Welcome back to this week’s Side Income Roundup, Monday, September 7.
The best feedback you’ll get this week isn’t in a survey, it’s already sitting in your reviews and support inbox. Plus two ad changes worth catching before October.
👂 The feedback that beats any survey you could send
🛒 Shopify starts feeding your products to AI shoppers, free
📹 Tag Amazon products right inside your YouTube videos
⚡ Microsoft Ads drops its cost cap on October 1
🤖 ChatGPT Ads just switched on automatic bidding by default
Let’s get into it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
📢 Stop measuring your brand and start listening
MarTech makes a sharp point this week: your real brand isn’t what your marketing claims, it’s what buyers actually experience. The most useful feedback isn’t a 1-to-10 survey nobody fills in, it’s what people write unprompted in reviews, comments, and your own support messages.
Those unsolicited notes are where the pattern lives. Read enough and the same complaint keeps surfacing, usually about shipping, returns, or something confusing at checkout. Fix the friction behind it, tell customers you fixed it, and you’ve done more than any survey score would.
Our Take: This week, skip the survey. Read your last 30 reviews and support messages, find the complaint that repeats, and fix that one thing.
TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🛒 Shopify now feeds your products to AI assistants
Shopify quietly built your catalog into a feed that tools like ChatGPT and Copilot can read, so your products can surface when a shopper asks an AI what to buy. Nothing to install.
🎨 Canva shipped 100+ free upgrades to its Visual Suite
You can now plan a whole promo in one free place: the brief in a doc, the numbers in a sheet, the deck, even a simple landing page, without paying for five separate tools.
Our Take: Spend twenty minutes in Canva’s free suite building your next promo end to end, then turn on Shopify’s catalog so AI shoppers can find them.
TODAY’S QUICK WINS
📹 YouTube lets you tag Amazon products inside your videos
US creators can now tag Amazon items directly in Shorts, long videos, and livestreams and earn a commission when viewers buy, instead of burying links in the description. YouTube’s own test found in-video tags drove over 110% more product clicks.
⚡ Microsoft Ads drops its cost-per-click cap on October 1
From October 1, new Microsoft search campaigns lose the Max CPC ceiling that keeps a hard lid on what each click costs. If you rely on it, set up a portfolio bid strategy before the date or the guardrail disappears.
Our Take: Post product videos? Link YouTube to Amazon Associates and tag your products this week. Running Microsoft ads? Set your cost cap before October 1.
FROM OMC
📝 How to Make Your First $200 Online This Weekend Without Buying a Thing
Most people learn to photograph, price, list, and ship for the first time after they’ve already sunk real money into Q4 stock. This runs the whole process this weekend on things already in your house.
Our Take: Before you spend a cent on Q4 inventory, run the whole selling process once this weekend on stuff you already own.
AI SPOTLIGHT
🤖 ChatGPT Ads switched on automatic bidding by default
OpenAI added a “Maximize Results” bid strategy to ChatGPT Ads Manager and made it the default for new ad groups, so you can be opted into automated bidding without touching a setting. It chases your goal but promises no specific cost per sale.
Our Take: If you run ChatGPT ads, open your bid settings now and test the default against a manual group before you trust it with your budget.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK…
Your moves this week:
👂 Read your last 30 reviews and fix the complaint that repeats
📹 Tag Amazon products in your next YouTube video
⚡ Set your Microsoft Ads cost cap before October 1
🤖 Check your ChatGPT Ads bidding isn’t on autopilot
One deadline, three improvements, and only the deadline stops being fixable if you leave it.
Talk soon,
Aidan
P.S. Next week, the one buying shift that’s quietly making your discounts work against you.
