“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

1. Freelancing

A strategy would be to work on your LinkedIn profile, contact recruiters and past clients from your network, go to conferences and meetups, and look out for platforms that match up remote workers with companies.

Take advantage of and leverage Facebook groups. There are dozens of Facebook groups that are designed specifically for freelancers.

• Jobs for Front-End Developers
• Remote and Travel Jobs
• Remote Jobs, Work Anywhere — Inventive Hub
• Guavabean Freelancer Group

There is no shortage of Facebook groups you can join and explore. Go ahead type “remote jobs” or “programming jobs” — or be creative about your search terms. You’ll be surprised at how many groups there are.

2. Bounty Programs

Hunting for bugs, or what’s called bug bounty hunting, is the process of being paid to find vulnerabilities in software, websites, and web applications.

Some programmers make tens of thousands of dollars a year on side-hustling via bounty programs.

• Google's Bug Hunting
• Facebook Bug Bounty Program
• Fire Bounty
• Bugcrowd
• Vulnerability Lab
• HackerOne

3. Coding Contests

Below is a list in no particular order of websites you can start looking into to practice and participate in coding contests with monetary rewards. This way of making money online is not for everyone, and there is no guarantee you’ll win.

I would also recommend looking into hackathons that require you to build an application based on ideas. These tend to be less stressful compared to the algorithm-based, problem-solving coding contests. Project-based hackathons are always fun when done with friends as the experience is more engaging.

• HackerEarth
• Google Code Jam
• HackerRank
• Topcoder
• Coderbyte
• InterviewBit
• Codeforces
• Sphere Online Judge
• CodingBat
• Codility
• Project Euler
• CodeChef

4. Become an Online Instructor

• Create a course, upload it to a marketplace, sit back and let the marketplace do all the marketing (the hands-free way).
• Create a course, host it yourself on a content management platform, and market it yourself.
• Conduct teaching sessions that foster face-to-face interactions with students. These could be one-on-one or in a group setting.

The instructor business can be something that might take up a lot of your time initially. The process of creating courses, editing your content, and preparing lecture material and homework exercises can be quite a bit of a time investment. It could take you anywhere from one to three months' worth of work.

While course creation is great, something to keep in mind is that you have to pay your taxes.

Below are platforms you can start to look into to sell or teach online to generate some semi-passive revenue. Take note that most of these are open to everyone regardless of which country you come from. There's always PayPal and Payoneer to help facilitate your transferring your profits.

Available for everyone:

• YouTube for publishing your own video coding tutorials. Revenue is generated through an ads program.
• Udemy for creating and publishing your own online coding courses. The profit-sharing is high at 50% but Udemy brings to the table millions of students and an audience you can directly tap into when you hit the Publish button.
• Skillshare is also an alternative to Udemy.
• Udacity is another alternative to Udemy.
• BitDegree is a Udemy alternative for creating and publishing your own online coding courses.
• Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for creating and selling your own books
• Host courses on your own website

High end of the spectrum, invite based:

• Frontend Masters
• LinkedIn Learning
• Pluralsight

They are by invite only, but worth the time investment to get into as they have a large audience and some of the best instructors you can get to learn from.

Making consistent high-quality content is what will set you apart from the rest of the pack. Competition is high, and part of the game is marketing. The best instructors constantly update their courses to stay relevant and at the top of their game. The beauty of creating courses is that once you build traction, it’s an endless stream of passive income.

5. YouTube Channel

YouTube still has massive potential for you as a programmer to make some pretty decent passive income through the YouTube Partner Program.

The barrier to entry is a bit high if you're trying to join the partner program, though. It requires that your channel have an aggregate total of 4,000 watched hours of video over 12 months and at least 1,000 subscribers, which is no small feat when you’re getting started and you’re a nobody.

There are alternative ways of generating value from your channel, even if they’re small, like blogging or article creation. You need to leverage this platform as a lead and audience generator.

To make some money, you need to build social proof, this requires you to provide valuable content for your YouTube channel.

6. Build an App You Can Sell

Make your own piece of software in order to sell it. It’s no easy feat, but can be incredibly rewarding. One of the things we programmers suck at is understanding how to market our craft.

You need to come up with a business plan and strategy of how to monetize your application.

Build a software product that the market needs or that helps other people solve their problems.The first steps are to find a problem and solve it with software. This can be as simple as walking down to your local store and having a conversation with the owners to see what pressing issues they’re struggling with, and then providing a solution.

7. Make a Plugin or Theme for WordPress

The market may seem oversaturated, but think for a moment about the number of plugins or apps that haven't been built yet on WordPress. Or the number of restaurants and businesses opening up around your neighborhood that still do not have an online presence. To get started making money with your plugins, you can start posting to various online marketplaces, such as:

• WordPress.org
• Themeforest
• CodeCanyon
• TemplateMonster Marketplace
• Mojo Marketplace
• ThemeSnap
• Creative Market
• Codester

You can choose to make your plugins and themes premium. Or you can charge perusers, use ad-driven monetization, or accept donations through Patreon. You can also give your plugins and themes away free, to build social proof. Like all things, if no one knows who you are, sometimes it’s good to showcase a few freebies.

Conclusion

There is no such thing as fast money.

Please feel free to drop me a line in the comments below! I’d like to hear how your journey is going.