Welcome back to this week’s Side Income Roundup, Monday, June 1.
This week is about where your buyer is actually doing their research before they hit buy, and the small, decisive moves you can make on four different platforms before Friday rolls around.
📢 Reddit just dropped a small business marketing guide that doubles as a buyer-research map
🛠 A free tool that shows you how AI search engines see your store, plus one-click SMS automation in Shopify
⚡ Fresh ad tools out of TikTok World, plus two quiet Shopify levers worth flipping today
📝 Last week’s “$1,000 from 100 subscribers” email playbook
🤖 Anthropic just launched Claude for Small Business
Let’s get into it.
THIS WEEK’S BIG IDEA
📢 Reddit just released a small business marketing guide
Reddit just released a 13-page guide showing small businesses how to tap into the subreddit communities where shoppers do their pre-purchase research, and Reddit’s ad revenue is up 74% year over year off the back of all that buying intent.
The bigger pull for OMC sellers is that Reddit threads now feed AI search answers too, so showing up in the right subreddits puts you in front of buyers today and makes your brand visible to ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews tomorrow.
Our Take: Pick a subreddit that matches what you sell, spend 15 minutes reading the top posts, and note the exact phrases buyers use so you can mirror them in your next product page.
TOOLS OF THE WEEK
🛠 EZ Texting in the Shopify App Store
A one-click install with pre-built SMS automations for abandoned carts, welcome flows, order confirmations, and shipping updates running out of the box.
🛠 AIOverview.com — free AI search visibility tool
A new free tool where you drop in your store URL and get a 1-50 visibility score plus a side-by-side breakdown of how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview describe your brand.
Our Take: Drop your store URL into AIOverview.com this week and see whether AI search engines even mention you, then flip on EZ Texting in Shopify to claw back the carts you’re losing.
TODAY’S QUICK WINS
⚡ Major ad tool announcements from TikTok World 2026
Smart+ gains manual controls plus a Music Autofix that stops flagged audio from killing campaigns, and new Search Hubs give brands a destination page on TikTok’s search results.
⚡ Shopify quietly upgraded discount scoping and per-channel variants
Shopify now lets merchants scope discounts by market, region, sales channel, retail vs B2B, or online vs POS, and publish or unpublish individual product variants per channel without duplicating the product.
Our Take: On Shopify, scope a 10% promo to one country and unpublish your weakest variant from its slowest channel; on TikTok, open Smart+ and turn on the new manual controls so the algorithm stops draining budget.
FROM OMC
📝 3 Emails That Turn 100 Subscribers Into $1,000
Last week’s post breaks down the 3-email sequence that turns a tiny list of 100 subscribers into $1,000 in sales, plus the one email pattern almost nobody sends that does most of the selling.
Our Take: Don’t wait until you have 10,000 subscribers to start emailing. Pick one offer, plan three emails this weekend, and send the first one to whatever small list you already have.
AI SPOTLIGHT
🤖 Anthropic just launched Claude for Small Business
Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business this month, packaging 15 ready-to-run agentic workflows plus connectors to HubSpot, Canva, QuickBooks, and Google Workspace inside a standard Claude subscription with no extra fee.
Our Take: Pick the task that drains your week and run a Claude workflow against it. Connect HubSpot or Canva, fire the lead-triage flow once, and see what it produces before you commit to a full setup.
UNTIL NEXT WEEK…
Here’s your move this week:
✅ Spend 15 minutes reading the top posts in two subreddits that match what you sell
✅ Drop your store URL into AIOverview.com and check your AI search visibility
✅ On Shopify, scope a country-only promo and unpublish your slowest variant from your worst channel
✅ Try one Claude workflow on the task that’s been draining your week
Small operators don’t win by doing more this year, they win by quietly showing up first in the places everyone else is sleeping on.
Talk soon,
Aidan
P.S. This Wednesday I’m sharing the one checkbox at checkout that quietly adds $1,800 to a six-thousand-dollar month, including where to put it so buyers actually tick it. Keep an eye on your inbox.
