But How Can I Make Money Online?
When you have no clue what to sell or offer, this is the first move.
I get this question every week.
"Liz, how do I make money online?"
The person asking is almost always smart. They have a real job. They've thought about this for months. Sometimes years.
But they're stuck.
Here's the thing nobody tells you. The reason you're stuck isn't that you're missing some secret. It's that you're trying to answer the wrong question.
"How do I make money online?" feels like the right question. It's the question on every YouTube thumbnail. Every Substack post. Every TikTok side-hustle reel.
But it's the wrong question.
The right question is much smaller. Much simpler.
Who can I help?
That's it.
If you can answer "who can I help and what would they pay me to fix," everything else lines up. The product. The price. The marketing. The AI tools. All of it just follows.
If you cannot answer "who can I help," nothing else matters. You'll build the wrong product. Pick the wrong price. Send the wrong marketing. Burn 6 months. Quit.
This article fixes that.
By the end of this you'll have one line that tells you who you're helping and what their problem is. That one line is your niche.
Yes. You. By the end of this article. One line. Done.
I'll walk you through it. Slowly.
First, what is a "niche"?
A niche is just the kind of person you help.
Like "first-time moms." Or "new realtors." Or "engineers who want to quit their corporate job."
It's NOT "everyone." It's NOT "small business owners." It's NOT "people who want to make money."
Those are too big. Too broad. Too vague.
A real niche is small. Specific. You can picture one person in your head when you think about it.
Got it? OK, keep going.
Why "everyone" is the wrong niche
Imagine you walk into a coffee shop and yell, "DOES ANYONE HAVE A PROBLEM I CAN HELP WITH?"
Nobody answers. Right?
Now imagine you walk into a coffee shop and say, "I'm here for the new moms struggling to get the baby to sleep. I figured out a 30-minute trick that worked on my own kid. Free to anyone who wants it."
Three new moms walk over.
That is the difference. Smaller is bigger.
When you pick a small specific group of people, they recognize themselves. They listen. They pay.
When you pick "everyone," nobody hears you.
This article is for you if
You want to make money online but you don't know what to sell.
You've thought, "I'd start a business, but I have no idea what."
You keep starting and stopping. You can't pick a lane.
You're scared of picking the wrong thing.
You've tried before and got overwhelmed.
If any of those is you, keep reading.
I'm not selling you a course. I'm not telling you to go all-in. I'm walking you through one question. One simple thing.
Pick the people. The money follows.
Why trust me on this
I've picked niches that worked. I've picked niches that flopped.
The flops taught me what to skip. The wins taught me what to lock in.
The 5 AI prompts below are the exact prompts I use today when I'm picking a new lane. Not a course version. Not a "for beginners" simplified version. The real ones.
Behind the paywall (what you'll get)
I'm going to walk you through, step by step:
The 3 things that make a niche profitable, with real examples
5 AI prompts you can copy, paste, and run tonight
A 48-hour plan, literally hour by hour, to find and validate your niche
The 6 wrong-niche traps that waste 6 months
The exact non-salesy DM you can send to 3 strangers to validate your niche
Plus, what you get as a paid sub
Every article in the One-Person Empire series, full thing including the paid sections
Monthly receipts: what I shipped, what it cost, what made money, what didn't
Every Notion template, swipe file, and checklist I publish
The full prompt library I use every day. This article's 5 prompts plus dozens more.
Early access: paid subs see new articles 7 days before free subs
If you want the prompts you can paste into Claude tonight, paid subs get the rest.
Paid subscribers get the rest: the prompts, the 48-hour plan, the offer test, and the exact next move.