How To Make Money Online With Web Development (5 Methods That Actually Worked)

Web development was one of the first skills Alston used to make money online. Not in a theoretical sense where you learn to code and wait for a company to hire you. In a direct, go-get-clients-today sense where you turn the skill into cash on your own timeline. In this video he walks through five specific methods he tested, what worked, what cost money, and what produced real income.

If you already know how to build websites, or you are in the middle of learning, this post maps out the exact paths Alston used to turn that skill into cash. Some of these methods are free to start. One costs money but expands your reach across the country. All five have produced real income, and you can start testing at least one of them this week.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A free method to generate a local business lead list using your library card and Data Axle
A pitch framework for landing website clients at $300 to $1,000 per project
The math behind a single Udemy course that generated close to $499,000 in net revenue
How to use Thumbtack to find clients across the United States without a resume or agency behind you
A YouTube channel strategy that uses Stack Overflow questions as free content ideas
How to use Ahrefs keyword research to build a blog that earns passively around web development topics
Which of these five methods fits your situation right now at finder.platformproof.com

Method 1: Reach Out to Local Businesses Using Your Library Card

This was one of the first approaches Alston tested, and it costs nothing to get started. The entire lead list comes from a free resource you can access with a library card: a business database called Data Axle, formerly known as Reference USA.

Here is how the process works. Go to your local library and get a free library card. Most libraries provide access to a digital resource section where Data Axle lives. Once you are inside, you can do an advanced search for businesses in your county, filtered by industry, company size, revenue, and even how much a business spends on technology. That last data point is surprisingly useful because it tells you whether a prospect has any budget before you pick up the phone.

The data you get back is detailed. Alston pulled records that included church pastor names, business addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, Twitter handles, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, and website URLs. The export comes as an Excel spreadsheet you can work through systematically. You are not guessing who to call. You have a full contact file for every business in your county organized by industry.

The strategy is to look for businesses in a specific industry that either have no website or have one that is clearly outdated. Alston built a templated demo website, something like restaurant-example.com, and showed it to every restaurant owner he contacted. The visual made it easy for them to see what their online presence could look like without having to use their imagination. That one move shortened the sales conversation significantly because the prospect did not need to picture anything. They could see it.

Pricing was straightforward: $300 to $1,000 per website depending on complexity. Some contacts responded to phone calls. Some responded to postcards Alston sent using the mailing addresses from the export. Others were reachable through their listed social media profiles. Because you can see their Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook information in the same spreadsheet, you have multiple ways to reach any single business without cold calling being your only option.

Data Axle has one limitation worth knowing upfront. You can only view and export 25 results per search, which means you have to run multiple searches to work through a full county list. It is a minor inconvenience, not a real obstacle. You are working with free leads. One closed project at $500 more than covers the time it takes to run a handful of searches and download several spreadsheets.

Alston pointed out something that is easy to overlook: being local is a selling point. When you tell a business owner you are in the same county, they are more willing to listen. Local proximity builds trust faster than any portfolio badge or testimonial page. If you can offer to meet in person, even briefly, the conversation changes entirely. You stop being a stranger on the phone and become someone they can actually shake hands with.

Alston targeted churches in his area specifically because the data showed 110 churches in his county alone. He could approach each one with the same message: a lot of people make donations online now, and you can collect those donations through a website, but right now you do not have one. That pitch is not about selling a product. It is about showing a gap and offering to close it.

Method 2: Create a Web Development Course on Udemy

Alston built four courses on Amazon Web Services, covering topics like SQS and S3, and sold them through Udemy. This shifts the model from active income, where you trade time for project fees, to passive income, where a course earns money around the clock without you doing additional work.

Here is the math he ran live in the video. His first AWS course had over 22,000 reviews, which he used as a proxy for total enrollment. He estimated around 100,000 people enrolled in that course. At Udemy’s standard discounted price of $9.99, that works out to roughly $999,000 in gross revenue. After splitting with Udemy, the net is approximately $499,000 from a single course on a topic many developers consider intermediate at best.

That is not a projection. That is what the public-facing data on that course implied when Alston worked through the numbers in the video. You do not need to reach that scale to make this worthwhile. A course with 2,000 enrollments at the same math generates close to $10,000. A focused course on a specific topic can be built in a weekend and stay on the marketplace earning money for years.

Udemy is not the only platform available. Alston also mentioned Skillshare and other online education platforms as viable options. Each has a different payout model. Udemy brings buyers to you through its marketplace but controls the pricing heavily through discount campaigns. Skillshare pays per minute watched, which rewards courses that keep viewers engaged throughout. Other platforms let you set your own price and keep more of the revenue but require you to drive your own traffic to them.

Course length does not have to be intimidating. Alston noted that courses can run anywhere from 90 minutes to seven hours. A 90-minute course on a single focused topic, such as how to set up an S3 bucket, how to use React hooks, or how to build a contact form in WordPress, can be recorded in one day and published the same week. You add modules over time as you hear what questions students ask most. The course gets better, ratings improve, and enrollment grows.

The best topic ideas are already in front of you. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange are full of questions people ask repeatedly. If a specific question shows up hundreds of times with thousands of total views across threads, that is a market signal. People want a clear, visual answer and they are not finding one that satisfies them. A focused course that solves that exact problem will find buyers without heavy marketing because the search volume already exists.

Method 3: Find Web Development Clients on Thumbtack

Thumbtack is a platform where people post specific tasks they need done, including web development, and professionals apply to help them. Unlike the local outreach method, Thumbtack gives you access to clients all across the United States from wherever you are sitting right now.

Alston signed up as a Thumbtack Pro and used the platform to land clients in states he had never visited. He worked with an electrical company in California, churches in Texas and in Virginia, and other clients spread geographically in ways that a local outreach campaign alone could never reach. That kind of reach matters if you live in a small town or a market where local businesses are too spread out to contact efficiently.

The honest drawback is cost. To get your proposal in front of people searching for a web developer on Thumbtack, you pay a fee per proposal. This is a direct contrast to the library card method, which is entirely free. Think of Thumbtack as paid lead generation. The trade-off is speed and intent: instead of cold calling people who never asked to hear from you, you are reaching people who already decided they need help and took the step of posting a job on a platform to find someone.

The platform surfaces ratings and reviews prominently. When you start, you have zero reviews, which puts you at a disadvantage against established profiles with 15 or 21 reviews, the numbers Alston pointed out in the video. The practical workaround is to price your first few projects competitively, deliver work that earns a strong review, and collect that social proof as fast as possible. Once you have a handful of solid ratings, the platform returns you in results more reliably and your proposal conversion rate improves with it.

Thumbtack works best as a complement to local outreach rather than a replacement. Use the free library card method to build your first few clients and collect testimonials. Then bring those testimonials to your Thumbtack profile to shorten the credibility gap. You are paying for leads on Thumbtack, so you want your profile to convert as many of those paid proposals into actual clients as possible.

Not sure which of these five methods fits where you are right now?

Answer a few short questions and get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

Method 4: Start a YouTube Channel Teaching Web Development

A YouTube channel built around web development topics can generate income in multiple ways from the same video: ad revenue through the YouTube Partner Program, course sales through a link in the description, and direct client leads from people who watch the tutorial and decide they would rather hire someone than do it themselves.

The content strategy Alston described starts at Stack Overflow. People go there every day to ask the same technical questions. If you search for something like “how to run a for loop in Python,” you find thousands of posts with people asking exactly that question. That is a video idea. Record a clear screen share walking through the answer, post it to YouTube, and people searching that question on Google and YouTube will find it for months or years without you doing any additional promotion.

The YouTube Partner Program pays ad revenue once you reach 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers. Getting there takes time, but web development tutorials have an advantage in this area. Technical how-to videos tend to have high completion rates because viewers follow along step by step. That watch time accumulates faster than it does on channels where people browse and leave. The more thorough your tutorial, the longer people stay, and the faster your channel hits the monetization threshold.

Beyond ad revenue, Alston described a direct client pitch you can build into the video itself. At the beginning of a tutorial showing people how to build a WordPress website, you say something like: if you would rather have someone do this for you, I will build your WordPress website for $300 and have it done in 24 hours. Put a payment link or a booking form in the description. Some viewers who started watching will decide partway through that they do not want to do the work themselves. Those viewers become paying clients without you running any separate marketing campaign.

He also mentioned an arbitrage approach for developers who want to scale without doing every project themselves. You build the client relationship through your YouTube channel and close the project at $300 or more. Then you hire someone on Fiverr to do the actual build. The margin between what your client pays and what you pay your Fiverr contractor is your profit. This is essentially running a small web development agency from a YouTube channel, and it requires almost no upfront capital to start.

The search traffic in this space is real and significant. Alston showed results for “how to build a WordPress website” where individual videos had 121,000 views, 168,000 views, and 286,000 views. None of those creators paid for that traffic. It came from people searching and finding. As you publish more videos in your niche, each one becomes an additional entry point for new viewers, and the channel compounds over time.

Method 5: Start a Blog in a Web Development Niche

Blogging is the fifth method Alston covered, and it is built on the same fundamental logic as the YouTube channel: find what people are searching for and create content that answers it. The tool he used for research here is Ahrefs, a keyword research platform that shows you how often any given term gets searched each month and how competitive the results are.

He searched for “Amazon Web Services” in Ahrefs during the video and found it gets searched over 3.5 million times per month. There are more than 584,000 related keywords across all the variations people use to search for information about AWS. That is an enormous topic area with room for hundreds of focused blog posts, each targeting a different question someone might type into Google.

You do not have to pick AWS. The same logic applies to React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, WordPress, and every major framework or language developers work with. Pick a technology you already know or are actively learning, open Ahrefs, and look at the questions people ask most. Each one of those questions is a potential blog post that could rank in search results and bring visitors to your site month after month.

Stack Overflow serves double duty in this strategy too. The questions people ask on Stack Overflow are almost always the same questions people type into Google. Browse the most-viewed questions in your chosen technology and write detailed blog posts that answer each one comprehensively. You are building a content library that attracts search traffic without ongoing promotion. Once an article ranks, it earns visits passively.

Blog income has a longer runway than the other methods on this list. You are building something that compounds over time, not something that pays in week one. The payoff is durability. A single well-ranked article in a high-traffic niche can generate consistent visitors for years. Display ad revenue from that traffic, affiliate links to relevant tools, or a services page where readers can hire you all become income sources without additional work on your end once the article is written and ranked.

The combination of blogging and YouTube, both pointing back to a services page or a course listing, creates multiple income streams that reinforce each other. Someone who finds your blog post might subscribe to your YouTube channel. Someone who watches a YouTube video might click through to your blog for a deeper explanation. Both paths eventually lead to a paying relationship.

Honest Drawbacks You Should Know Before You Start

None of these five methods is effort-free, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Here is what each one actually costs in time and money so you can pick the right starting point for your situation.

The local business outreach method takes significant relationship-building time. You will make calls that go unanswered and send emails that get no reply. Most business owners have never bought a website from a stranger they found through a cold call. Expect the conversion rate to be low and plan for volume. The more businesses you contact, the more clients you close, and the Data Axle export makes it possible to systematically contact hundreds of businesses in your county without running out of leads quickly.

Udemy courses require upfront recording and editing time. A 90-minute course still takes many hours to script, record, and polish to a quality that earns strong reviews. Udemy also controls pricing heavily through its own discount promotions, which means your course will often sell at $9.99 regardless of what you list it at. You are trading time upfront for passive income that continues long after you stop actively working on the course.

Thumbtack costs money per proposal. There is no guarantee a proposal turns into a paid project. Budget for some losses before you start winning clients consistently. The platform rewards profiles with review history, so the first few months are the most expensive per client you acquire. Once your profile has reviews and your proposal-to-close rate improves, the cost per client drops significantly.

YouTube takes time to reach monetization. The 4,000 watch hour and 1,000 subscriber threshold is not trivial. Most channels take six months to a year to reach it with consistent publishing. If you post one video a month, the timeline stretches further. The long-term payoff is that a monetized channel with 50 or 100 tutorials becomes a durable income asset that keeps attracting views and clients without ongoing promotion from you.

Blogging has the longest ramp-up. Organic search rankings can take three to six months to appear, sometimes longer for competitive keywords. You are building something that grows in value over time rather than something that pays immediately. If you need income in the next 30 days, start with local outreach or Thumbtack and build your blog in parallel as a second track.

The Real Numbers Breakdown

Alston walked through specific numbers in the video. Here is the breakdown so you can compare what each method can realistically generate.

Local business outreach: $300 to $1,000 per project. At 2 projects a month at $500 each, that is $1,000 in active income. At 4 projects a month, $2,000. The ceiling is your capacity and how many clients you can handle in parallel.

Udemy course: Alston’s AWS course had over 22,000 reviews and an estimated 100,000 enrollments. At $9.99 per enrollment, gross revenue is approximately $999,000. After the Udemy split, net is roughly $499,000. A smaller course with 2,000 enrollments generates close to $10,000. This is passive income that continues without additional work after the course is published.

Thumbtack: Same project range as local outreach, $300 to $1,000 or more per website. The difference is geographic reach. You are not limited to your county. You can work with an electrical company in California and churches in Virginia from the same desk.

YouTube: Ad revenue at 100,000 views per month in a tech niche can range from $200 to $500 monthly. Add a $300 website offer in each tutorial and close two clients a month and you add $600 in active income on top of that. Course sales from the same channel can compound the total further. The numbers are modest early but grow with the channel.

Blog: Revenue from a ranking blog in a tech niche comes from display ads (around $10 to $30 per 1,000 visitors depending on the niche), affiliate commissions from tools you recommend, and leads for your services. A blog with 10,000 monthly visitors in a web development niche can generate $300 to $1,000 per month from ads alone, with more from affiliate and services income layered on top.

Find Your X

Five methods is a lot to evaluate at once. Not every method is the right starting point for every person. Someone with zero clients needs the local outreach method or Thumbtack before anything else. Someone who already has a repeatable skill and wants to stop trading hours for dollars should look at courses and blogging. Someone who wants to build an audience over time should start the YouTube channel now and let the other methods grow out of it as the audience scales.

The fastest way to figure out where to start is to answer a few short questions about your situation. Go to finder.platformproof.com and the tool will point you toward the method that fits your skills, your schedule, and your income goal right now rather than making you work it out from scratch.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be a professional web developer to use these methods?

Not necessarily. For the local outreach method, you need to be able to build a basic functional website with a homepage, contact form, and a few pages of content. For Thumbtack you compete with other developers, so your work needs to be at a level clients will actually pay for. For courses and YouTube, you teach what you already know, which means your skill level determines your topic, not whether you can participate at all. Start with what you can do right now and expand as you go.

How much can I realistically charge for a local business website?

Alston mentioned a range of $300 to $1,000 depending on the project complexity. A simple five-page website for a restaurant or church at the lower end of that range is a reasonable first project price. As you build a portfolio and start collecting real client reviews, you can raise your rates. Some freelance developers charge $2,500 or more for local business websites. The key is to close your first few projects at whatever price gets you hired, then increase your rates as your track record grows.

What is Data Axle and how do I access it?

Data Axle, formerly called Reference USA, is a business database that many public libraries provide free access to as part of their digital resources. Go to your library’s website and look for a section labeled “Digital Resources” or “Research Databases.” Log in with your library card number. Once inside, you can search businesses by county, industry, revenue, employee count, technology spending, and many other filters. The export gives you contact information you can use to start outreach the same day.

Is Udemy the only platform for selling a web development course?

No. Alston mentioned Skillshare as an alternative, and there are others including Teachable, Thinkific, and Podia where you host and sell courses on your own terms. The core trade-off is marketplace traffic versus pricing control. Udemy brings buyers to you through its existing marketplace but controls the pricing through its own discount campaigns. Self-hosted platforms let you charge whatever you want but require you to drive your own traffic. If you are starting with zero audience, Udemy is the lower-friction entry point because the buyers are already there.

How does Thumbtack compare to Upwork or Fiverr for finding clients?

All three are marketplaces that connect freelancers with clients but they work differently. Upwork is project-based with a focus on longer ongoing engagements. Fiverr positions your services as set-price packages that buyers purchase directly without negotiating. Thumbtack works like a local services platform where you apply to jobs posted by people who need help with a specific task. Alston focused on Thumbtack in this video because of how it mirrors the intent-based nature of local outreach: people come looking for real help with a real project, and you respond directly to that request.

How do I find YouTube video ideas if I am just starting out?

Alston pointed directly to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Go to the site and filter by your chosen technology. Sort by votes or total views and look for questions with thousands of views that still lack a clear, detailed video answer on YouTube. Type those questions into YouTube and see what comes up. If the results are low quality, thin, or just not very clear, that is your opening. Record a thorough screen share that answers the question step by step and you are serving an audience that already exists and is actively searching for exactly that answer.

How long before a blog starts generating traffic from Google?

Typically three to six months for a new domain to start ranking for low-competition keywords, and sometimes longer. The shorter path is to target very specific, lower-volume questions where the competition in search results is thin. A post answering a narrow Stack Overflow question about a specific JavaScript method might rank in eight weeks. A post targeting a broad term like “React tutorial” will take much longer because the competition is heavy and well-established. Use Ahrefs to find keywords with manageable difficulty scores in your niche and start there before targeting bigger terms.

Can I combine more than one of these methods at the same time?

Yes, and Alston’s own career is an example of that. He built local clients, created courses on AWS, and started a YouTube channel as part of an overall online income strategy rather than treating any one method as the only thing he did. The methods reinforce each other over time: your YouTube channel drives course sales, your blog drives client inquiries, your client work gives you real project examples to teach in your courses. The recommended approach is to start with one method to generate income quickly and then layer in the others as your capacity and audience grow.

Sources

Data Axle (formerly Reference USA) — business database available free through most public libraries with a library card
Thumbtack — platform for connecting with local and national service clients across the United States
Udemy — online course marketplace; AWS course enrollment and revenue estimates referenced directly from the video
Ahrefs — keyword research tool used to identify AWS search volume cited in the video as 3.5 million-plus monthly searches and 584,000 related keywords
Stack Overflow — developer Q&A site used for both YouTube content ideation and blog keyword research as described in the video
YouTube — platform search data on WordPress tutorial videos showing 121,000 to 286,000 views per video referenced in the video