The traditional playbook is not dead. But the economics have changed, and the people who taught it have changed with them. A few years ago, the standard advice for making money online fitted on a postcard. Pick a topic you care about. Build a site. Publish useful content. Earn affiliate commissions, ad income, or both. Add an email list. Repeat. That advice built a lot of businesses, and it built IncomeDiary. Other routes ran alongside it: online courses, software, authority sites in tight niches, sponsorships. Michael Dunlop’s PopUpDomination is a good example from the software side. When Pat Flynn interviewed him on the Smart Passive Income podcast in October 2010, Michael had just launched it as a premium WordPress plugin for bloggers. It found one specific problem, getting more email subscribers, and built a tool for it. So is that world over? Not quite. But anyone who tells you AI has changed nothing, or that it has changed everything, has not looked at the numbers. 1. ...