0:00 when I first started to learn to code it was all about making money online as quickly as possible and it took me a long time but eventually I made it but along the way I found a couple of ways that you could start earning way faster than I did with just some basic HTML CSS and a little bit of JavaScript so in this video I'm going to go over three ways that you can start making money as fast as possible as a freelance web developer nobody likes to hear this but learning to code is not easy it takes a long time and what happens to most people is they just kind of get disheartened they lose motivation and then they fall away from it so those people who started off really motivated end up losing interest and falling away from learning to code and then they never reach their ultimate goal so the easiest way to stay motivated when
0:46 you're learning to code is to be making money when learning to code a lot of us follow tutorials and this can give us something called the illusion of explanatory debt which is essentially when I watch a video I understand kind of what's going on and then it comes around to me actually building something I'm like uh what was that thing earlier flexbox is it align items is it justify content I can't really remember and that's when we think we understand something because we've watched the tutorial or we've maybe practiced a couple of problems but when it actually comes down to solving a problem or creating a landing page we're a little bit lost that feeling of being lost is something that happens to all of us and it depends on how you react to that so two things could happen number one is
1:31 you'll be like okay well I don't fully understand that now I'm gonna go back and fill in those gaps whatever Gap in understanding I have I'm going to attack it and I'm going to get better the other and most common response to recognizing that there's a gap in your understanding is like no I don't know anything I've been wasting all my time I'm not going out to be a coder and I'm leading pushing through the difficulty is extremely important whenever you start something new it's so easy to just get caught up with a new topic run with it and then the end of the day Skip to the next thing and skip to the next thing and you never really get deep enough to start earning but when it comes to coding we think okay getting a job is pretty far out it's going to take a while and starting to freelance seems something like unattainable something that we can't achieve so in this video I
2:17 wanted to give you three ways that you could start to freelance as quickly as possible with the basics of HTML and CSS now do you need to know anything before watching this video ideally you've already dabbled in a little bit of coding so that's things like HTML CSS and maybe a bit of JavaScript ideally you understand what a domain is what a server is and how to put a website online but if not don't worry those types of things they don't take a huge amount of time to learn and if you find the right resources you could learn them in a couple of weeks money making opportunity number one Lighthouse reports Lighthouse is a Chrome extension that is completely free to just add to your browser and all you need to do is find a prospect find somebody who's got a website and you want to help them out
3:03 so go to their website and run a lighthouse report and it's going to generate a report of optimizations that could be run on this website Lighthouse is going to give you a variety of things that you could fix on the website and generally people who've built the website themselves or in some cases they've had a developer who was quite busy and couldn't optimize everything for them these are opportunities for you to help speed up a website for a business usually the number one thing is the images are not optimized and this is a really quick fix for anybody with basic skills of H team out and CSS all you need to go in is download the image that's in question compress it maybe change the format to a web key and then upload it again and that's going to speed up the site tremendously on the topic of images you might have to add
3:49 alt tags and ALT tag is just a description of the image and it increases the accessibility and Google really values accessibility so if your site is accessible and you've got alt tags and Aria labels especially having the correct Dom layout so using your HTML elements correctly like a navigation a header a folder a main sections this type of thing if you just go in and change all of those things automatically Google is going to push you up a little bit higher in that SEO ranking which is hugely important for a lot of businesses so with just a quick Lighthouse report you're going to get a lot of things that you can optimize for a website and if you see some of those things you're like I could change these then it's time to approach the client and give them this opportunity what may feel easy to you is still valuable for
4:34 the clients because there's a marketing term called Bounce rate and it's when somebody arrives on a website if it's a really slow heavy website that takes a long time to load a lot of people bounce and they get out of there so they don't make the purchase or they don't enter the sales funnel and this is something that you can upsell to a clients you say hey I'm going to reduce your bounce rate by X number in y amount of time and it's only going to cost this much and you could expect whatever outcome so an increase of one percent sales when it comes to these types of gigs they're quite small but usually it will lead to more work with that client if it's a really good client and they're happy with your work you're going to get other adjustments and customizations for that site this takes me nicely on to my next
5:21 point and it is using web Builders and customizing themes if you're trying to work with a specific client just like I said you can go to their website and you maybe run a lighthouse report but you could also check in head tag to see what kind of a web Builder they use usually these sites are not completely custom they're generally made with something like WordPress and Wix Squarespace Elementor you'll see quite a lot of that's with WordPress or Shopify and if you can get comfortable with one of these web Builders and you know a little bit of HTML and CSS you can start to offer customizations and optimizations for those specific websites the reason why a client would want to work with you is because you know already without
6:06 talking to them what their site is built on and you're going to know some ways to customize it and optimize it for them this is hugely valuable to a lot of people because they use themes initially to get up and running but then when they're up and running they start to say oh I would love to change the color of that button I would love to change the way it lays out in the mobile responsiveness I would like to change the order of this list and they don't know how because it's not there built into the theme so you could offer these adjustments by just having good knowledge of CSS and HTML I know a lot of people who start learning to code are like oh it's a web Builder I don't want to be working web Builder that's not real code well it is okay all of those web Builders boil down to JavaScript HTML CSS and sometimes PHP so it is real
6:55 code and it's on real business websites that's making real business money so if you want to make money online you need to be working with people who are making money and generally these people are using page builders that you can customize for them so don't shy away from something just because it's a web Builder increase your value in the marketplace by being an expert in webflow by being an expert in Wix by being an expert in Squarespace or framer being really good at these and knowing HTML CSS it automatically puts you way above everybody who just works with the web Builders and it also puts you above people who don't know them after one coaching session with me one of my students has decided to specialize in webflow to get his business off the
7:40 ground and I think it's going to go perfectly well for him because he's already got some skills at HTML CSS and JavaScript and now he's specializing in webflow on top of that he's got the right mindset so it's gonna go great for him and I think that you should take this as an example of how to be successful how to be resourceful in the freelancing world to get you up and running making money as quickly as possible one of my first ever jobs was working with a client who had a website that was built on a page builder that wasn't mobile responsive and they wanted me to take a look and see what I could do I charge 200 and when I got into the code all I had to do was change the flex direction to column and then it was mobile responsive honestly adding one media query and one adjustment fix the
8:26 website and I got two hundred dollars for essentially five minutes of work it's not about how long it takes or how difficult the task is it's about the value that that gives the clients now people weren't arriving on a desktop zoomed out horrible website on their phone they could now have an interactive website and a proper experience so it doesn't take much sometimes but getting these clients is the trick and remember small jobs can lead to bigger jobs getting these small gigs initially is a challenge and if you want to learn more about how to get those gigs leave a comment down below and I'll put together a video for everybody money making opportunity number three is integration and analytics now don't get scared when you hear these words analytics and Integrations it sounds quite complicated
9:13 it sounds like oh I only know HTML CSS I'm not going to be able to do that but I want you to think back to your very first day writing a single line of code or even just seeing code you probably thought what is going on here I know what these words are they're in English but I have no idea what's happening or how to address things but that is the exact same as the impression that a client or a business owner is going to have when they go to their Google analytics and it says take this code snippet and put it in the head of the index.html file on your website they're gonna Panic they're gonna have no idea what these angle brackets mean and they're going to call a developer and that can be you there are tons of service providers that require you to add a snippet to your website in order
10:00 for it to work Google analytics is one very very popular one but you've also got anybody who's running ads or marketing campaigns they need to add a Facebook pixel a tick tock pixel a Snapchat pixel all into the header they want to add other optimizations I think Google optimize also requires these types of things also you've got Salesforce HubSpot all these different CR terms to integrate into the website and these are things that are really intimidating for a lot of business owners that you can solve by just knowing where their head is on a HTML document honestly it can be that easy the key skill that you have as somebody who has learned HTML and CSS is that you're not panicking when things start to go wrong you're able to read documentation follow tutorials work
10:46 through problems and eventually arrive at a solution this is something that generally people have not developed yet so you can sell that skill if you can follow a recipe to cook a dish you can solve some of these problems it's just a matter of following really well laid out documentation and doing everything in order but many people are going to be worried about that and they're going to Outsource it to a freelancer or any kind of a developer that they can find and remember I need to reiterate this just because something feels easy to you it does not mean it's not valuable to a client in the example I gave earlier of customizing a theme sometimes uh specifically with Shopify a lot of the themes come with a primary button and a secondary button but that secondary button is a ghost button and from a
11:31 usability perspective sometimes that's not the best if you want to have a learn more button beside your your main call to action and in client might ask you to just change the color of that button because the theme doesn't automatically enable that if you change that color and it results in one percent more sales that could be tens of thousands of dollars to that e-commerce store so these small changes that feel easy for you can result in very very valuable changes for the clients so don't be afraid to charge for your time even if it feels easy so to wrap it up that was the three main ways that you could start making money quickly which is basic HTML and CSS just to run through them again it's Lighthouse reporting and website optimization it's customizing themes and its Integrations and analytics and if
12:16 you can offer those types of services you'll be off the ground way faster than you think now I know learning to code is hard and if you're somebody who wanted to just go all the way through and get a job straight away you're not interested in freelancing power to you if you're interested I have created a video on the best way to become a front-end developer if you want to check that video out but for anybody else that was like me I just needed that coin in my pocket to keep me going keep me motivated and keep me learning and these are some of the ways that you can get off the ground as fast as possible so I hope you found this video useful and if you have I do share tips every week in my newsletter this week's one just went out and it's about design and how to improve your design as a front-end developer so you can check that with a link in the description and that's it for now ciao
13:04 thank you
