The Code Room #2 - Making Money as a Developer

Hey 👋

Being a developer has its perks, and making money is easily one of the best ones! You can make a full-time living, or even earn an extra couple hundred dollars every month with code.

Even though I’ve never had a full-time job as a developer, I’ve managed to make money from a bunch of different sources, and today I want to share them with you!

Freelancing

This is an interesting one because in my opinion most people look at this in a wrong way. Usually when I say “freelancing”, people associate this with platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork. Now that’s not a bad thing, but it’s definitely not a place you want to start off. Why?

• Because it’s a huge race! If you have something to offer, you can be rest assured there’s at least a couple hundred, if not thousands of people offering the same thing at a much lower price. Doing so yourself is not really sustainable.

• Another reason is, these platforms usually tend to take a decent chunk of the amount you’re supposed to get. Now yes, they have to operate some way or another, but my point is that these cuts especially feel like a lot when you’re already getting very little work on the platform.

What you really want to be focusing on is making clients find you! How? For me it’s been through creating content on YouTube. This is a good approach since you’re not only marketing yourself to potential clients, you’re also building a valuable audience.

Another reason why this self-marketing method is so valuable is because people see what you have to offer, and they know what you’re talking about. Funny thing about my channel is that even though I’ve never marketed any freelancing services, people reach out to me via email or DMs on their own for work.

Consulting

A lot of people need advice, and this is where you can help! If you’re good at a specific field, you can charge individuals or businesses for your time. Some of the advice that you can give out can be stuff like technical guidance, code review and quality assurance, and performance optimizations.

For consulting you usually require good technical skills in key fields. If you’re a front end developer, this could be things like understanding key differences between major modern technologies such as React, Angular, Vue, and understand if they’d be suitable for the end users of the person/business you’re providing advice to. You need a lot of niche expertise when it comes to consulting, but it’s lucrative if you do it right!

Creating Content

This requires a decent bit of work upfront, but the results are definitely worth it! This is the path that I chose with a mix of freelancing and I cannot recommend it enough.

So what type of content am I talking about? This can be YouTube videos, blogs, or even email lists. From the ones I’ve mentioned YouTube is my personal favorite, since at the moment it seems like the algorithm is pushing a lot small creators which is a great thing!

Earning money from content will take time. It took me about 5 months to get monetized on YouTube, and that was very lucky of me! It usually takes much longer on average so if you decide to go down this path, get ready to be consistent!

If you decide to create blogs, you can do so in developer blog platforms like dev.to or even use Medium. However, I personally recommend creating your own personal blog just so you have more control over how stuff works. Just make sure you get SEO right.

Online Courses

This is a lucrative one… if done right.

I personally do not recommend this if you don’t already have an established audience. Sure you could use platforms such as Udemy to get organic traffic, but the issue is platforms like these have too much control over stuff. Udemy I believe can run sales on your courses even when you don’t want it to, generally leading to less revenue.

Instead, if you have an established audience, you can use platforms such as Teachable or Thinkific to host your own courses!

You may be thinking, information is freely available on the internet. Why would people pay for my courses? If you’re a content creator, people may enjoy your teaching style which is a very valuable thing to have. But more importantly, people prefer having a structured resource that they can learn from instead of having to look around in different places.

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I hope this information was valuable to you. That’s all for me for this week! See ya around :)