Below I’m going to share with you three practical and realistic ways that you can make $ 500 a month or more from coding. Now I’m not going to tell you to make a global game. Then you sell for tons of money or run a youtube channel or start a blog or anything like that. These are real things that you can start today even if you are a beginner programmer. If you’re someone who’s 12, 13 or14 years old you can definitely do these things.
The reason why I’m saying these are realistic is that everything mentioned here is what I have actually done. Most of them were when I was at the age of between 14 and 18 years old. These are meant to be the kind of short tasks you take on on a freelance basis. You can do it whenever you have free time to make a little bit of money. Also to get a bit of experience working with clients.
Lastly, I will say for this introduction is that you can definitely make much more than $ 500. As I grew up and got into the first, second, and third year of university my income from these tasks increased drastically. Especially if you’re only spending a few hours and not working on something like a full-time job. So with that said let’s get into these three methods.
Table of Contents
I. Tutoring
Let’s dive into method number one here which is tutoring. Now, this is personally my favorite method and I found that this makes the most amount of money when you average it out per hour. Now I understand there are a lot of concerns here with tutoring. A bunch of you are probably already yelling at the computer and saying I’m not skilled enough! I’m not good enough to tutor! I don’t have any clients and you’re going to list off a thousand excuses. That’s fine but the reality is you can always find someone to tutor. Even if you know one thing more than they do you’re still gonna be valuable in being able to teach them or help them out.
Reason
The thing is when most people are looking for a tutor the reason they’re doing that is that they struggle to learn stuff on their own. They really just need someone to guide them through some content to read what their teacher would have read them in class again and again. Basically to help them solve a problem and work on a project. If you have even the most basic skill in the area that this person needs to be tutored in, you can definitely be valuable.
My Experience
Now I started tutoring when I was about 14 years old. I actually was not tutoring in computer science I was tutoring in math and tutoring in just regular science in high school. But you can definitely tutor in computer science and that’s actually one of the more lucrative ways to make money.
Pay Scale
When I started tutoring at 14 years old I was charging $20 an hour. This is Canadian dollars but still, that was kind of the base rate you’re not often going to see tutors that are charging less than twenty dollars per hour. You have a one-on-one session with someone for $ 20 an hour at least from where I am. That’s kind of a standard rate in other countries that may vary but still, that’s pretty good. Especially if you compare it to a minimum wage job which in Canada is about $ 15 an hour. Now as you become a more skilled tutor you can charge 50 dollars an hour or 100 dollars an hour. So you get the idea here but this is definitely scalable and if you have a few clients you do a few tutoring sessions per week that can definitely add up.
II. Helping Small Businesses
So moving on to method number two. Now this one is a bit more challenging than the other methods I have on this list. But it can be a lot more lucrative and in my opinion a lot more rewarding and fun. Now, this is to build software or tools or websites for local businesses in your community.
Reason
I think this is great because you’re actually helping out a local business that may be a place that you’ve been to before and this is something that’s really attainable. Because you’re not trying to target Costco or the Walmarts or these huge stores that won’t even answer your email. You’re actually targeting a client that you could drive to their store. A kind of convincing them verbally why they need your services or products. Of course, don’t do this in a way where you’re harassing anyone.
My Experience
So the first thing I would do right now if I was about 15 years old and I had the skill to build a really basic single-page website is would look at all of the businesses in my local community and I would find out if they have a website or not. Now most of them are going to have a website. You may find a few that don’t have one.
So if they don’t have one I would actually physically visit their store and I would ask them hey do you guys want a website? If you don’t want one these are all the reasons I think you should have one. I could do one for you for 50 or 75 bucks whatever the rate you feel comfortable charging.
Pay Scale
The reason why you’re going to make your money back from this is that you only need 10 clients to walk through your door. Because this website is here forever. it will deal with hosting. It will deal with putting all this stuff up. You can of course charge them for those extra costs. Also, it’s really easy to prove to someone why a website would actually affect the bottom line of the business and how they would make money back from it.
Now of course most businesses do have websites. So another thing you could do is offer to redesign a website. If it’s really poorly done if it looks like it’s from the 1990s or what you could do is offer to build some type of automation tool for companies. If they can save 4, 8, or 12 through the automated scheduling then my $100 charge or whatever it was for that software is well worth it. Because they don’t have to pay employees to be doing something that the computer can do. I think this is really practical and this is something I’ve done in the past and found some success with.
III. Freelancing
So now we’re moving on to method three. This is my least favorite method on this list. But it does still make some money and can be fairly lucrative depending on kind of how you position yourself in this market. This is freelancing. Now freelancing when it comes to coding is difficult if you don’t have a very particular skill. But I’m going to talk about some strategies here that can make it so you can increase the revenue.
Reason
So if you’re unfamiliar with freelancing essentially this is you post an ad on some type of website like Upwork. When someone ideally finds that ad and then pays to complete some type of task. The most common thing is like making a website for someone or making a discord bot or working on an API, etc. There are tons of people that are offering services for the most generic things right for the things that everyone needs to be done. There’s a huge client base. Also, a huge amount of people are offering services. That means it’s pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of how much you’re gonna have to charge for services.
My Experience
When I was offering freelancing services probably three or four years ago. I actually was pretty much-completing people’s homework and projects which is against Fiverr terms of services. Don’t tell them I told you that. Anyways that’s what I was doing and I was doing this specifically for pie game projects. So the ad I put on Fiverr was you know I will make a pie game for you or something like that.
What happened was I got people with homework. That was due in like two days or three days or an assignment or a project. Mostly they would reach out to me with a high degree of urgency to complete something. and because of that fact I could charge them two or three times what I would normally charge. So since then, there’s been tons of people that have just copied my exact same ad.
Pay Scale
It may realistically take you four or five hours to create something and you only can charge $25 or $30 because people mostly from around the world are offering way cheaper rates to do the exact same thing. So I do find it difficult to make a lot of money from freelancing. But you can absolutely make money and the best way to increase the rate.
Of course, you need to pick something that’s super-specific super niche and that you can charge a fair amount of money for. You could offer services for they would be like specific python modules or a specific library in javascript or something that. You know just not a lot of people do and that you might not get a ton of clients for. But when you do get clients they’ll actually pay you a fair price. So it’s worth your time again you got to look into this you have to do your own research. All of these things require effort.
So start with any of these ways today and make $500 a week or even more!