Ways in which you can generate regular income with Python.
Of course, you can earn money with Python in many ways. However, some ideas are better than others. I will focus on the simplest ideas. First, you must find gigs to support most of these ideas but these are ways that I have earned money using Python through the years.
By reading my blog, it should help to give you some great ideas that you may not have thought of. I tend to focus on those gigs that can provide additional income right away, typically earning me around $3000 monthly as a side income to as much as $10,000. My goal is to build this to $20K monthly.
Web Scraping
There are multiple Python tools for Web Scraping.
Selenium is handy to scrape data. It is especially usually if you want to pull data element by element and place the data in a data frame and then export it to Excel. Don’t forget the requests package or urllib.request.retrieve. The urllib.request.retrieve is great if you need to pull files from a website.
Of course, we can not forget about BeautifulSoup.
Finally, there is Scrapy which is great for web crawling. If you can master the packages noted above you will definitely have enough knowledge to become a master web scraper. You will need which tool to apply depending on the job. Scrapy is the most complicated — use it only if you need it.
Finding Emails
I know some may object to this — but lots of businesses still use email marketing. Often, they want emails based on a domain name. I have a database that I rely on but sometimes I need to scrape new emails. In that case, I use emailfinder.extractor import *.
Hint: use the bing option it works best by far.
Report Automation
Companies all around the globe develop reports for several reasons. If you can automate such reports you can save them time and money. It might be useful to know a little SQL to help build some reports. To learn this skill, I found this great website, pbpython.com, Practical Business Python. They have a great article on developing a PowerPoint automatically using Python.
As a consultant for a startup, the account manager left for another job. The startup had about 40 commercial customers. I wrote a script in Python to generate the 40 PowerPoint decks to provide updates on their businesses — metrics, KPIs, etc. Then, the CEO could review the decks quickly and know the health of his customers and provide a monthly report to them with a click of a button. Python filled a critical gap when the account manager resigned. Also, when a new account manager was hired, that person had a great headstart and could focus on more important activities.
Data Visualization
Data visualization is an important skill set to have in your tool bag. It can be useful for report building and report automation. Some important packages for data visualization include matplotlib, plotly, GEOPandas, and Altair. I build several reports for customers that require data visualization skills regularly. If you have reports to build I suggest that you explore data visualization skills in Python which can take you beyond the capabilities of Excel. Tree Maps and Heatmaps are two tools that I find particularly useful — not sure that you build those using Excel but with Python, it is quick and easy.
Classification
Classification is an important problem for many customers out there as well. For example, a customer might have 1000s of questions and answers that need to be classified by question type. Machine Learning can perform this task efficiently. This is a little more complex use case than the others listed above. Another simpler, example that earned me a quick $1000 was a customer who had a list of around 10,000 URLs. The customer wanted me to visit those websites, search for certain keywords and provide categorize/classify websites accordingly. It took a while to run but it was a simple script to write that took less than 30 minutes.
Automate Tasks
This is a very rich opportunity. Sometimes, your client is not even thinking about automation but you can offer them the idea and they will love it. For example, a law firm needed garnishment information. They had an ad on Craiglist to hire someone to manually pull the data. They were willing to pay $300 per month. I told them that I could automate it and for them to pay for 6 months of manual pulls and they could automate forever. Great for them, efficient, no mistakes, etc.
Another example is a customer who has a website that has past due invoices, he wanted me to build a system so that he could manage them based on the way the website worked. I got paid for this one twice because he lost the original file after a year and my old computer died. It was maybe a 15 line script to get it done.
Blogging
One final tip to earn a little more from your gigs. Write about them on Medium or other outlets. Your success will motivate others.
Conclusions
In summary, I like what I have listed because unlike creating a course, which could earn you money — you don’t know if it will be successful and the time required to do so is great. Use your imagination, what I listed is the tip of the iceberg. Great things can happen, I am in the process of building a business with a customer and he is paying me for all the development along the way. The websites Practical Business Python and Automate the Boring Stuff are great resources.
P.S. Store your scripts on Github so you never lose them. I need to get better at that.