Have you heard from a friend or seen from social media how lucrative programming skills can be, so you learned to code?
You’re eager, and anyone who can’t code thinks you’re a genius, word gets out and all of a sudden every guy you meet wants you to build him a website or mobile application. Most of them want a freebie but some guys that are willing to pay a little.
This article will expose you to different ways you can make money with your programming skills.
What I am about to tell you is no well-kept secret. There is no silver bullet to making money as a software developer.
Get a job (Traditional Employment)
This is the obvious choice that everyone knows. Software development is a lucrative job, if you persist for a long time, you can make a lot of money. The software industry is booming, and there is now a great demand for excellent software developers. Therefore, if you are a good developer, you can definitely be hired by Google, Facebook, Atlassian, and other highest-paid companies.
This path is becoming less popular nowadays with the rise of the creator economy. More people want to step away from the 9–5 rat race & want to have the freedom and start their own businesses even if they make less money initially.
But if you’re okay with working for someone else throughout your career and lead a comfortable life, then this is definitely an option you should consider.
Build a Piece of Software and Sell It
One of the ways to make money as a software developer is to develop a product. Although this strategy requires a lot of work, it is a very lucrative way of making money as a software developer.
The idea here is very simple.
Instead of writing software for someone else to sell, make some software that you sell yourself. This requires more than just your programming skills, you need to develop an eye for business needs and opportunities.
Create software products that the market needs or help others solve problems and you will be in good shape. You also need to improve your marketing skills in order to promote your software.
Despite the extreme importance of all of these skills, an average programmer does not have them. You will be at a huge advantage if you can learn and employ these skills.
There is some online marketplace for you to sell your software or code, these include but are not limited to CodeCayon, PieceX, Codester, etc.
Sell Themes or Plugins
Popular content management systems such as WordPress and Shopify have a high demand for website templates and themes. Programmers equipped with the knowledge of developing themes and plugins for those content management systems will always make a lot of money by meeting those demands.
There are several different ways to sell your themes and plugins:
Set on your own shop — Create your own website and sell themes or plugins on your own. You’ll need to get traffic and build up the business, but you’ll have full control.
Sell on a marketplace — Instead of dealing with building up traffic to your own site, you could sell at a marketplace like ThemeForest and benefit from their huge, established user base. You’ll have to split the revenue and you’ll give up a lot of control.
Some plugin/theme creators do both. That way you can benefit from the exposure of a marketplace, but you’re not totally at the mercy of the marketplace either.
Making Tutorial Courses
Creating your own online course about some aspect of design or development. You could create a course on web design, Introduction to programming, WordPress development, Algorithm, DevOps, or any number of other topics.
There are a few different options when it comes to selling or monetizing your course, they are:
Sell it at your own website — You could create the course on a platform like Teachable and sell it at your own site. Or you could use a membership WordPress plugin to set up the course area and protect content so only paying customers can access it.
Sell at a marketplace — You could also host your course at Udemy, Skillshare, or another marketplace that will allow you to reach a larger audience. Of course, you’ll give up some control with this approach, but if you don’t have your own audience, it may be a way to actually get your course in front of people.
Youtube channel— You could also create a youtube channel to host your courses. Although you won’t be able to sell your course through this medium, you can always make money by monetizing your channel.
Freelancing
The last option that we’ll look at is freelancing. Freelancing is one of the easiest ways for software developers to get a few side bucks.
There are a lot of online marketplaces for freelancers, but the two popular ones are Fiverr and Upwork.
Fiverr
If you don’t know what Fiverr is, it is one of the largest online marketplaces for freelancers with services starting at five dollars.
These services can be in a wide variety of categories including programming, business, marketing, design, writing, translation, video, music, and much more.
So whether you want to use your existing programming skills to make money on the side, or you have other skills that you would rather monetize, Fiverr can be your gateway to the freelancing world.
And in addition to making money on Fiverr by being a freelancer, you can also use the site to outsource some of the tasks that you would rather someone else do, freeing up your precious time to do something more valuable with it.
There is no silver bullet to making money as a software developer. You could try to combine two or even of these methods to maximize your income. But always try to know your limit to avaoid burn out. thanks for reading.
