10 Tips for Making Money with Web Development, TODAY!
By: Ian Schoonover
Tags: Freelance, Earn Money Online, Contracting, Web Development, Self Taught

Photo by Joshua Aragon on Unsplash

Want to start making money right now as a web developer?

You don’t have to know much.

If you know some HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript, then you’re ready to begin taking on clients and earning some cash while you continue to learn.

Here are some basic steps you can take to land your first client and many more after that…

Find a friend, family member, friend of a friend, or complete stranger, who has a business that needs a website, or needs a better website. Always be sure to write up some form of contract for paid work, there are plenty of templates online where you can just fill in your name and the client’s name, get signatures, and you’re done.

A contract ensures that you’re not doing more work than was agreed to. A painful mistake to learn is having earned too little money on a project where you’re doing too much work because you didn’t outline the scope of the work in a legally binding contract. Find an awesome pre-made template (I like to use ones that are built with Bootstrap4 and SASS, it makes them so much easier to edit) from somewhere like https://bootstrapmade.com/, https://wrapbootstrap.com/, or https://startbootstrap.com/ Swap out the theme’s placeholder content with the text content, logo(s), and images for your client’s website.

Change colors if need be (this is where SASS/SCSS can be really handy!)

Need a pre-made color palette? Check out https://colorpalettes.net/ Give the client the site for free, or for cheap ($100 — $1000), and add the site to your portfolio. Sign up for an affiliate account for a popular shared hosting service (godaddy, hostgator, bluehost, a2hosting, etc.) and get your client to sign up for their own account, via your affiliate link (usually earns you anywhere from $75 — $150 in commission), then help them get their site hosted and connected to a custom domain (usually free with the hosting plan, or $16.99 — $39.99 depending on the extension, e.g., .com vs .io) Configure the website’s contact form (usually a very self-explanatory PHP file that simply needs one line of code changed with the client’s receiving email address) Get the client to get SSL certificate for HTTPS from their hosting service OR get it for free from https://letsencrypt.org/ and add it to their DNS/domain for them (you may need to configure an .htaccess file to force https on all requests, you can always get the hosting tech support team to help with this or use google) Ask the client to recommend you to their friends, family, business partners, etc. Rinse, repeat.

After awhile you will have a nice system down and will be able to crank these kinds of sites out very quickly. You can charge anywhere from $500 — $5000 for this kind of work. If the client needs work done in the future, charge them $50/hr — $100/hr for any followup work.

Bonus tip:

Don’t take it personally when the client wants something different than what you’ve built, it happens, your vision may not be aligned with theirs, that’s where good communication, and having the humility to be able to accept their criticism in a constructive way, is very useful. Be sure to check in with the client early and often so that there’s less room for miscommunication.

Set up a trello board (see my video on productivity/trello) where you can outline the work, detail each task, and organize all of your hours, content, and so on.

I could go on forever about this stuff, but hopefully you can take the information above and move forward with your goals, today.

Good luck :) You’ve got this!

P.S. If you land a client, but you need guidance through the process, you can always hire me on as a consultant for $100/hr and I’ll help you meet your project goals.