Table of Content

Introduction - Why Code Less And Earn More?

Chapter 1: Make Money Writing Online

- Write Down Headlines and Define The Type of Article

- Start Writing and Do Some Research
- Submit Your Article to a Publication

Chapter 2: Make Money with Online Courses

- Find a Narrow Niche

- Upload 20% of Your Course to freeCodeCamp
- Build an Email List and Automate It

Chapter 3: Make Money Through Ads, Affiliate Links, and

Sponsored Content

- Find Your Target Audience and Upload Videos Consistently

- Collaborate With Other Channels
- Exploit Your “unfair advantage”
Why Code Less And Earn More?
When I finished university, I didn’t know how to code. One of the few
programming courses I was forced to take at university was Excel VBA.
I can say that I learned a thing or two after failing and retaking the
course, but I didn’t learn that much.

Back then, writing code wasn’t for me, but I envied programmers
because I knew they had a good paycheck even in an entry-level
position.

After a few internships though, I realized that always programmers (or

anyone who could write code) worked harder than everyone else. At
the end of my workday, I used to see the same guys staying at the
office writing code. Their workday started at the same time as
everyone else, yet they were the last to leave the office.

Sometimes they were fixing bugs, compensating for the hours lost
after joining useless meetings, or simply trying to meet an unrealistic
deadline. Either way, the passion they had for their jobs was
admirable, but at the same time I asked myself, “isn’t working more
than anyone else (without being properly rewarded) a bit unfair?”

At the end of the day, only a very few of them might get a raise, and
probably none of them would get a raise proportional to the results
they produce.

After making a transition from business analytics to data science, I

experienced this first hand. I used to work more than most coworkers,
but none of the things I got compensated for the extra work.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like building things with the code I write …
but I like even more to be properly compensated for the work I do.
What did I do? Well, I learned as much as I could, and when I felt there
were very few new things to learn at work, I quit. On those days my
goal wasn’t to get a job with a better salary and perks (the one I had
was good enough) but to create something I can be proud of and
(hopefully) be properly rewarded for all the hours invested.

So far, I haven’t been able to build that thing (the project is still on),
but what I did build were passive income streams that give me the
financial stability I need to keep working on what I love.

If you dream one day to build your own company, create your product
or provide a service, you should start building different passive
income streams now. No matter how huge is your paycheck, if you
want to have financial stability and time to pursue things you love
(rather than what pays the bills), you’d definitely need income streams
that require little to no extra work to earn and maintain.

The good news is that you don’t need to quit your job to start building
passive income streams. Let me show you some passive income
streams I’ve built using my programming and data science skills.

This isn’t something a friend told me about or I read/watched out

there, but my own experience. Throughout this book, you’ll see the
steps I followed to make money while sleeping.
Medium — Make Money Writing
Online
Medium is a platform for independent writing. Every article you
publish there (also known as a Medium story) accumulates earnings.
Also, if someone becomes a member because of you, you get half of
that new reader’s subscription fee every month.

On Medium, you can write about hundreds of topics, and some

popular topics on the platform are data science and programming.

You heard that right! You can make money by writing how-to guides,
giving advice, sharing your point of view, and so on. It doesn't matter if
you're not an experienced programmer, data scientist, developer, or
engineer. You only need to turn your ideas into articles.

If you have a story to share, go ahead and write about it.

If you're still not an expert, do some research and write about it.
If you know better ways to do something, list them and write about it.

The number of topics you can write about is huge (as long as you have
an open mind). Whenever you have an idea, pick up your phone and
turn it into a headline for your next article.

Here are some reasons why Medium is on top of this list:

You can join the Medium Partner Program in a couple of days (you
only need 100 followers and to publish 1 story)
Growing on Medium as a data scientist/programmer is fast thanks
to publications (I’ll give more details about this later)
You don’t need to buy a camera, microphone, or anything like that
to start writing on Medium
There are a few problems some people encounter when writing on
Medium though:

Currently, enrollment in the Medium Partner Program is only

available in some countries (check the list here)

I’ve been writing articles on Medium for over a year. If you check my
profile at https://frank-andrade.medium.com/, you’ll see that I
published more than 100 articles and got more than 3 million views.

In the following section, I’ll show you how to get your first 100
followers, publish your first article and start making money on the
Medium Partner Program.

How to Join The Medium Partner Program and Start

Making Money

When I joined the Medium Partner Program, there wasn’t any special
requirement. Things changed in 2022. Now you need to publish at
least one story and have 100 followers to apply to the Medium Partner
Program.

Here are the steps to publish your first article, gain 100 followers and
go beyond that.

Step 1: Write Down Headlines and Define The Type of Article

You Want to Write

Pick a topic you’re good at (or that's still in the process). It can be
anything you’ve learned to become a programmer, data scientist, or
developer. For example, some topics I like to write about are
automation, data analysis, and web scraping.
Once you have the topic, write down some article ideas. Here are
some ideas I came up with:

- habits for programmers

- data science degree (worth it?)
- how to convert py to exe

Now, let me tell you all the types of articles you can write. When it
comes to writing programming or data science articles, there are 3
main types of articles — listicles, opinion pieces, and how-to guides.

In a listicle, you present items such as projects, books, and courses as

a list:

“7 Habits I Learned From Programmers More Successful Than Me”

In an opinion piece, you share your thoughts about a particular topic:

“Is a Degree in Data Science Worth It in 2022?”

How-to guides are the typical tutorials that teach you something.

“How to Easily Convert a Python Script to an Executable File (.exe)”

All the headlines written above belong to articles I wrote. You can
check them out to get a better idea of these 3 types of articles.

Now pick an idea from your list and think about the type of article
you’d like to write. This will help you picture the article even before
writing it.

Listicles have items that you have to describe, opinion pieces have
thoughts you have to defend, and how-to guides have steps or code
snippets you have to explain.
As you write more articles on Medium, you’ll learn what topics work
well on the platform. As a rule of thumb, read articles published on
Medium in your niche as much as you can. The more you read, the
better you write, and the easier to find what readers are looking for on
Medium.

Step 2: Start Writing and Do Some Research

First, go to Medium and create a free account. Once you’re logged in,
click on the “write” button to create an empty draft.

In the draft, you can start writing everything you know about the topic
you chose. As you write the article, you’d probably need to do some
research to complete your thoughts or add an element to a listicle.
Doing the research might take you minutes or hours (that depends on
your expertise), but that’s an important step to add more value to
your article.

To help yourself, check related articles to borrow new ideas and

extract information that you can later quote.

Remember that when explaining concepts and code in an article, you

end up relearning stuff and improving your skills.

Step 3: Submit Your Article to a Publication

Once you finish writing your article, you must submit it to a

publication.

This is an important step! Some people self-publish their articles and

get few views and almost no followers. This is why you have to submit
your article to a publication that has already a good number of
followers.
If your article gets accepted in a publication on Medium, it will reach
the people that subscribed to that publication. This is a great chance
for you to get your first 100 followers and go beyond that.

Publications focus on specific topics. For example, the publication

“Towards Data Science” focuses on anything related to Data Science,
while “Better Programming” publishes coding tutorials as well as
articles that have actionable advice for programmers and engineers.

As you read more articles on Medium, you’ll find other publications

that are a good fit for you.

To submit an article to a publication, first, you have to become a

writer. To do so, send your draft via their submission form. You can
find this form on their homepage inside a section named “Write for us
/ Contribute / Submit.” There you can also check their submission
rules. Here and here you can find the submission form of the
publications mentioned before.

Once You Met the Requirements, Join the Medium Partner

Program

Only after you published your first story and gained 100 followers,
apply for the Medium Partner Program. To join the program, go to
medium.com/earn and click on “Apply to the Partner Program.”

After that, you need to fill out a form. Then you have to wait a couple
of days and you’ll get an email from Medium. They’ll welcome you to
the partner program, ask you to fill out taxpayer information, and
create a Stripe account (this is where you get paid).

After they verify all your information, your new articles will accumulate
earnings and you can also start referring new members to generate
passive income.
Udemy — Make Money with Online
Courses
If you’ve ever paid for a programming course, you probably know
Udemy.

I like to think of Udemy as the Amazon of online courses. There

anyone can publish a course and profit from it without taking care of
the promotion but mostly relying on Udemy’s organic sales, ads, and
affiliate program.

Students get so many offers and discounts that some of them end up
buying multiple courses on the same niche and a few of them end up
collecting them (I have students who never watched a single lecture
after getting my courses)

This makes Udemy a great place to generate passive income. You only
need to record a course once and then promote it yourself or let
Udemy take care of it.

This sounds too good to be true, so let’s see some pros and cons of
the platform:

Pros:

Anyone can publish courses on Udemy: They don’t check your

curriculum, experience, grades, or anything like that. You only
need to send some basic documents to identify yourself and that’s
pretty much it.

Udemy takes care of the promotion: You can go on with your

everyday life and let Udemy promote your course for you.
Cons

If students buy your course with your referral link, they credit you
with the sale and you get 97% revenue, but if you get the sale
thanks to Udemy’s promotion channels, you get only 37% revenue
(ouch!)

You don’t set the price of the course: Udemy’s business model sets
the price of your course based on factors such as geography,
promotions, type of student, etc. This is sometimes great, but
other times horrible. I’ve seen students in developed countries
paying up to $40 for one of my courses, while students in
developing countries might pay as low as $5.

How to Make Courses on Udemy that Actually Sell

I’ve been making Python courses on Udemy for almost a year. So far
I've published 4 courses. Here are the steps I'd follow next time I make
and publish a course on Udemy.

Step 1: Find a Narrow Niche

I can’t tell how important is to narrow down a niche, especially if

you’ve never made a course before and have no one to sell your
courses to.

Let’s compare 2 courses I have on Udemy:

-“Python for Data Science Bootcamp 2022: From Zero to Hero”

-“Web Scraping for Data Science-Python: BS4, Selenium & Scrapy”

Web scraping targets a smaller group of people than data science, but
it can be more profitable when it comes to selling your first course.
Although I more than tripled my income the month I published my
data science course, things went back to normal in the following
months.

The thing is, the more well-established competitors you have, the
harder is to sell your course. On Udemy, there are already lots of best-
seller data science courses that are highly promoted by the platform.
The month I published my data science course I increased my income,
yes, but thanks to my own promotion, not Udemy’s.

Promoting your course yourself is good because you keep 97%

revenue but after your followers join/ignore your course, there are
fewer new followers to promote your course to. Here’s when you need
Udemy’s promotion.

I know, I know … with Udemy’s help you keep only 37% but at least
you don’t have to take care of the promotion anymore. Your course
will accumulate earnings without you being actively involved. You can
keep your job and continue with your everyday life. That’s basically the
definition of passive income.

But remember that to be highly promoted on Udemy, you should

avoid too much competition by narrowing down a niche.

Step 2: Upload 20% of Your Course to freeCodeCamp

For those who want to get 97% revenue on a consistent basis,

consider promoting your courses on YouTube. There you can upload
parts of your original course and leave your referral link in the
description or comment section.
The problem is that most likely you don’t have a YouTube channel, but
what you can do is to collaborate with other YouTubers. A big
YouTube channel that has its doors open for anyone who wants to
teach something is freeCodeCamp.

Naturally, they have some rules you have to follow to be accepted

(check how to contribute to the freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel
here). As a rule of thumb, strategically extract 20% content of your
course to create a new piece of content that targets potential students
on YouTube.

I did this for my data science course, but instead of targeting data
science enthusiasts on my YouTube video, I targeted Excel users who
would like to learn how to do data analysis in Python. I strategically
extracted 20% of my original course and created “Data Analysis with
Python for Excel Users — Full Course” which is available for free on
YouTube. You won't make a single dollar from the video, but you'll
make thousands from your course.

Promoting your course and getting sales sends positive feedback to

Udemy, so this will also help your courses get promoted by Udemy.

Step 3: Build an Email List and Automate It

Although I mentioned before that you could leave your referral links in
a YouTube video to sell more, I rarely do that.

Why? I’m a bit more ambitious, so I prefer to build an email list.

Would you rather sell 1 course or 5 courses? If your answer is 1, go

ahead and leave your referral link in YouTube videos, but if your
answer is 5, you need to leave a link to your newsletter in order to
collect emails, so you can contact your followers every time you
publish a new course.
If someone joins your course on Udemy, you won’t have access to
his/her email, so the next time that student buys one of your courses,
most likely you’ll get only 37% revenue.

I like paying for email marketing apps like Converkit because they
have an automation feature that allows me to create a sequence of
emails to promote courses within specific segments. That said, there
are some free apps like Substack that help you collect and send emails
with a nice template. They lack some advanced features though.
YouTube — Make Money Through Ads,
Affiliate Links, and Sponsored
Content
Most people think you need to have a big YouTube channel to make a
good amount of money on YouTube. That’s not true at all!

You need to have a big YouTube channel to boost earnings through

the YouTube Partner Program, but you don’t need so many
subscribers to make money through affiliate links, and sponsored
content.

Also, if you have an online presence, you can get clients to pay you to
make videos for them (even if you’re not on the YouTube Partner
Program yet).

How do I do it? I use Medium’s traffic to get more views on YouTube.

Also, I convince some clients to pay me for making a couple of videos
promoting their products.

This is why I highly recommend writing articles on Medium before

jumping to YouTube … but in case you want first to try luck on
YouTube, here’s what you need to join the YouTube Partner Program.

The requirements to join the YouTube Partner Program are 1000

subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time.

Getting 1000 subscribers isn’t so difficult, the bad news is that most
people struggle to get 4000 hours of watch time. Some lucky folks get
it in 1 month, others (like me) get it in 5 months and the rest give up
before a year.
How to get 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch
time

Here’s what I did to get 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch
time on my YouTube channel.

1. Find Your Target Audience and Upload Videos Consistently

Your target audience is the type of people you’d like to make videos
for.

If you’re a programmer, your target audience might be people

interested in learning coding and computer science. If you’re a data
scientist, your target audience might be people interested in learning
Python or R.

But that’s not all! You have to understand what your target audience is
looking for. You don’t have to record only coding tutorials but can go
beyond that making videos on methods of self-study, how to be more
productive, etc. Also, you can check what your audience is looking for
by reading subreddits and following YouTubers that have a similar
target audience.

Another important point is to upload videos consistently. You have to

stick to a schedule and upload videos every 2 days, 5 days, once per
week, or whatever fits you best.

Believe me, it’s not the same uploading 7 videos on a week and then
stopping for a month than uploading a video each week. The impact
on your audience and on the algorithm will be different.
2. Collaborate With Other Channels

One of the disadvantages of YouTube is that you’re completely alone

in the very beginning. No one knows who you are, so it’s hard to get
views and collaborations.

That said, there are still big channels like freeCodeCamp that you can
collaborate with. Usually, the videos they publish are free courses that
last at least 1 hour. As I mentioned before, they have rules that you
should check before contacting them through email.

If your video gets accepted, you can leave a comment in that video
and promote your channel. I easily got more than 1000 subscribers
after publishing my video “Data Analysis with Python for Excel Users —
Full Course” on freeCodeCamp.

I can’t guarantee you’ll get the 4000 hours of watch time though, but
the next tip can help with that.

3. Exploit Your “unfair advantage”

Everyone and their mother knows YouTube is overcrowded, so you

need to exploit your “unfair advantage” to stand out on the platform.

What I mean by “unfair advantage” is something that you have that

others don’t. If you’re an ex-Google engineer, we can say you have an
unfair advantage because only a few people have the privilege to work
at Google. This can help you get clicks whenever you publish videos
sharing your experience in interviews, at work, etc.

My unfair advantage? Ok, I’m not a tech guru or ex-FAANG employee,

but I’m a well-established writer on Medium, so I strategically turn
some of my articles into YouTube videos. Then I leave a link to my
YouTube videos in the articles.
For example, I turned my most read article “How to Easily Convert a
Python Script to an Executable File (.exe)” into a video, and shared the
video in the article, so those who don’t feel like reading would watch
the video.

The result? That video became my most viewed video on my YouTube

channel. I don’t even have to come up with new ideas, but only adapt
my old articles to video format.

I didn’t mention all of this to brag, but to encourage you to find your
unfair advantage. I know that it might look hard at the beginning, but
everyone has something special.

In case it’s hard for you to find your unfair advantage, try writing on
Medium. Medium’s publications can help you grow faster and you can
use that traffic to get more views on YouTube as I did.