Welcome back to this week’s Side Income Roundup, Monday, October 5.
This week is about working smarter with AI: using it to sharpen your thinking, seeing whether it surfaces your products, and knowing which pages it trusts to make a recommendation.
🧠 Why faster AI content just exposes weak thinking
🛒 See how often AI shopping answers show your products, free
🔍 Find how much of your site traffic is really bots
📦 An eBay ad test with a surprising winner
🤝 The review pages AI trusts when it recommends what to buy
Let’s get into it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
🧠 AI made marketing faster, not better
AI can turn out a week of content in an afternoon, but speed only exposes fuzzy thinking. Hand it a vague brief and it will confidently write something polished and off-target, without ever telling you what was missing.
The bottleneck was never typing speed, it’s decision quality. So before you prompt, get clear on who the piece is for, the one job it has to do, and how you’ll know it worked. Do that and AI turns from a fast writer into a sharper one.
Our Take: Before you ask AI to write your next email or product description, tell it who it’s for and what one action it should drive.
TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🛒 Google Merchant Center now shows your AI shopping visibility
A free report shows how often your products appear in Google’s AI shopping answers next to competing brands, so you can see whether AI shoppers are finding you or passing you by.
🔍 Microsoft Clarity sorts your bot traffic by page
Clarity’s new free view groups the bots hitting your site by page type, so you can tell how much of your traffic is real shoppers and which pages the crawlers are hammering.
Our Take: Open Merchant Center and check your AI share of voice, then turn on Clarity’s bot view so you’re optimizing for real shoppers, not crawlers.
TODAY’S QUICK WINS
📦 An eBay Promoted Listings test where not promoting won
A fresh side-by-side test found listings promoted at a 5% ad rate earned about 15% less each than the ones left alone. If you promote everything by default, you could be paying for sales you’d make anyway.
🚚 Mercari raises its shipping label rates on October 19
Mercari’s prepaid USPS, UPS and FedEx labels get more expensive from October 19, with some rates up more than 50%, which quietly eats into the margin on anything you ship after that.
Our Take: Re-test your eBay Promoted Listings rate against an unpromoted control, and if you sell on Mercari, print your labels before rates jump October 19.
FROM OMC
📝 Same Clicks, 2-3x the Commissions: The Bonus Stack That Wins Black Friday
Every affiliate pushes the same Black Friday deals with the same links to the same inboxes. This post shows the one lever you actually control that can pay two to three times more from the exact same clicks.
Our Take: Before Black Friday, add one bonus to the affiliate offer you’re already promoting so the same clicks can pay two to three times more.
AI SPOTLIGHT
🤝 86% of AI product picks cite a commercial source
When GetCited checked 106,000 links that ChatGPT, Google AI Overview and Perplexity cited for “best product” questions, most pointed to affiliate review and comparison pages, and 86% of answers leaned on at least one.
Our Take: Search “best [your product]” in ChatGPT and note which review sites it cites. Those are the exact pages to pitch for a mention.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK…
Here’s your short list this week:
🧠 Give AI the audience and the goal before you prompt
🛒 Check your AI share of voice in Merchant Center
📦 Re-test one eBay Promoted Listings rate against no promotion
🤝 Ask ChatGPT which review sites it cites for your product
Most take a few minutes, and the Mercari rate change is the one that costs you if you wait.
Talk soon,
Aidan
P.S. Next week, a Black Friday prep move most sellers leave until it’s too late to matter.
