I have now made $10,000 with my No CS Degree website
I've made this money from a variety of income streams and it's generally pretty good to not be reliant on one source of money. Here's a quick breakdown:
Newsletter sponsorship
This has been a really big one for me. It was the first proper source of money for me if you don't count the money some people nicely donated in the first week on buymeacoffee.com.
The best way to get sponsors? Be a part of communities like Indiehackers, Makerlog and WIP. Just tell people you are looking for sponsors and then private message them with a figure. You'll need to know your number of subscribers, your open rate and the click through rate. Suggest a number and you can always adjust downwards if they aren't sold straight away. Some sponsors have also reached out to me on LinkedIn recently which obviously makes things easier. So it's a mix of inbound and outbound sales. Thanks to everyone that has sponsored the newsletter so far!
Article sponsors from coding bootcamps
I'm very happy to have had bootcamp supporting No CS Degree by sponsoring interviews with their students. You can check out a recent example with this interview with a Flatiron School student.
In all the cases of having articles sponsored, I reached out to the bootcamps myself. If you are selling to a business rather than an indiehacker or a consumer there are inevitably more people that need to approve the project so you have to be willing to follow up and close sales. But these sales are worth lots more than selling a SAAS for 10 bucks etc so it's worth it.
Affiliate sales from online coding courses
I'm a member of two affiliate programmes - Algo Expert, which prepares developers for technical interviews and the Wes Bos coding courses. Since I've started they have paid me over $1,000. I really used to think affiliate programmes were a scam! I don't know why exactly - I guess it seemed to good to be true. But some months I've made $400 from these links that I put in my articles and honestly, it's the dream to be making money this way with no effort. It's the classic 'make money while you sleep' trope but it can happen.
Listings on Bootcamp Index
This is the latest source of revenue - I made a directory of the best coding bootcamps and I've had a few bootcamps pay to be listed and put at the top of the list. It's great to be able to open up a new income stream. It's a good sign as well because when I launched the site a lot of people said I was crazy because there were already sites for finding bootcamps (they just suck in my opinion).
Job posts on the No CS OK job board for developers without CS degrees
The final source of money is companies paying to post job ads on my job board. I wanted to make a place where you could apply for jobs safe in the knowledge they didn't care if you were a self-taught developer or a software engineer who had learned at a coding bootcamp. This is a tough part of the business and requires a lot of outreach.
Future plans for revenue growth
I'm spending lots of time making a revamped version of the job board and Bootcamp Index just now in Django. This will allow me to improve the SEO of the websites and add some more features.
I'm going to be making a No CS Degree 2.0 with a premium tier which will give members some perks like early access to articles, more job alerts, access to an ebook summary of advice from interviews and a few other things. I was hoping to get this out in April but it's looking more like May now. I've really been inspired by how Anne-Laure Le Cunff has grown her membership site on Ness Labs and I'd love to have $1,000 MRR just coming from No CS Degree.
Apart from that, the answer to make more money is to sell more! So I'm going to be increasing my engagement with coding bootcamps, finding more affiliate programmes to partner with and do more sales emails for the job board.