10 Ways to Make Money as a Developer

[Music] hey what's going on guys so in this video i want to talk a little bit about making money as a developer and the idea for this video comes from flor and pop's new ebook called 10 plus plus ways to make money as a developer and i'm just going to kind of go over the 10 different methods that he has and give you a little bit of my own insight and experience let you know what they are and if you want to dive deeper into these topics and get some really good quality information and experience then definitely check out florin's ebook i'll have a link in the description with a code for 20 off so let's jump right into it the first one is the most obvious which is making money as a professional web developer so so getting a job at a company this is the most common route so a lot of people learn how to code whether they're self-taught boot camp college whatever it might be then you start filling out applications you start to go to interviews you fail a shitload of interviews we all do and then ultimately you land a job as a developer and most of us get into coding because we really love it we have a passion for it so if you're able to make a good amount of money doing that that's not a bad deal as far as how much money it really depends on where you are in the world if you're in the u.s what state what city you're in that really you know tilts to scales so to give you an idea or web developer in my area which is the boston area is around 74k a year so low side is 50k high side is 108k so you can get up to six figures as a web developer if you're doing something like devops or uh ai i mean there's there's other types of developers that make more money um but this is typical for a web developer at least in my area which isn't too bad so if you can make 80 000 90 100 000 a year doing what you love like i said that's not a bad deal so that's one way to go that's kind of a you know your main route then you have freelancing which is another way you can freelance on the side but it can get really time consuming if you're trying to work for a company and freelance so i would suggest doing one or the other maybe starting with it on the side and when you get your first few clients you can move to really dedic you know dedicating all your time to it if that's what you want to do so i've done both i prefer freelancing i enjoy the freedom there's something really fulfilling about doing your own thing having your own business but it is difficult and it's not for everyone you have to be willing to take risks because you don't know if you're if you're going to make a ton of money this month or you're going to make no money so it is it is kind of risky but like i said it's very rewarding and you can scale your business you can outsource projects or parts of projects i i ended up hiring two in-house developers so i mean it depends on the type of person you are whether you're going to get a job at a company or freelance and to get started you could start with sites like upwork there's a whole bunch of websites where you can apply for different projects you're probably going to make just scraps at first that's at least what i did and what i know a lot of people i know have done but as you build your portfolio and you build your ratings and reviews on these different websites you can start to get higher paying jobs and definitely don't stick to just those websites you want to go and look at local businesses small businesses see where you can help where you can you know build them a better website with better functionality better design if you can create a little application that will you know help them run their business in some way and really just tailor your when you pitch to these companies these businesses tailor your um your emails or whatever if you're gonna go talk to them to their business don't just use some pre-made template so that's freelancing the next one is or the next few are really just side incomes to start with but could get into something bigger so number three is blogging which is is a type of content creation so it's it's obviously it's writing you don't have to be a great writer to start a blog you just need to be able to offer some valuable information it could be like written tutorial type posts or you could be talking about new new technologies new frameworks or whatever it might be now when you start a blog it's not going to make money right away just like most of these aren't it takes a lot of time and dedication and one thing that that i will say is really valuable for most of these if not all of these is having a social media presence so you really want to do that along with all of these that i'm mentioning because if you have a following if you have a social media presence you can promote your blog you can promote your your products and so on as far as making money with a blog you can use ads so you know google adsense you can have affiliate links to other people's products where you get a chunk of the you know the money that's that people pay for other products you could promote your own products you could potentially have sponsors that will sponsor your blog so there's there's different avenues to take so the next one is running a youtube channel and obviously this isn't for everyone not everyone is comfortable on camera or wants to be on camera or you know even do screencasts i know that when you get started even when i got started i hated the sound of my own voice i hated the sound of my accent with my boston accent which was much thicker back then um but you eventually get used to it and and i just really fell in love with it i fell in love with um just creating tutorials and helping people out and creating little projects that that nobody was telling me to make no clients no boss i mean it's just it's very freeing to do what you want and have people watch it and enjoy it and learn from it so i would say don't start a youtube channel to make money because you're going to be very very disappointed it takes it takes a long time just to even make uh friggin you know fifty dollars a month it takes a while so don't start it for that if that's all you would start a youtube channel for don't skip this one but if it's something you enjoy doing you're passionate about you could eventually make a decent income a decent side income or even move to full time if you get really successful so the next one is live coding and streaming which is similar to youtube i mean you're you're teaching code basically on video except it's live um my my recommendation would be to start youtube first and or just any kind of pre-recorded video before you just can go live and you're probably not going to get anybody in there if you go on twitch and you know nobody knows who you are and you start streaming so i would i would suggest putting some youtube videos out building a little audience again social media presence twitter specifically uh really helps just just get out there and get in the community um but yeah that's that's an option twitch has some really cool ways for people to donate you have bits you have subscriptions amazon prime subscriptions people can gift subs so there's a lot of different ways i haven't live streamed yet i plan on doing it this year and i'm probably going to do it on twitch because i really like i think that it's a better platform for live streaming than youtube is and flooring goes into this you know in detail in his book because he's done a lot of live streaming on both twitch and youtube so the next one is one-on-one mentoring and this is something that i really haven't done you know at least at least for for money i've i've helped people out here and there but uh and of course i've done you know lots of content but i haven't had experience like like being paid to directly talk to someone and help them but i do know quite a few people that do this for well over a hundred dollars an hour so you can charge a good amount because when you when you really know what you're doing and you're able to to help someone out directly like not through a video but directly where you can answer direct questions um that's worth a lot you know so use your experience as a developer to to help others and even if you start with free mentoring just just to kind of get your feet wet to see how it is see if you can actually help people because not everybody that is a great a great developer can can really explain and teach people stuff so maybe do it for free a couple times and then maybe 40 50 an hour move up to 100 an hour and i know people that do this for like 250 dollars an hour so you can make pretty good money doing it but like i said i haven't really done it myself um check florence book out he's he's done it quite a bit so the next one is courses which is of course another form of video content so you can make a lot of money doing courses and it doesn't even have to be like like direct tutorials or you know teaching a language or a framework it could be a freelancing course a business course whatever anything that you have experience in working you know with a team using git open source i mean there's a lot of different topics that you could you could do a course on and just because someone else has a course on it and that goes for youtube and this other stuff too just because someone else has done it doesn't mean that you won't be successful you have a unique take everyone does so that's something i see a lot is oh there's so many of those out there that it's not going to be successful there's a lot out there but none of them are you with your exact take so don't let that like discourage you from doing any of this but with courses i would suggest doing free content first or even a free course first because free stuff is a lot easier to get eyes on um so start a youtube channel get build build a decent following you don't have to have a hundred thousand subscribers but try to get you know one two thousand subscribers and then create a course and promote your course to your youtube audience um and again i can't say it enough social media twitter people are always promoting each other's courses and ebooks and stuff like that so just something to think about i know i know video content isn't for everybody the next one digital products digital products could mean a lot of things it can mean content like ebooks and courses but it can also be web apps mobile apps plugins for you know wordpress shopify other platforms themes and and templates so it could be a bootstrap bootstrap templates wordpress templates i know people that have made a lot of money just doing wordpress templates so that's something you can think about there's a lot of other things anything that you can build and sell even just like little tools here and there you can make a good amount of money with so take your skills and and see what you can create that other people would would find value in and would purchase so digital products is is definitely something that you could do on the side so if you're working for a company or freelancing so an example for me for selling digital products i used to build wordpress and joomla plugins uh joomla you probably don't even know if it's an older content management system and i sold them on my own platform i had a suite of like eight different extensions one was like a classifieds one was a knowledge base just different things you could add to your website and i sold them for you know really cheap but i had quite a few people buying them joomla had its own little marketplace where you could list your extensions and i was you know up there rated uh as the top rated extensions and um it didn't make me like a ton of money where i could quit my job but it was a nice decent side income and something i enjoyed doing and once i built out the extensions i mean there wasn't much else i had to do i did have a support ticket system in the website where people if they had problems they could send in a ticket but that was maybe an hour a week you know an hour out of my week so it was pretty much passive income um and that's something that i would definitely encourage you to do if if you can build something that that people are are willing to buy so the next one is contributing to open source or building something building an open source product and obviously you know open source software is is publicly available software and a lot of it is free you usually think free when you think open source and there's different ways you can still make money by creating a free open source product so one is is contributions um if you create something that's free that people like you can set up a patreon you also have github sponsors now now github has its own kind of like patreon built in where people can directly contribute and support you for creating you know open source projects another thing you could do is you could have a free version and then you could have something paid that people can get as kind of an add-on so an example for that is like tailwind css which is a free open source css framework but then there's also tailwind ui which is a paid product so if people want to take it a step further they can purchase tailwind ui and there's there's so many different things like that and you can make a good amount of money with it and you're also you know creating a a good product and um you know contributing to the uh to the open source community so the next one is or the last one is creating a sas which is a software as a service so basically this means that you create some kind of hosted product that's usually licensed out monthly people pay monthly yearly and some examples of that are like trello figma base camp um dropbox and then there's a lot of like hosting services and i know these are the real big guys but you could create something smaller and license it out and maybe even create a little startup around it if you have a couple people that are willing to help out you know a few friends that are developers and it can take a lot of time to create a sas at least a successful one i know people are creating them left and right but it takes a lot of time and dedication to create a successful one but if it does become successful i mean you can make a lot of money creating a you know a sas i don't have experience with it so i can't say too much on it but definitely another thing you could do as a developer so those are the 10 ways to make money as a developer i mean obviously there's there's much more than that but these are 10 that you could look into if you want to dig deeper into these topics check out florin's ebook again link is in the description with a promo code but that's it guys thank you for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 127,123

Rating: 4.9590268 out of 5

Keywords: web developer, developer, make money, make money as a developer, developer salary, programming, coding, seo, programmer, web development

Id: bnzVL0a5h5w

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021