I’m asked on regular basis, what is an easy way for a college student to make money. Well, the easiest way to make money is by offering something that is in very high demand and offer it at a fair price. You’ll make lots of money. In college, there are lots of students who, instead of focussing on the clep study guide, are desperate to make money in their spare time. Most students don’t have the luxury of a schedule that permits a part time job with scheduled hours.

The easiest way for a college student to make money is by freelancing. However, you’re probably wondering what kind of skills you can find on campus. Pretty much all students, regardless of their major, are essay writers and a fair chunk of them are good at it. Skilled English writers are hard to find in an economy where we outsource everything to offshore workers. They don’t have the English ability that we do.

A good student can likely pump out 1000 words in an hour. Article writers are paid anywhere from $2 to 6 per 100 words. Even if you only pay the student half the profit, you can easily scale this business across many writers and build something worthwhile. If you can sell a modest 5000 words per day at $4 per 100 words, that’s $200 per day in revenue.

Another talent you can find is programming. Second year computer science students are worth a lot of money in the workforce. They are at the turning point in their career where they are reaching the skill level to be employable. A couple loyal programmers can be the basis of an excellent in house programming service.

Now, you’re probably wondering where you should find these students. The easiest way is to post in your school’s Facebook group. Most schools have a group for jobs and internships. Message them and find out who feels reliable and has the best communication with you.

So lets say you’ve found the students. Where are you going to promote your services? The best place is online forums. There are tons of marketing forums out there that are always looking for services. Warrior Forum would be one of many options to list a thread. If you need help finding more places to offer your services, just shoot me a Tweet or email.

By offering writing or programming services online, you can fill a very large gap in the demand these services have.

There’s no way to go about it, coding is an in demand skill and is at the heart of the tech industry which  has thousands of unfilled jobs every year. Many people are afraid to learn or just don’t have the discipline. Companies like Code.org have started initiatives like Hour of Code which organize events teaching students from all walks of life how to code. Hour of Code shows every student, boy or girl, that they can learn to code too. I’m now in a 3rd year Computer Science program and love what I do. Here’s how I did it.

I started messing around with code around grade 9, the beginning of high school. I didn’t actually know what I was doing until I took a class in grade 10 on it. I got 95% and another pair of 95s when I took the grade 11 and 12 version. Before then, I thought the key was reading books. I have several 500+ paged textbooks on Java, C++, C# and many other languages. The key to learning to write code is practice. You have to apply what you’ve read or learned or you’ll forget.

On another note, I spent way too much time worrying about which language to learn. Oddly enough, know I know several programming languages. The semantics between the languages are similar… there are if/else statements, variables, loops and objects. The only thing that really changes is the syntax… the brackets, the semicolons, the parenthesis, etc.

When I taught my sister and girlfriend to code, both of them had no idea or confidence that they could do it. I assured them that they can do it. I told them to register on Codecademy.com and start doing the lessons. Choose Python as your beginning language, and read the couple sentences and do the quiz. Each lesson requires you to apply your knowledge, which is why this method works.

Once you’re done the course, move on to creating your own projects. Try to apply what you’ve learned, use the Python documentation and third party libraries to get what you want done. You may have expected a big secret, but there is none. The only thing I could possibly call a secret is the fact that you need to practice what you’ve learned so that you actually remember what you’ve learned.

So many freelancers sit on Upwork all day bidding on jobs. I started freelancing about 6 months ago, and I already have more work than I can handle, turning much of it down. I have no problem getting endless hourly jobs in the $25-50 USD per hour range. Being 20 years old, that’s not so bad.

The first step is to work with someone who has connections. Build out a simple project for them, and do it for dirt cheap. 20 hour job for $200. The key is, they’ve got to be a somebody. They have to have clients and the ability to refer you to others when they are given the chance. You likely know someone already who has this ability. Just help them out and they’ll treat you well.

I did this, and I was referred to a Wall Street Journal featured company who raised a $25,000,000 funding round earlier this year. The referrals just keep growing and the hourly rate keeps going up.

Also, do the first projects through Upwork (formerly Elance and oDesk). This will get your profile from 0 ratings to 1 or 2 ratings with 5 stars. This will be enough to generate jobs with a good cover letter. Explain why you’re better than the rest and you’ll win that job. You won’t ever rely off Upwork completely. It will help you get a few jobs, grow your portfolio, get experience and build a name. I imagine the amount of people that make $100k+ per year through the Upwork system is low because they eventually move off the system and work with the same repeat customers over and over.

By doing jobs for cheap initially, and getting some easy reviews on freelancing sites like Upwork, you’ll have no problem getting coding work.

When I started out, I didn’t have much money or skills. It was tough to create value. I didn’t have the mindset or skills to get paying clients. I struggled to freelance write in high school, before finally being able to afford a programmer to help build out a software that went on to sell 6 figures, called Keyword Scout.

After that, I decided to push myself to learn to program. Programming not only offered the option to have a steady income from freelancing, but it also gave me an opportunity to create value for clients who didn’t know how to program. It’s a different feeling knowing there are thousands of software ideas out there and they’ll all make me money, as the clients are begging for them.

I no have so many options and opportunities open to me. Any time I want, I can sit down, build out a great product that will turn into a chunk of change. It’s a different feeling when you have such an in demand skill. It gives you so much confidence in your business.

Knowing how to program has now given me the option to hire programmers to work under me, leaving me with the small task of checking over their code for quality and knowing exactly what I’m paying for. In this industry, it’s so easy to get scammed but it’s nice to know that I know what I’m paying for. I can literally pay someone $1200 to build out a software system in 4 weeks, test it and review the code, and turn this system into a 4 figure per month income. When the product creation is handle, that just leaves marketing to me, which I love, and if it’s a good product, it will handle a lot of marketing by itself.

This entire process just leaves it to, getting the idea and validating it by talking to prospective buyers, then writing the spec and hiring the coder. I basically then just review the code and what I’m paying for, and bring it to market. More of my failed products were in the product creation step, but that’s now automated. I’d lose interest after coding for 200 hours when I was only halfway done. I’m motivated but easily distracted to something else.