The Most Overlooked AI Side Hustle Of 2026 - Ep. #328

Mike Stewart (0:00)

We've made millions of dollars. I don't see anybody else doing this. 300 customers is a million dollar business, and every bit of it can be outsourced. It's a great side hustle. This year, for the first time in my life, everything that I have been doing that took my skill set can be done by AI, and it's scalable. It's never been scalable before. We created a simple website with one call to action, and we went from zero to 80 grand this summer.

Chris Koerner (0:27)

Holy cow. From that new website?

Mike Stewart (0:30)

Well, that's a one-page website.

Chris Koerner (0:35)

So I just ran across the godfather of the internet marketing world. He's a baby boomer. He flew here to my house in Texas from his house in Nashville to talk to me all about making money, selling a very specific thing to local business owners, or if you're already a local business owner, how you can explode your business through a little clever tactic that I've never heard of anyone doing. It's simple.

It's based on human psychology, and it just works. A few years ago, you needed to pay thousands of dollars and have a bunch of studio equipment like this to make it work. But now you can use AI tools to make it happen. Please enjoy. So tell me what your business is.

Mike Stewart (1:13)

The business that, well, I have multiple businesses, but the main business that I have been doing for about 15 years is helping small local service businesses. And what I mean by service business is a tire store, a pest control, HVAC, roofing. Businesses that they have, people have a problem. My roof is leaking, my toilet is leaking. I got bugs in the house. That's a problem. And they need to find somebody they know, like and trust, or at least trust, that's going to solve their problem. And then they're willing to do business with it. So it boils down to the basics of most local, small service businesses. Don't think in the lines of traffic and conversion. Traffic and conversion is not that geeky of a term, but at the end of the day, I actually make it as simple as possible. Traffic is people who find you on whatever device they're looking, which is 90% cell phones for local businesses. And when they find you, are they within three seconds of finding you, convinced that you're the person to do business with? So that's conversion. The conversion that a local business needs is that this guy has a leaky toilet, I'm the plumber to fix it, let me call and book an appointment to solve my problem, then that turns into a conversion of business.

Chris Koerner (2:29)

So give me an example of a customer you have and what problem you solve for them.

Mike Stewart (2:34)

That I solve or the problems they solve?

Chris Koerner (2:36)

Either one.

Mike Stewart (2:37)

Well, the problem that I see that is so massive is that, and of course, web designers will probably not like hearing this, but most people build award-winning websites. And what they don't build is high converting websites. You can, when the bounce rate for most local business websites is 90%, they never go deep past the first page. Some people don't even go past the Google business profile.

Chris Koerner (3:00)

And just so our viewers are aware, a bounce rate is the percentage of people that hit a website, never click through to that website and just end up leaving, right?

Mike Stewart (3:07)

Well according to the new Google stats, anybody who doesn't stay 10 seconds is a bounce.

Chris Koerner (3:12)

Even if they click to another page?

Mike Stewart (3:14)

If they click to another page, that's considered not a bounce. So it's kind of like, let's leave this place, let's bounce out of here. That's what it means. So the point being is, if you got somebody to your marketing information, if you don't convince them to stay longer than 10 seconds or take another action like look at another page or tap to call or any of those other conversion strategies, then you're considered a bounce rate. And how you got them there, there's only three ways to get people to your website, paid traffic, organic, free traffic, or borrowed traffic, an affiliate or somebody else sends you to your website. And so small businesses in the masses don't understand traffic and conversion. So it's like you could get a lot of people to your local business website, but if somebody's confused and they don't understand who you are and why you're the best at what you do, and something that convinces them that the data's out there, they're going to bounce.