Do you want to start a business and make money with chatbots? If YES, here are 20 best ideas and opportunities for making money with chatbots.
A chatbot can be literally seen as a piece of software that conducts a conversation via voice or text methods. But technically, a chatbot is an artificial intelligence powered application, which converses with a human being to solve a problem or to answer a certain query.
The most dominant factor in these definitions is communication, so chatbots are basically virtual assistants that communicate with us through text messages. They are also virtual companions that are integrated into websites, applications or instant messengers that helps entrepreneurs to serve their customers efficiently and effectively.
These bots are so efficient that some of them are able to perform complex tasks such as placing orders, editing shipping details, updating billing information, and changing account information. To be very effective, chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner.
Chatbot have an application in virtually all businesses, but the question now is, can you make some good profit out of this hot new B2B trend? The answer is yes, and there are various ways this can be done.
Best Chatbot Business ideas
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Use Chatbots for Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing program where you promote the products of other companies by the means of your own product and earn money out of it.
You can monetize your chatbot through affiliate marketing. When someone interacts with the chatbot and requests where to find certain items, your chatbots can refer users to affiliate links, and when they make a purchase, you can get an affiliate commission.
Affiliate marketing is an easy market for chatbots. If your chatbot solves a specific problem, you can add affiliate links in it, and allow your chatbots do the work.
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Use Chatbots for Advertising
If you are looking for a way to make money from the use of chatbots, or to even supplement your chatbot income, then it would be through advertising.
If you embed your chatbot to a landing page, you can place ads around it. These may be PPC (Pay Per Click ads, like Google Ads), affiliate or sponsored ads. You can make revenue from ad views or clicks. This works great because one thing that chatbots do best is using data.
By monitoring users experience and following shopping patterns, you can offer paid commercials to be sent to your users targeted to them individually and personally. Ads can be tailored to a specific moment in a conversation, offering a coupon or companion product at just the right time to perfectly engage a customer. Chatbots do great with pushing adverts at the right time.
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Sell chatbot services to your clients
Chatbots provide a lot of function for businesses, so you can sell chatbot services to your clients and make good money. For businesses, chatbots can save costs and even improve the availability of services to clients for businesses. Chatbots can not only help support agents, but also generate leads and sales, assist developers, and reply to accounting issues.
You can create a chatbot outline, adapt it to a bunch of different companies then sell it to them. You can make a Dollar amount for the sale, and receive recurring revenue for updates, ongoing support, new features and further adapting the chatbot to each business’s specific needs.
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Give the Chatbot Away for Free, and Monetize sub-services
It may sound strange to give away your chatbot services for free, but that may do you good than putting the up for a high amount for it initially. If it helps people, generates leads or sales, you can then request extra commissions on sales.
Think wordpress. They offered a free service and monetize other sub-services. You can do that too with your chatbot. If your chatbot is efficient and you manage to negotiate good margins, your chatbot can generate substantial income for you.
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Create Chatbots for Conversions Landing Pages
A chatbot can also be used to lead people to a landing page where they can buy products and pay for services. You can conveniently place the landing page in conversational messages as a link, and then users can follow that link to a landing page.
However, you have to be careful about the way you integrate these links into the conversation to ensure that customers do not find it spammy.
Providing excellent service should always be your main focus. The better the interaction with the bot, the more likely someone will click through. Treat the conversation as if they were talking to a helpful agent. This would help you get more engagement and turn more sales.
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Create Chatbots for Conducting Surveys
Some bots can even carry out surveys. These bots can collect a lot of information about web users. This information can be very useful to some corporations, and they can readily pay for it, which can obviously bring good income. For instance, if you get data about financial behavior among clients, you can sell it to financial firms for cash.
Surveys can be carried out to collect information to be resold to companies, or to collect information for specific companies. In either case, you can receive a commission for each time someone fills in a survey. This is one of the ways you can make money off your chatbots.
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Use Chatbots to Generate Leads
Chatbots can also be used to generate leads, and a lot of businesses are taking note of this right now. Lead generation businesses are thriving like never before. Extending the conventional web Business model to the domain of chatbots, it is eminently possible to monetize chatbots by positioning them as lead generation platforms.
If you have a chatbot that answers questions about HVAC for example, and the person doesn’t find the specific answer they need form the bot, it can ask the user where they are located and generate a lead for a local HVAC company. The lead can then be resold for an excellent commission.
You can even automate the entire process to make it as passive as possible, without you getting involved. These bots can offer insights to users who are seeking inputs on insurance, loans, home ownership, weddings, etc. before passing on the user’s information (typically name, phone, and email) to numerous businesses that sell products which in turn are in sync with the content being delivered.
The process is as follows: You create the lead generation to chatbot; the chatbot validates lead generation, leads are passed on to the firm; and the company pays commission to the chatbot.
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Use Chatbots for eCommerce (FAQ)
Because chatbots are mainly conversational and communication mediums, they can effectively be used to answer frequently asked questions (FAQ). Chatbots can answer any question that a company has in an FAQ section on an eCommerce site.
Chatbots can answer questions in relation to order status, order location and shipping costs. These bots get to save you money and time by taking that job off your hands.
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Offer BooS (Bots as a service)
The future belongs to B2B bots that will empower entrepreneurs and companies to increase their productivity and handle difficult tasks, thereby replicating the business models of most B2B software. Essentially, startups in this industry try to create various functional bots, including chatbots, for companies.
The focus of many of these companies is to become the next WordPress/Wix for Bots and in doing this there is tremendous value. WordPress is valued at over 3.4B and makes up about 25% of the Internet. If you are bot creator, you can start creating bots for companies.
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Create Chatbots That Stop Online Visitors from Leaving the Store
Visitors who want to leave your website can be engaged the same as customers that abandoned their carts. When the customer’s mouse cursor leaves a window, a chatbot can send a message or a quick reply type of question. Alternatively, the chatbot can start a conversation and, at the same time, discreetly notify the live chat human operator. This valuable piece of information can be used to prioritize customers who are about to leave.
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Seek for Partnerships
If you have created a product that you are unable to monetize right away, consider joining hands with companies or entities that could leverage your chatbot marketing strategy and make money.
You may want to seek companies or entrepreneurs that will find your chatbot relevant as long as you are confident that they will be able to monetize the chatbot using their resources. On your part, gaining potential access to wide-ranging exposure coupled with diminished business risks can be a huge plus.
12. Create Bot testers
Testing your product before launch and collecting pre-release user feedback is a crucial part of the product development lifecycle. Usually, humans do the testing and provide feedback, but today, there are chatbots that are built to test products before release.
Automated testing programs use bots to act as real users and automatically run through software products to find any bugs or other major functional issues.
These “bot testers” are capable of going through apps much faster than human testers can, and because the program is able to measure and track performance much more easily, the program can also analyze the data being collected. If you have created an efficient chatbot tester, you would definitely make profits through it.
13. Create ChatBot content writers
There is a huge possibility that you have already come across a news article written by a chatbot without knowing it. In 2014, the Associated Press implemented an automated system which can write articles entirely on its own. AP assigned its bot to cover the quarterly earnings of companies.
Yes, there are things like bots that create full readable articles and they are slowly coming to limelight. They are artificial intelligence apps that create coherent stories based on data input. For example, they might create a recap of a sports event or report on a company’s stock performance. This is yet another way to make money off chatbots.
14. Create conversation chatbots
College admissions are a fertile field for Bot applications. Every admission season, every year the same questions are asked in campuses across the country and even across the world; about the classes, to the alumni, to courses. These perennial questions, if they could be stored in a database, would turn into a vast knowledge resource which could be used by Bots in easily consumed channels.
These chatbots can be released to the school’s social media pages. This is both a good advertisement for colleges that are trying to attract the best talent. Seasonal contracts can be prepared for colleges that do not want to pay for this service year-round.
15. Build a fact-check Bot
Chatbots have already started helping fact-checkers publish their work. There are now fact-checking bots that perform a high volume of repetitive tasks.
If you want to make money off a chatbot, you could create a fact-checking bot to provide facts on public issues, maybe something like Brexit, to keep the falsehoods at bay. You can also create these bots for companies to use in their services.
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E- Commerce
E-commerce is one are chatbots have the greatest impact. Make your bot to offer relevant products to your users and drive sales. Use direct pay option to your chatbot over 3rd party company. Also, try drop shipping or direct sales it would be a great fit as well. Your chatbot can be suited of all of these.
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Create Abandoned Cart Recovery Chatbots
Sending an email to a shopper who has abandoned their shopping cart is an example of an old-school approach to the problem. It takes too much time. Chatbots can help with this problem. You can create chatbots that react instantly to an abandoned cart, thus giving the customers an incentive to complete their purchase.
19. Use chatbots in sponsored and native content
Native advertising is the hot item all brands and marketers are after. Everywhere you look sponsored posts and native ad units are intertwined into content, social platforms, and apps. Native advertisers are taking these services to the next level with the use of chatbots.
Publishers can take advantage of their chatbots by providing articles without going to the website or downloading the publisher’s application. In the native or sponsored content model, the media companies get paid for distributing brand content on their channels. This is viewed as content created by the media publisher rather than the brand that paid for content.
20. Facebook Commerce
Facebook is a very popular platform for buyers and sellers to connect. This is one platform that allows for the use of chatbots, and they use them a lot too. You can make your business reach new heights if you wish to push your organisational agenda through chatbot on Facebook.