How to Turn Your Passion for Writing Into Money as a Software Developer

Part I - Paid to Write

Monetize your writing, and the dream comes true.

It’s simple, scalable, and (potentially) passive.

But is it that easy to make money directly by writing?

No funneling users to a different product, selling them coaching or consulting services but basically getting paid to type words.

Almost a week ago, I asked Twitter this:

Akos @akoskm

As a developer, you have a blog visited by 10 000 people each month. How would you use this traffic to make some side income?

The majority of answers suggested one thing: make money somewhere else.

Two things came to people’s minds with direct monetization: ads and paywalls.

Monetization through ads for tech folks is a dead end. You’re probably using an ad blocker right now.

This week I talked to someone from a social blogging platform about their plans for monetization.

They won’t do ads for a simple reason:

70% of their visitors use ad-blockers or browsers that block ads natively, like Brave.

It’s also hard to paywall tech articles because of the vast amount of high-quality, free content.

So how can software developers get paid for writing? Here are a couple of options:

Social Blogging

Use platforms with a built-in monetization scheme.

Medium

An honest summary from Nick Wignall will tell you that building a profitable Medium audience is not child’s play.

I’ve published 1-2 articles on Medium every week for the past 5 years on the side of my full-time job.

Substack

The social blogging platform I mentioned also conducted research on who performs best on Substack. They found that people subscribe to reporters, journalists, and, in the tech space, writers with previous leadership experience.

I found something similar. People who successfully monetize Substack writing are the ones who:

1. worked for some software behemoths, so they have authority because of their past day job. Gergely Oroszi comes to my mind. Gergely writes for engineers and engineering managers. You’ll most likely advance your career through his stories, earning you more money in the long run.

2. do something extremely profitable. Then you read their thing and imagine you could do this too, and it will earn you more money in the long run, and you buy in.

So if you’re a writer like me who freelanced most of his life, didn’t work for any behemoths, and you don’t fall into category 2) either, you’ll have a hard time monetizing your Substack.

Selling digital products (Ebooks, Guides)

I would put this as a subcategory to Paid Substack because it has pretty much the same constraints that you need on Substack for people to open their wallets:

• Existing credibility that you’re qualified to talk about X and Y, and people reading about X and Y will earn them more money than they spent on your stuff.

• You make a ton of money from a skill, write about that, and teach people to do the same skill. They earn more money too, and we went full circle.

Ghostwriting

The idea behind Ghostwriting is that you write different content for other companies that publish your content (sometimes under their name). You can Ghostwrite:

• tweets

• blog posts

• newsletters

• email campaigns

• welcome email sequences

Pretty much anything that needs to be written.

I’ve written 0 of these except for blog posts, but an educated guess would be that as AI writing technologies advance, it’ll write okay stuff.

This means that people who are already good at this will keep making money from copywriting and tech blogging, but people who are just getting started will have a hard time monetizing.

Conclusion

Making money directly by writing is not a walk in the park.

At least not in the tech community.

Some people, even well above the 10k/month visit, don’t know how to make some side income only with their blogs.

This is why I had to dig deeper and find out if direct monetization is likely not the answer for software developers, then what is?

I’ll try to answer this in the next issue!

As always, thanks for reading my newsletter!

Until next time,

Akos