Can we agree that the end game of any skill we learn is actually to make money? Can we…? No…? Well mine is, I simply chose something I enjoy doing so the journey to the money can be pain free.
As a web developer, there is a lengthy array of ways for you to make money. A lot of developers out there are earning 6 figures yearly and that should be your goal too. Of course not everyone can reach those figures. I put this article together as a thesis of the research I carried out on making money as a web developer. Just thought I should share with you my take of the best routes I found.
But of course none of what I list below will matter if you are not comfortable with at least one programming language or just any skill that qualifies you as a developer. Think the article could also be relevant if you are just getting started with learning a developer skill. Read up and let me know if you found it relevant.
5. Full time job Working for a company
This is obviously my least favorite but i gotta say, a lot of companies out there pay developers really well. An average developer in Nigeria earns about 2M Naira (about $5000) which is relatively high as compared to other jobs in the country. In Cameroon the figure is roughly 1.5M FCFA ($2000) yearly, and this might look small but if you consider the average salary in the country, well, you get it, and the figure is on the rise too.
The fact here is that regardless of where you live, software development jobs will always earn a better pay as compared to other local jobs. Now developers in countries like the US, UK, France earn far more. An average developer in the US easily makes more than $50K/year and way more for senior web developers in some of these tech giants.
Your salary will of course be determined by how good you are at what you specialize in. your skills will need to match if you want to earn a high paycheck. So in order to land the best jobs, you really need to master whatever skill you wish to apply for. Most big tech companies apply tricky interview techniques in order to filter out the best person for the job and sometimes it’s not just about how good you are.
Explore possible interview questions to increase your chances of being considered. Websites like
Leetcode
can be very handy when preparing for interviews. Mastering your craft and preparing for interviews might only cover half of what you need to land the job.
Past projects and your portfolio will always make the difference in every opportunity you want to pursue as a developper. You need to build as many projects as you can during your learning journey and after mastery. Contribute to open source projects and network with other developers who can actually be very resourceful, especially when it comes to recommending you for jobs.
4. Blogging
This is where you write articles (blog posts) about topics you master and have them published on your blog (Website). You don’t need to be a top notch writer to do blogging but you need to provide useful information about what you are writing about (just what I'm doing with this article, hope this is useful to you).
Making money as a web developer with blogging isn't going to yield any early income but as you write and grow the blog, you will have lots of opportunities to monetize. You will be able to apply for the google adsense program to show ads on your articles and get paid for ad clicks from the website. There’s also affiliate marketing and it consists listing vendor products on the blog and earning commissions from the sales you generates.
As a web developer, your main source of content is going to come from what you have learned and still learning about your stack. Your blog could be a way for you to document what you learn. You could write and explain some of the concepts people struggle with. Provide tips and tricks and personal opinions on trending topics about programming.
Blogs require lots of work and dedication and your best bet will be to cover as many topics as possible. Consistency is the key here and is the most rewarding aspect of blogging and of course your blog post have to be relevant to potential readers
3. Freelancing
While waiting to land that five or six figure job, or maybe growing that blog to a place of profit, you might want to consider freelancing. Freelancing is just an independent way of working and earning money. You take on short term jobs or complete micro tasks, get paid and move on to the next. You have total control of pricing, timing or any other convenience factor you want. You can even freelance alongside a full time job, though obviously, this could be too stressful. You can also combine freelancing with blogging and other activities to boost your passive income stream.
There are a couple ways for you to get customers as a freelance web developer. Websites like upwork.com and fiverr.com are a great place to start from. A lot of clients visit these websites everyday looking for developers to help with various tasks or to work short term on projects. However, your profile needs a good reputation in order to land more and good gigs.
You will have to do your best for every job you get and ask the clients to leave reviews about your profile. This is how you will build a good reputation and get more and more consideration by potential clients.
Another way of getting jobs as a freelance is to treat yourself as a company who needs to do marketing and promotion. Social media will be a great place to promote yourself and meet new people (networking) who can hook you up with jobs and other resources. You want to let people know about your services, keep your social media profile active with content and frequently post jobs as you complete them.
There is also the possibility of landing local jobs. Start by rendering free services to family and friends. They can then refer you in the circle and expose your work to more people. You can also walk up to local businesses with project proposals that can help them.
Freelancing can be really challenging as well and this is because you are taking a lot of risk on your own, in terms of what you invest to promote yourself as a freelancer. You may also struggle in the beginning because you will have very few clients but it will be profitable and worth it in the long run.
2. Building your own products
This one of my favorites and is actually a cool way of monetizing your skills as a developer. Cool because you get to build your own stuff, give it your own touch and feel then, most importantly, put it up for sale for the money. There are quite a lot of options as to what products you can build.
Wordpress plugins and extensions have a great market since they power over 40% of the websites on the internet. You can build small scripts for performing common tasks and put them up for sale in marketplaces like Codecanyon. Codecanyon is a very popular marketplace for scripts and assets. Wordpress plugin and themes library is also a great place if you do wordpress products.
Another option here is saas (software as a service). Saas products are subscription based tools for individuals and businesses. Common ones we know are salesforce, google drive but you don’t need to build something that big. You could develop any tool that offers a service people need, like a live chat script for websites and apps and other ideas you could research on. Your app will have plans people can subscribe to and make recurring payments to use the service. The plans can go from free plan to premium.
As you see, this is a great way of making money while enjoying the process of building stuff that work and serve people.
1. Creating content
Content creation might just be the most demanding of ways to make money as a developer in terms of time and effort. First of all, content creation can be broad but what I want to talk about here is simply creating media content, graphics and video to be precise. This content can then be posted on platforms like youtube, social media like facebook, instagram and twitter. The idea behind content creation is to put together useful visual information that could be helpful to people in a specific way. It is very similar to blogging which is in fact considered as sub within content creation.
Youtubers make a lot of money creating videos on different topics and the money they get flows from the views and how good their content is. Your content needs to be very good in order to stand out from other content creators. This involves a lot of research for both the material to deliver and how to deliver it for optimum feedback. The way to break the difficult chain of content creation is to start and create as much content as you can. The more content you create, the more you figure out how to do it better or faster.
Okay that’s quite a lot for an article only intended to be a summary. Hope you found something useful that could help you make money as a developer. These are just a few routes and there are quite a lot of other profitable options you could explore. Thanks for reading and feel free to check my other articles, they are just as good as this one.
