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Now, we’re going to go over a bunch of different ways that you can make money with programming.
And I bet that at least one method will help you,
so please read carefully.
These are going to have a big range to them — some of them are going to be more beginner-friendly, and others are going to require more advanced skills.
Some of them are going to be simple side hustles that can earn you a few extra bucks, and others could be entire career paths.
So, hopefully, there’s something for everybody here.
1️⃣Tutoring services
The first way a lot of people start making money programming is by offering tutoring services, and you might be thinking,
“I’m still learning myself. How can I possibly tutor anybody?”
But there’s bound to be somebody who’s still earlier in that journey than you are, and they will likely pay you to tutor them.
The best tutors are the ones who don’t know a ton but are just slightly more advanced than you currently are.
So, if you are, say, an intermediate programmer, you can try offering tutoring services to local middle schools and high schools.
And if you’re more advanced, say, a university computer science student, then you can offer tutoring services to students at your school taking classes you’ve already taken.
Of course, you can also try applying to teaching assistant jobs if those exist at your university.
2️⃣Freelancing
Okay, so the next way you can try to make money programming is to try freelancing online, and there are a lot of different ways you can go about this.
One option is to offer services on websites like Fiverr or Upwork.
On these websites, you can offer services for anything from building a website or an app to simply helping somebody debug an application, and you can make money doing this.
That said, it can be a little bit saturated, which tends to drive the actual prices for your work down.
But regardless, it is a way you can make some extra money and get some experience with freelancing.
Alternatively, you can try to find clients on your own without using sites like Fiverr and Upwork.
This is going to be much harder in terms of actually finding clients, but once you do, you can probably charge them more for your work than you would be able to on one of these websites.
A good place to start would be to reach out to people like artists and photographers who might want to have an online portfolio but don’t exactly know how to build one.
As you start building up your own portfolio, you can start reaching out to larger clients over time, where hopefully, you can be charging more money.
All that said, just know that if you decide to freelance without sites like Fiverr and Upwork, realistically, you’re going to be getting rejected a lot, and you need to be prepared for that.
3️⃣Local Freelancing
Okay, but maybe you want to try freelancing, but you don’t want to do it online.
For this, you could try local freelancing.
What I mean by this is finding local businesses — think of your local restaurant or whatever other local businesses you might have —
and offering to make them websites or mobile apps that can help them make extra money.
The strategy here should essentially be to find businesses that you think you can provide a lot of value to and be able to show them how you’re going to provide them value,
how it’s not going to cost them all that much, and how it could actually make them more money.
Again, expect a lot of rejections at the beginning with this one, but you can build a long, sustainable business over time, especially through word of mouth once you have some successful stories with existing clients.
Okay, but maybe freelancing isn’t your thing — you don’t want to be rejected all the time, and I get that.
4️⃣Website Templates & Plugins
So, the next option is to try selling website templates as well as different sorts of plugins.
The first option here is to sell full website or application templates — build a base for common websites like portfolios and sell them as templates on one of the many template marketplaces that exist.
Another option is to take advantage of the fact that so much of the internet is built by people who don’t actually know how to code.
They’re using tools like Wix or WordPress, and you can build plugins and themes for these different tools.
Essentially, people using these no-code and low-code tools can use your plugins and themes to add extra functionality or styling to their sites without needing to know how to code themselves.
You can make some extra money on this.
5️⃣Software as a Service
Now, I know a lot of people get into programming because they want to be building new, cool things, and oftentimes, freelancing and building website templates just doesn’t really scratch that itch.
So, one other option is to build a SaaS (Software as a Service) company.
Now, this is going to be a much longer-term play in most cases and also a little bit more advanced.
But the key idea is actually pretty simple and something most programmers could actually do if they wanted to.
At the core, all this actually entails is finding some inefficiency in the world — finding some problem that’s easy to solve with tech but currently, people are just doing some repetitive manual task —
and building out some software service that allows them to automate this task.
I know this sounds daunting, but you’d be surprised how many software engineers I know who either have some side-hustle SaaS company they run on the side (which is fairly passive at this point) or even some project they built when they were in college that still generates them income to this day.
So, it is definitely possible, but it can be one of the more difficult ones to get started with —
figuring out what problem you’re actually trying to solve and how you’re going to market your solution.
6️⃣Mobile Apps
Next, another option to try to make money is to build some kind of game, a mobile app, a Chrome extension, or even an app for virtual reality.
Now, the days of the gold rush of “just put anything up on the App Store, and you’re going to make a bunch of money” are completely gone,
but there is still money to be made if you can solve some problem for people.
Particularly right now, I actually think there’s more money to be made in more niche areas like Chrome extensions as well as VR applications simply because there’s not as much competition.
Of course, things like VR haven’t caught on quite as much, which means that there’s not as large of a market right now, but that also means there’s far less competition, and you can be one of the only applications on the App Store.
Now, I’ve talked a lot about things like building websites and mobile applications,
but some people are interested in different areas of software development and programming, and one of those areas could potentially be security.
7️⃣Security
And if this is you, then one thing you could look into is bug bounty programs.
These are programs a lot of companies have where, if you can find a bug in some of their systems, they will actually pay you a lot of money for reporting that bug to them.
To be honest, I don’t really even know where I’d get started with trying to find some of these, but if you happen to be somebody more interested in security than I am, then potentially, this is a good route to go.
8️⃣Content Creation
The next way you can make money programming is a little bit adjacent to actually programming itself, but it’s content creation.
With this, you can make YouTube content, TikTok content, or try blogging.
Any form of content creation within the software engineering space is actually a potential income stream.
Personally, I think right now, TikTok is the easiest platform to actually grow on, and you’d be surprised how much money you can actually make with a modest following on YouTube or TikTok in the software engineering space.
So, on YouTube, of course, you can earn ad revenue, but it actually goes much deeper than that.
It just so happens that within the software engineering niche, there are a lot of sponsors that can help you earn a lot of money even with a fairly modest following.
That said, do know that if you’re getting into content creation just to make money, it is probably going to be an uphill battle, and it could be months,
if not years, before you actually start making any money with it.
9️⃣Selling Online Courses
Sort of adjacent to content creation is that you could also try selling online courses.
Of course, you don’t need to be a content creator to do this.
You could sell courses on a site like Udemy, and there are some people making a lot of money doing this.
And, of course, if you do go the content creation route, then you could build your own courses outside of platforms like Udemy and sell them directly to your audience on whatever areas of expertise you might have.
That said, one caveat with building courses is that a lot of people underestimate how much work they actually are to build.
So, don’t expect to be able to make some course in two weeks, sell it, and make a bunch of money.
It is going to take a lot of time and effort to build something that’s actually of value that people will want to buy.
🔟Building Plugins
Another cool way to try to make some money coding is to build plugins for whatever software it might be that you use.
For example, one plugin I bought, which I think was $20, is called Captionator, and all it does is take the audio from videos and automatically generate some captions that I can use on TikTok.
And honestly, I can’t imagine that plugin was all that complicated to make, but I’m happy to pay $20 for it because it saves me a lot of time while editing.