version of themselves for a subscription.
All of these people are selling knowledge. They’re in the knowledge business. And that is exactly what you are going to help these micro creators do. And you’re going to do it using AI.
And also, the beautiful thing is the reason they have their audience in the first place is because they’re experts or they’re passionate about a topic. They have knowledge about a topic. So, it’s very easy to package that up into an info product, a digital product, a coaching program, whatever it is.
A Real-World Example: The Numbers Breakdown
And I’m going to give you a real-world example here. Let’s take a creator with 30,000 followers. And let’s say that you don’t close this partnership at a 50/50 split. Let’s say you have a 70-30 split with this creator, as in they keep 70% and you only keep 30%.
And let’s say that instead of 2% of their audience buying, let’s say things go horribly and only 1% of their audience buys. Just to give you context, that means that 99% of the audience that knows, likes, and trust them. Remember, this isn’t someone with 7 million followers that has random people throughout the years, this is a tight-knit community.
And 99% of the community go, you know what? Actually, I don’t want to buy this. So, only 1% of their audience buys.
And let’s say you make the product very cheap. Now, in this space of coaching, courses, info products, digital products, selling anything for under $1,000 is considered cheap in the knowledge industry. So, let’s say you help them launch a product for $150.
Well, in that case, that’s 300 people buying a $150 product and that is $45,000 and that means $45,000 in earnings. Your portion $13,500 and that is from one partnership on month one.
That partnership keeps going. You think when that micro creator makes $45,000 in a month, they’re going to stop promoting and they’re going to stop selling the product that you guys built together using their knowledge combined with some AI tools that you’re going to bring to the table.
Why Would a Creator Partner with You?
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Well, why would a creator partner with me? Why would they not? Remember guys, we’re not being delusional here. We’re not saying, oh, you know, go to someone with $17 million followers and help them. And we’re also not saying go to someone who already is involved in the industry.
I’m not saying you go to someone who’s already making $5 million a year and help them make more money. Cuz remember what you’re doing in that situation. Let’s say a big creator is only making a million a year with their course, their digital product, their info product, however they structure their knowledge business.
Well, in that case, you basically have to take them from a 7 out of 10 to a 9 out of 10. And that’s a lot of work. Okay? You have to improve what they’re already doing.
But when you go with micro creators, you’re not selling, okay? You’re presenting a new opportunity. You’re helping them make money that they wouldn’t have had without you. When you tackle the part of the business that they don’t want to, which is monetizing.
And by the way, this is very easy to do these days with AI. We’re going to touch on it a little late. I’ll come back to that point, by the way.
Why This Model Works Better Than Ever in 2026
And also, if you want me to make more content about how to actually do this more like step by step, I know I asked you in one of the other posts. I’ll be honest, I’ve been super busy. As I said, we just crossed $2 billion earned. Things are going so crazy. We’re expanding so quickly. It’s just like there’s honestly no better market in the world that you can get into it.
Now, I’m not telling you become an expert, build a personal brand. No, we’re being realistic here. We’re letting someone else do what they’re good at, making the content, being the expert. You’re just a person in the shadows helping them monetize using AI.
So going back to my point about micro creators, you’re genuinely changing their life here, okay? You’re presenting a new opportunity, which is also cool because it means you’re not selling. Okay?
I actually did this business for about six years, but I did it a little differently. I ran it as an agency. So, I actually had to sell clients because we were charging a monthly fee, in which case that takes a lot of work. I wish going back now, I knew what I knew. And instead, I did this shadow operating model because we basically did this work, but we acted as an agency rather than a shadow operator.
And by the way, also when I used to do it, I had a full-time team that I had on payroll. It was expensive. Point is, when I did it, AI didn’t exist, so it was a lot trickier.
The Three Main Advantages of Shadow Operating
So, as I said, it’s so cool because we basically have the scenario where you don’t have to sell them. You’re actually presenting an opportunity that they’re excited about.
Number two, they already have the audience that knows, likes, and trusts them.
Number three, you now have specialized AI tools that will do the entire marketing and launch strategy for you. You have incredible payments platforms like my company, where you can literally get paid out your fair share.
Remember how we talked about 70-30 split? When a $100 comes in, you can automatically have $30 sent to your and $70 sent to their So that way you get your shadow operator cut straight away without having to ask them for money at the end of the month, which back when I was running my agency was one of the most annoying things because it’s kind of like paying taxes, even though the money was never yours.
The act of returning it is painful. Okay? So that way when you get your cut automatically through our payment system, it just changes absolutely everything.
Why I Changed My Mind About This Model
And I also just want to touch on something because I was super against this model for years. I’ll be honest with you. And the reason I was against it was because of my experience running an agency where I had a full-time copywriter. I had a CMO. I had a a junior media buyer, a senior media buyer.
So, I did not have AI. I also had to sell because remember my clients were paying monthly. So, that’s a lot of pressure. And also, we were doing more complicated things like ads and funnels and all this stuff.
All you’re doing is basically going to these micro creators using these specialized tools basically babysitting them so that way they can create their knowledge offer. And then from there, AI does the entire marketing roll out for you.
And the thing is for our clients, we were running ads whereas you’re not going to touch that. It’s way too complicated. It’s too risky. It’s more of an advanced thing.
Once again, remember there are shadow operators, I know many that are making more than a million a month in income. Okay, that’s not normal. That’s not regular. That’s on the advanced scale. These individuals, they’re doing things like that.
The Realistic Goal for Most People
I know for most people in 2026, they just want to quit their job. They don’t care about driving around in Rolls-Royces and flying around in private jets. And to be honest, I don’t blame you. I can tell you from experience the biggest life-changer is once you start making 10 grand a month everything after that nothing compares trust me.
So back to my point this wasn’t possible before. AI has changed everything and not enough people are doing it. I’m seeing a lot more people see the opportunity with the big creators but people are ignoring the micro creators and that is where the real money actually is and that’s also where this becomes realistic for you as a beginner.
In good faith I couldn’t sit here and go yeah reach out to someone who’s already making $500,000 a month with this or someone with 6 million followers. like, okay, that’s just not very realistic.
But helping micro creators monetize through a digital product or an info offer using the power of AI in 2026, nothing comes close.
Tens of Millions of Opportunities Are Waiting
So, please really understand and take this in that there are tens of millions of micro creators that are perfect for this. And once again, I want you to think outside of maybe your interest and understand there’s a micro creator with 37,000 followers that all they talk about is matcha. That’s it.
All they talk about is coffee. All they talk about is jiu-jitsu. All they talk about is playing the harmonica. But even their 37,000 followers, even though it’s not millions, you need to understand that’s 37,000 people that know, like, trust them, and are interested, fascinated in what they talk about every single day.
And all you have to do is not sell them, but present them an opportunity that could change their life. And from there, you take your fair share, which could be 70-30, or you know what, when you start, it could even be 90-10.
But listen, in the first month, who cares? 10% of 50 grand is still better than nothing. And as you get more and more experience as a shadow operator, eventually you’ll be doing 50/50 splits. And in fact, I even know a lot of shadow operators where they get majority because they’re further on in their career. They’re the ones with the experience and creators are begging them to work with them.
