While we all enjoy to write code, we all also need to make a living. Many people get into web development just to make money, and that's fair too. Sometimes people want to use their skills to create some financial safety or freedom for themselves, and we're all for that too. So here is how you can make money as PHP/Web developer.
Day Job
It would be silly not to add having a day job as a way to make money, as it's literally the most common way to make money. We sell our time and services to employers in exchange for money. It works, it works well. Many of us love our day jobs and have no desire to do anything else.
Potential Income: Depends on location. US $80-120k, Europe €50-80k
Blog
Writing a blog may, on the face of it seem like something that could only be for fun only. But, while it is hard to make money from a technical blog, it is not impossible. If you're consistent and write good quality blog posts over a period of time you'll eventually build up an audience. And when there is an audience, there are people wanting to advertise to that audience.
A good example would be Brent who has stitcher.io. Where he says in his privacy policy that carbon ads, as well as google ads, may be used. If you look at the top of any blog post they have, you'll notice an ad for an application monitoring system.
Personally, I think there is a lack of consistent good blog sites in the tech scene. It feels like in the past, it was better.
YouTube
Like writing blog posts, this is a long term process that requires to be consistently creating content. But the same principle applies, build up an audience, and you can get ad money. YouTube allows to monetize videos, and if your audience is big enough, you'll get companies who will sponsor your video.
With YouTube there is creating material to help people learn PHP/Web Development. But there is also the possibility of creating podcasts that just discuss the current state of development and interview people.
Write A book
One of the first ways I saw PHP developers talk about making money from their skillset other than a day job was writing books. Again, there are lots of people wanting to learn. Not everyone knows what you know. It is possible to write a book on PHP/Web Development and then sell that book to other developers.
Really good at skinning Magento? Write a book about how to create Magento themes. Spend all day working on WordPress plugins? Write a book about building WordPress plugins? Spend all day firefighting a legacy system? Write a book on how to maintain a legacy system in a safe manner. You will have skills other people don't have, you will know things they don't. Use your knowledge to make money!
In this day and age, you don't even need to go through a book publisher you can self-publish. You can write up your book, get a book cover, and then upload the book to either leanpub or gumroad and start selling.
Examples:
https://leanpub.com/grumpy-guide By Chris Hartjes https://leanpub.com/mlaphp by Paul M. Jones https://humblyarrogant.gumroad.com/l/missing-tech-manual by Me. https://fullstack.gumroad.com/l/fullstack-react-full by "\newline"
Create a Course
Same principle with the books. There are people wanting to learn and you know things they want to learn. So you can teach them via a course and make some money.
One people want to learn via reading books others want to have a more helpful course approach so you can make a course for the same thing you wrote a book on. In fact, you can sell them together in a bundle, and people will pay.
Courses often make way more money for their creators than books while taking roughly the same amount of time to create.
You can upload your course to Udemy or Gumroad and start selling.
Examples:
https://www.udemy.com/course/php-for-complete-beginners-includes-msql-object-oriented/ https://fullstack.gumroad.com/l/ngbook-two-full
Release/Sell Software
While many people like to release their code under open source licenses, it doesn't need to be this way. You can sell the software yourself. One of the biggest shocks non-technical people had when I told them about the software I wrote when I was younger was that I would open-source it and give it away. They all thought this was crazy and I should sell it. The average person is willing to pay for software.
You can sell your software, or you can take the sponsorware approach that is also becoming popular. This is where you create something and then only open source it once people have sponsored you to a certain level.
Examples:
https://pestphp.com/ was sponsorware and only open-sourced once it was properly funded. https://getparthenon.com by me and is commercial software to build SaaS systems using Symfony https://spark.laravel.com is commercial software to help deal with payments in Laravel.
Run a SaaS
You don't need to sell your software as a downloadable self-hostable application. You can sell your software in a SaaS model. This is more understandable to software developers as an approach to selling their software.
All you need to do is find a problem that people have and build a solution and then tell the world about this solution.
A little sales pitch that anyone who knows what Parthenon is would have been expecting. Parthenon lets you build a SaaS MVP in days by providing you with everything you need to get up and running. It lets you focus on what your SaaS will do and not boring things like payments.
I personally think anyone who wants to get in the SaaS game should get a boilerplate as it's pretty common that you will need a few attempts to find something that gets traction and generates you an income. However, once you've found something that gets traction generating $10k a month is quite common, and many people are generating much more.
In my opinion, this is the way to generate the most amount of money.
Sell a premade SaaS
Here is a thing a lot of people don't realize. You can build a SaaS simply to sell. There are people out there wanting to buy pre-existing SaaS applications that just need money to be spent on marketing. So even if you build a SaaS that doesn't take off you can just sell that SaaS on.
You can sell a SaaS on microacquire.com.