Software engineers get pretty hefty wages, let’s face it.
Based on your earnings, you might easily have a very luxurious life.
To augment their full-time salary, though, some programmers like looking into alternative sources of money.
You could desire to take early retirement.
Perhaps you want to know how liberating it is to just have enough money to live comfortably without ever having to worry about money or losing your job.
There are many and different reasons why you might want an additional source of money in addition to your salary.
I’ll give you some suggestions for side hustles in this article that you can use to enhance your income without leaving your current work.
1. Investing :
Many programmers consider saving money to be sufficient.
It is a fairly easy task to complete. Your bank account is credited with your salary. You save the rest and spend a portion of it.
Your net worth will progressively improve over time if you continue to spend less money than you make.
The problem is that keeping money in your bank account is not a good idea because it doesn’t generate any income.
This effectively indicates that you are losing money because of inflation.
All signs point to the necessity of investing your money if you wish to increase your wealth.
You probably don’t know much about stock market investment if you just started your programming career after college.
so, first learn the fundamentals , and also try to do any course on stock market investing.
Please understand that I am not referring to day trading or investing all of your leisure time in stock trading. You won’t have the time or the energy to do that task because it is a job in and of itself.
Instead, you should concentrate on long-term investing.
That refers to investing your savings in reputable businesses and allowing your portfolio to gradually increase over time.
2. Create a Video Course
Effective programmers are really in greater demand right now than there are candidates to fill such positions.
Given this, it is simple to draw the conclusion that programming is currently and will continue to be in extremely high demand.
With such a high demand, earning money through programming is not the only option; you can also earn money by instructing programming.
There are literally millions of people who are interested in learning what you already know.
Additionally, if you have a gift for teaching, this could be a great source of extra money for you.
Literally anyone in the planet can learn programming. It’s a GIANT market.
Platforms like Udemy make it super easy to create your courses and make money from them. All you need to do is create a high-quality course.
They will handle everything, including marketing.
3. Start Your Own Programming Blog
The advantage of this method is that not only will you be making money, but you will also be making yourself a name in the programming community.
Marketing yourself as a software engineer and having a strong online presence is extremely important and it will open the doors for a lot of opportunities in your career that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
In addition to building your personal brand, I am a strong believer that you can’t fully learn something until you teach it.
With a programming blog, you will be teaching others about programming while improving as a programmer yourself. All that while making money at the same time. How awesome is that?!
And it doesn’t have to be expensive, you can start your WordPress blog today for as little as the price of a cup of coffee
But wait a minute, how can you make money from your programming blog?
You can monetize your blog in several ways:
First: Advertisements
The first method is to simply put ads on your blog.
If you don’t know where to start, you can always start with Google Adsense.
Google allows you to put Google ads on your site and get a share of the ad revenue every time one of your readers click on the ad.
If you decide to monetize only with ads, you should always be trying to increase your readers as your ads income is directly proportional to the size of your readers.
After you get comfortable with Adsense, you can start experimenting with other premium ad agencies.
For example, popular programming blogs/sites like coding horror, codewars, and others use carbon ads.
Second: Being an Affiliate
Alternatively, you can try to set up your own affiliate system by selling other people’s products.
For example, you can sign up with Amazon associates and start selling any amazon product on your blog.
That’s pretty awesome because Amazon has pretty much everything under the sun.
When you sign up, Amazon will give you a referral link that you can use on your blog. If your readers go to amazon through your referral link and buy anything from amazon, you get a commission.
The commission varies a lot based on the product, your performance, and other variables.
Since your readers are interested in programming, you should always suggest products that are valuable to programmers like programming books and software.
Now let me give you a word of advice.
Unlike monetizing with ads, when you monetize through being an affiliate, you might be tempted to recommend expensive products even if you have never used these products yourself.
Don’t do that. This is dangerous!
Whatever you recommend, make sure you recommend the products you actually use.
This is extremely important because the most valuable asset that you have is the trust of your readers.
Don’t ever compromise this mutual trust for a few extra bucks. Make sure you recommend good, valuable products that you use yourself. If you don’t use the product, don’t recommend it. Period.
Third: Selling your own products
Selling your own products on your blog requires the most work but it brings in the most money.
Once you set up the products you want to sell and do everything on your end, your blog will continue to passively make money for you.
Make sure that your product aligns well with your readers.
Your products should be valuable to programmers and computer scientists.
For example, you can sell books about programming and the software engineering career.
Let me be clear here, selling your own product isn’t going to be easy.
Among other things, you will need to learn about online marketing and proper ways to promote your products.
However, these skills are extremely useful for you as a person and as a software engineer.
4. Fiverr
One of the easiest ways to get started making a few bucks on the side is through freelancing on 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.
5. Start your own you tube channel
If you want more personal interaction with your audience and you have a likable friendly personality, you can start your very own Youtube channel.
Believe it or not, most software engineers could use some experience when it comes to public speaking.
After all, being able to work on your public speaking and communication skills can be very beneficial to you and your career.
So even if we were to entirely disregard the potential income (which could be significant), starting your you tube channel is still worth it.
I personally think starting a you tube channel is much more effective than just starting a blog.
Because You tube allows you to build a much stronger relationship with your audience at a much deeper level than a programming blog would.
Of course, the best strategy is to have both.
Now when it comes to monetization, making money on youtube isn’t very different from making money from your blog.
You can also monetize with you tube ads, affiliate links, or selling your own products.
Conclusion
There are many ways you can make a side income as a programmer.
Pick whatever interests you the most and go for it.
Good luck 🙂
