Being a web designer doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to make money just via web design. There are plenty of ways a Web Designer can make money these days. Myself and Mike have been working hard finding out ways web designers can make money. We have got 14 different ways web designers can make money online. If you can think of any more, then please feel free to drop in a comment.

Blog About Web Design

Many web designers have their own blogs. Having your own web design blog can benefit a designer in many different ways. You can earn money from ads, if you have great content that brings in alot of traffic, you can sell other peoples products, and also you can convert some of your traffic into clients by promoting your web design services.

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Design Contests

99 Designs connects clients that need design work, to designers. You can participate in design contests such as logo designs, and earn some serious money. http://99designs.com

Design Stock Images (istockphoto) (graphicriver)

As a web designer, you can use your funky design skills to design vectors to sell on istockphoto, and also you can design textures, templates, graphics and much more and sell them on graphic river.

Write Tutorials For Photoshop Websites

There are loads of web design tutorial sites online, such as PsdTuts. They pay greatly for brilliant tutorials. PsdTuts pay $150 per tutorial they accept, so what are you waiting for, get writing!

Freelance Switch & Smashing Magazine’s Job Board

People always need design work doing. There are loads of people who post work on job boards such as FreeLance Switch or Smashing Magazine. This can be a great way to pick up work.

Bring Offline Businesses Online

This can be an awesome way to earn alot of cash. Web Designers can get in contact with offline businesses, and offer them a fee to bring their business online. Its a great way for web designers to earn more money, and also it will help the business out and gain exposure within search engines.

Create And Promote Your Online Portfolio

Creating an online portfolio of your work generates buzz and can rank you higher for certain keywords in search engines. Blogs can publish your work, which will send traffic to your portfolio. People who like your work will hire you.

Elance

This is the mother of all online places to find work. Looking at elance.com, it looks as if there are around 1,000 new jobs posted every day for web designers to feast upon. Work ranges from HTML, CSS down to SEO and flash. I would seriously recommend checking out elance.com to make some money.

Offer Training / Write How-To’s

There are many websites such as tutor.com, ehow.com and videojug.com that pay you to make how-to videos / articles, and tutor people about a certain subject, such as web design in our case.

Become An Expert In A Niche

A web design can brand themselves as a general web designer, but if you market yourself to a certain niche then you will receive alot more clients. An example of this would be you could be a general web designer, but you could have a few business cards in the golfing niche that say we specialize in web design for golfing, and you can repeat this for many different niches.

Participate On Web Marketplaces

Web Marketplaces such as sitepoint and digitalpoint forums can earn you alot of money. It can spread your name out there, and get you alot of work. If you participate in discussions and show off your design skills, you will find yourself with lots of design work.

Affiliate Marketing

This can make you alot of money in the long run. An example of affiliate marketing would be, if you have just finished designing a website for a client, you could recommend or even offer to help them setup hosting to host the website. If they agree then you can sign them up to web hosting companies using your affiliate link. Such as DreamHost and CrucialWebHost. Then you would receive a certain % of what the client is paying each month for referring them to that web host.

Design Themes For ThemeForest

With ThemeForest, you can design themes for popular content managment systems such as wordpress and joomla, and ThemeForest will sell your theme and give you a commission. Great huh!

Offer The “All In One” Package

Clients can be lazy, and sometimes they look for web designers that offer the “All In One” pack