The 4 Keys to Make Your First $1000 Writing Online as a Programmer
The 4 Keys to Make Your First $1000 Writing Online as a Programmer
My personal experiences monetizing my writing in the past two years.
Hello there!
Welcome to Algorithmically Speaking, where we discuss topics on the intersection of Computer Science, Software Engineering, and life.
On January 1st, 2023, I published my first piece of writing online. It started as a hobby and still is, but now I have almost two years of experience doing it.
In 2023 alone, I made around $1500 just from online writing. I will tell you how I did it and share some of my frameworks for crafting consistent weekly posts about the topics you want to write about.
Buckle up!
The Hashnode Adventure
Hashnode was the home of my first online writing. On January 1st, 2023, I hit publish on their platform for the first time, and this article came out on the other side. I decided I wanted to get comfortable with writing online by sharing my view on programming-related topics because it had been my day-to-day job for several years.
Little did I know that three days later, I would hit publish again and, as a result, receive a $500 prize.
The occasion was a writeathon hosted by Hashnode, with the topic of sharing your experience as a developer in 2022. I decided to give it a shot because I thought I had done many things in my professional life as a software developer, particularly in 2022, and it was worth sharing my experiences.
I produced this article and submitted it for the competition, almost in a rush. A few days later, the winners were announced, and I got second place. In this case, the top 10 places got a prize of $500 and a very cool coffee mug.
A month later, Hashnode announced another writeathon. This time, the topic was about sharing an experience related to debugging code. I did not think twice before getting hands-on writing a piece for this competition.
My approach was to take something from my competitive programming days and frame it as an exciting story about debugging code. There was much debugging in our programming competitions, so why not?
My team and I created a framework that allowed us to leverage the computer's computing power to have it find our bugs for us. This technique is very similar to fuzzy testing, but I did not know that when I wrote that article.
This time, I did not rush, and I worked on the article for a few weeks before submitting it for competition. The result was this post that I eventually sent to subscribers of this newsletter.
The results were announced shortly after, and this time, I shared first place with another talented writer. The prize for this competition was $449.
Why did I win?
If you are a sharp reader, you might have realized that I won two out of two writing competitions. And honestly, I’m not an exceptionally good writer.
So, how could I win without having an obvious writing talent and only a few weeks of experience writing online? The answer is simple: the rest of the competitors were worse.
It doesn’t take that much effort to be in the top 5% of your game in the modern world. People are too distracted, don’t know how to focus, and usually want shortcuts to achieve results instead of putting in the hard work and being patient.
In these competitions, I realized that most of the submitted posts were not of high quality. They were too short and vague, almost as if the writer did not put in any effort to produce something that would give them a shot at winning the price.
The only thing I had to focus on was caring enough. I knew that if I spent a few days crafting this piece instead of a few minutes, I would have a higher chance than the average submitted post. And it turned out to be true.
You can read both posts right now and realize they are nothing extraordinary. They were just better than the other articles submitted for the competition. They won, which is what competition is all about during performance time.
What happened after that?
After I won those two competitions, there were no other purely writing contests. Hashnode still hosts hackathons in collaboration with other tech companies. Usually, these hackathons include a section where you must write a post about the product you created, but they are not purely writing competitions.
I have been tempted to participate in some of these occasionally, but I don’t have the time between my 9-to-5 job and my writing.
The closest I could find were the monthly challenges proposed by WeMakeDevs. I participated in those and won a couple of prizes, including printed T-shirts, another cool Hashnode mug, and stickers.
I don’t know how to estimate the value of ceramic coffee mugs and printed T-shirts, so please leave a comment if you do.
I kept writing on Hashnode, trying to publish an average weekly article. The primary purpose was to get used to a sustainable publishing schedule over time.
Eventually, I discovered Substack, a newsletter-based system I particularly enjoy. I prefer to know that I’m writing for an audience, even if small, than advertising my writing everywhere to get eyes on my posts.
Still, to this day, my blog on Hashnode gets some daily views, which have amounted to surprisingly 25k.
I will explain how I have made Substack work for me since I started this newsletter in April 2023, but first, let me tell you about a few other options I tried on and off with very mixed results. You can try these independently and evaluate whether they fit you well.
The Other Adventures
Let me quickly run through the other experiments I have tried. I will let you know which ones have worked the best, which ones have not, and for what purpose I have tried using them.
With that in mind, here I go.
DEV Community
This is a website very similar to Hashnode. I started posting some of the articles I had published before, only to realize that it would take me the same effort to get eyes on this website, so I might as well send my small audience to Hashnode instead.
FreeCodeCamp
I used freeCodeCamp to republish some of the articles from the Hashnode blog but went through a review process with their professional editors. This worked wonderfully because my main goal was to learn from all the feedback they provided me.
Eventually, I published a few articles on their platform and benefited from their huge social media reach. This got me some followers on Twitter (now X) and LinkedIn.
Medium
I also tried Medium to get more experience writing for the Volvo Cars Engineering Blog. The results were not so good. Their group of editors is not as experienced as the ones from freeCodeCamp, and their engineering blog is very poorly handled, in my opinion, because it does not have a clear leader driving this initiative.
That being said, Medium has a lot of online traffic, and it is likely that if you can craft a great piece, it will be read by a considerable audience. I don’t have the experience to tell you what works and what doesn’t in this platform, so it is for you to discover.
Twitter/X
I tried writing short-form content on Twitter for a while. After a while, I got tired of it, and I barely use the app anymore.
Some people use it to drive new subscribers to their newsletters, but I could never make it work, and I don’t think I would even try again.
LinkedIn
On the other hand, LinkedIn has worked surprisingly well for me. The short-form content I write and the links to my newsletter posts are very well received on this platform.
I suspect that the more “professional” and “mature” audience over there is more compatible with the type of educational content I try to share every week.
I have also seen it work for some of the best voices in the software/technology space here on Substack. Some examples of them are:
- , from .
- , from .
- , from .
If you know other great voices in the software/technology space here on Substack, please share them in the comments.
Reddit
As I have said to other Substack writers, Reddit is a box of chocolates. And yes, you (or at least me) never know what you will get.
But lately, I have found two subreddits with surprisingly good reception to the content I share there. Those are:
The programming subreddit,
And the codeforces subreddit.
The first one is huge, with over 6.5M users and generating a lot of traffic. The people can be very direct there, so you should not mind an angry comment or two. The second one is a very niche subreddit for the competitive programming website, where I did most of my training during my university years.
In general, both communities receive topics related to software engineering, programming, algorithms, and competitive programming very well. Most of these are recurring in this newsletter, so I guess it makes sense that people tend to click the links and come over to read them.
Since this is a post about how I have monetized my online writing, the main point to notice from these experiments is that the socials have driven some paid subscribers to the newsletter.
Advertising your writing everywhere takes effort and time, but if you create a system for it, it can be done in a few minutes each time you publish something new.
Don’t get hung up in the comments or waiting for likes, claps, or hearts. None of that matters. Hit publish, share everywhere, and don’t look back.
The Substack Adventure
If you have been keeping track, so far, I’ve made around $1000 writing online from all the examples I’ve listed above:
$500 in DevRetro Writeathon.
$449 in DebuggingFeb Writeathon.
~$50 in swags (printed coffee mugs and T-shirts).
All these sources of income came from winning some writing competition, which is cool but not very sustainable. This is why:
They are scarce.
They usually have a fixed topic.
So, my attention shifted towards finding some source of income that involved writing, but that was a bit more consistent over time and in which I chose the topics I wanted to write about. And then came Substack.
In the next section, I share how I have made a weekly newsletter work for me so far and the improvements I will be implementing shortly to make it work even better with the purpose of:
Generating extra income,
From writing about the things I want,
In a way that is sustainable over time and avoids burnout.
Pay special attention to the third point above because this is a game of consistency and patience. I have failed to stay consistent in writing this newsletter before. It’s called burnout.
What has worked so far and a strategy for life
Let’s first discuss what has worked so far and then move on to how I plan to make this adventure last forever. You can implement variations of the following advice based on your specific needs.
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