Ten Side Efforts to Earn Extra Money as a Software Engineer

 During the last 10 years of my life, I have embarked on a wide range of companies. Some did well, others not so well, but as a result, I have learned a lot. Below I will go over my experience and discuss how you can use your engineering skills to generate additional income for yourself.

1. Take an education course

The way we learn is changing, and today's educational landscape looks very different than it did 10 years ago. College education is becoming questionable due to the vast amount of online content that in many cases provides more value than a very expensive degree for which there is no guarantee that you will get a job when it is finished.

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It is much cheaper to spend $ 500 on some courses taught by people who are experts in that field, who work there every day, than a lecturer, who often has no industry experience.

The result is huge opportunities to create paid educational content in the form of subscription-based businesses and courses. What is even more remarkable is that this is an area that cannot be entered because it has one thing that separates it from everyone else: its personality and its future teaching style.

People like different styles and personalities and learn best from different teaching styles. All you have to do is provide yourself, teach, and add value, and you'll get paid for it.

While it's more work, I recommend creating your own platform to sell your courses because you have more control over pricing, branding, etc., and this is what will make you truly successful.

Examples

Yaroslav Shmarov created a course and launched Udemy, generating 420 sales in 100 days. He made some very good points and more reasons to avoid platforms like Udemy.

Udemy hosting is free, but be prepared to sell for $ 10 and get $ 2-7

On Udemy, you don't have access to student emails / phones (so you can't create your own community and you can't cross-sell well)

Udemy hosting is good if your potential audience niche is very large

The only contact a teacher has with active students is the question and answer portion of a course.

In general, courses sold on Udemy can be considered passive income with a minimum participation required after a course is published.

Challenges

Course creation can be a great source of income - the demand is high and it's only growing. The key aspects in creating courses are:

Audience: Building an initial audience is challenging, but not impossible. It can be done very easily, but it takes a lot of work and consistency to create free content that brings traffic to your landing page.

Course quality is important - it's not really a surprise, but the quality of your course will affect your success. You have to be prepared for failure with the first courses you create; However, by taking your time, being patient and willing to learn, you can overcome it and significantly increase your chances of success.

2. Create a blog / content platform

Building a content-based website is another opportunity you can take as a developer to generate additional income. There are so many areas of computing and development that can provide you with great content on which to base your content.

Step CS is a great example of a self-created blog / content platform. It was created by @petecodes and is generating a recurring monthly income of $ 2,500 / month.

The product itself consists of interviews with people who have done it as a continuous developer, and that's it, nothing complicated. It is also free to sign up for the No CS CSree email list.

"Where do you make money with these platforms?" I hear you ask. Well, it's done with revenue from ads placed on the site or from sponsorship deals for email ad space.

Challenges

Writing content is time consuming as you need to do your research to deliver the most value to your readers.

Finding a niche, a good niche, will be of great help to you. Try to specialize when you can.

Find Sponsors - This can often be solved by contacting potential suitors for ad space or using something like Google AdSense to add ads to your page.

Driving traffic while creating something is a common problem. Again, it can be overcome by adding time to build continuity on platforms like Twitter or by improving your site's SEO ranking.

3. Create a forum / community

Community and paid forums are an emerging opportunity thanks to the rise of platforms like Discord, Patreon, and Discourse. These platforms make it easy to build communities and integrate payments, making it a gold mine of opportunity.

Why does this work? Well, people want to communicate and associate with others with similar interests, wants, and needs. Basically, by building a community, you are providing a platform for this to happen.

Some examples

Peter Levels built the Nomad List, providing a community of digital denominators. The business now generates $ 24,000 / month.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff created Ness Labs, a community of healthy entrepreneurs that generates $ 9,600 a month.

Why not use the free open source tools mentioned above and create your own community? You can even code additional functions that will allow you to create some amazing functions for potential users and really help as many people as possible.

Challenges

Building a community is very challenging but very rewarding due to the physiological influences of what is known as social proof. Basically, it is difficult to attract the first 100 users to your community, but as the number increases, it is easier to attract more, because the value is in the community. The trick is to keep going.

You will need high levels of participation, using much of your time

Managing the community to avoid spam and maintaining good content in the community will also be a challenge.

Note: Community building is one of the hardest things to do; however, it is worth it. Not only can you make a significant amount of money (thanks to word of mouth), but you can actually help a lot of people.

4. Create an e-book

As software engineers, we have a great deal of technology knowledge that many people want to learn. A great way to record this information is in e-book format.

The great thing about e-books is that they can be written relatively quickly, and if you choose a topic you are passionate about, it can be a lot of fun to do.

You can use a platform like Gumroad to host and sell your e-book.

Note: E-books can be a great source of income that you can use to generate money that can be invested in other companies / businesses. They are also a great project that you can work on for a few months, writing a little every day.

Examples

"The Good Parts of AWS" - An ebook by Daniel Vassallo and Josh Pschorr generated $ 31,000 in sales, selling more than 1,000 copies in the first week alone.

"Maker Minions: 101 Automations for Creators, Secondary Scammers, and Entrepreneurs" - A Michael Gill ebook made $ 5,000 and is growing.

Image by Daniel Vassallo

Challenges

Research and planning will take up most of your time

Create an audience (you can do this when you launch it - there is more flexibility in creating e-books as you can post to platforms like Amazon)

Creating structure for your book is also a challenge, but the simple solution is to spend some time figuring it out.

5. Independent worker

Ah, being self-employed, perhaps one of the most obvious ways to earn extra money as a software engineer. The model is simple: sell your time for some extra money.

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The good news about freelance work is that you can pay handsomely for your time, especially if you can create a well-funded startup.

The bad news is that unlike most of the other things in this article, it leaves you without a product in the end. This means that it has limitations of scale, since it has a direct relationship with time and money.

However, it gives you a great option to move on to a full-time job if you choose, and then you can join an agency if you want.

Note: I am working on my own initiative and have found it to be an amazing way to earn money that can be invested in other things or used to create more freedom with my time. The trick is to find good customers.

Examples

Susanne Peng is a developer and designer who built the life of her dreams through a free launch; her story is a great read

Glenn Stovall is an app developer who also built his life using the free release as a way to create more freedom.

Challenges

Establishing relationships with clients is key and it can be challenging to manage them because you must maintain good relationships with multiple clients.

Creating effective ways to manage your time is challenging at first, but it gets a lot easier after you've done it for a while.

Finding clients is also a big challenge. Places like Upwork aren't what they used to be anymore, and you'll have a hard time finding good customers there. I would recommend using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool (search for startups and just contact the people there).

Ghost Blog Topics

Ghost is a powerful blogging CMS for content creators, entrepreneurs, and developers. To give an idea of ​​what is growing, 5,933 writers, podcasters and video creators created sites with Ghost to publish newsletters online and deliver to their audiences this week alone.

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I use Ghost myself because it is a very powerful platform and it has some beautiful themes. However, the good news for you is that there is also a huge shortage of themes; recent posts on the Ghost forum only confirm this.

This provides a golden opportunity to create themes for Ghost, where the average theme sells for $ 59 on the official Ghost website. Ghost themes are created using the following stack:

Nód.js.

SQL

Handlebars.js

This article on Geekinsta is a great guide to help you get on your way.

Examples

fueko: a small company that sells various themes. They have a Ghost theme that was released on July 6. The issue they released is $ 59 and they have sold 94 copies in the last three months, at a net value of $ 5,546.

Challenges

There's a lot of support on the Ghost forums, but it can be challenging to get helpful tutorial videos and third-party documentation. The good news is that if you understand Handlebars and Node, then you should be prepared to be successful.

Choosing a niche for your topic can help you create a topic that some audiences will love and that can boost your sales. It can be challenging, but this is a relatively single market.

Retail items, on average, range from $ 29 to $ 99. This means a price is expected and will result in a potential price cap. However, if you create an exceptional theme, chances are good that you will charge a higher fee for it.

7. The Shopify application

With recent trends in drop shipping, lifestyle businesses, and pressure on independent retail outlets to move online, Shopify has opened up another great opportunity for developers.

Shopify store owners are very popular with Shopify store owners as it gives users a place to improve their customer experience and helps them increase business revenue.

These apps are a great source of passive income, as they tend to take care of themselves; Of course, this is not always the case, but it can still be a great income generator.

Examples

Filippo Mursia has created Tailry, a Shopify application that helps users manage their stores and inventory. It currently generates income of $ 2,800 / month and is a great example of how you can build an app on the Shopify platform and turn it into a profitable side business.

Challenges

Handling ongoing updates once you've built the app is a potential challenge that needs to be managed. There are ways to make this an elegant process, but it's definitely worth your research before diving into the creation of the Shopify app.

8. Create API as a service

We live in a data-driven age where information, attention, and content are king; To give you perspective, 2.5 trillion batches of data are created every day.

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A great way to make money is to take some of this data and turn it into a valuable collection of some kind. Businesses make data-driven decisions almost every day and will happily pay for anything that provides value / increases potential profits.

APIs provide a great platform to allow access to data for multiple companies, so why not create one and charge the privilege of accessing them?

You can create a web scraper that collects useful data and then a Rest / GraphQL based API to sit on top of the data, providing access to it.

If you want inspiration, any type of marketing, social, or product-related data can be invaluable to many people. Amazon, eBay, and other e-commerce platforms can be a great place to gather information. These are useful data sets for ecommerce entrepreneurs to analyze.

Examples

Gareth Fuller created a really simple price-oil API that generates $ 370 / month in revenue. Not bad considering how young a company is and the margin for growth.

Sébastien Dumont created a WordPress related API that deals with WooComerce with a head start. He currently makes $ 900 / month and is growing, with 20,000 downloads.

Challenges

A lot of research can be done to build a dataset before implementing any solution. This is because you must first find out how you can provide value and which way is best to provide the data. However, there is a very good article from Coding VC that gives a great perspective on how to overcome this challenge and also provides great advice.

9. Become an Online Tutor

There is no shortage of supply for people who want to make it as a software engineer in 2020, so why not jump on the trend and help them by becoming an online tutor.

I have done this myself in the past and it provides a decent amount of money. You can typically charge anywhere from $ 50 to $ 130 per hour depending on what you're teaching, and it's a great way to earn extra income and provide great value to someone who may need it. 

Platforms like Codementor provide an excellent service for matching mentors with students, and it's becoming easier to find people on social media looking for instructors.

Examples

Suresh Atta is a software engineer who has completed a total of 1781 sessions for $ 60 / hour at Codementor

Yuriy Linnyk has 3,079 huge jobs at $ 80 / hour

Challenges

Gaining momentum can be a bit more difficult as you will have to do about 10 sessions to provide social proof to others (I found it worthwhile to offer and provide a free 15 minute session which I was successful in helping me achieve something traction).

Competition is high and this can be an obstacle, especially when people can reduce the hourly sales price. Personally, I use these platforms as a way to attract an audience; platforms will try to dissuade you, but there are often ways around it.

10. Create a boiler code database

Think about how many hours it took to start a project, forgetting how long it takes to set everything up. This is a problem that many engineers have, and we all like quick solutions, so much so that sometimes we are willing to pay for a simple solution that already exists.

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Building a template that covers all the basics of a particular arrangement can provide us with great value for software developers, and by using a paid plate boiler we can work on the important parts rather than focus on the arrangement.

A great place to create a standard model now in the world of web applications. It's a great way to build your React / Vue interface and pair it with a Node backend that takes care of authentication, databases, configuration, and common API services like Firebase, SendGrid, Twilio to get your foot in the door. and Enter the field of passive income.

Examples

Kyle Gawley built Gravity, a SAAS React and Node boilerplate that generates $ 3,700 / month in MRR. Kyle has created a clean and simple user interface that is paired with an elegantly designed backend, ready for you to configure with your favorite database.

Challenges

Creating a clean user interface is a time-consuming process, but anything worth doing takes time and patience.

It is difficult to build trust with other developers, although this can work if you market it from the angle that you are a developer yourself.

Creating good documentation is another great job that you may want to consider.

conclusion

There are many ways to make money online today, especially being a developer - it is basically a superpower and a form of financial freedom if properly harnessed. I hope you have a great day and thanks for your time reading.