There are literally hundreds of ways for someone with programming skills to earn money online - and make more money than hourly wages. Here are just a few to get you started: 1) Setup a profile on Odesk / Elance. Showcase your programming skills and start bidding on projects. There are thousands of eager buyers there. Sure you will be competing with programmers from India/Russia/Phillipines - but you can underbid them all and buyers in the US will hire you - as being in the US and cheaper than offshore programmers will be a huge plus for you. 2) Buy a domain name and build websites using Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal (pick any one), get a domain name for $8.00, use one of thousands of free themes, add some content, RSS feeds, add Google Adsense (all free), drive some traffic using SEO techniques. Then list the site for sale on Flippa, Ebay, Craigslist or any of the other sites to sell stuff. You can easily sell a site for anywhere from $50 to $500. Sell one site for $250 per week = $1000 per month. 3) Setup a site, Sign up for affiliate programs (Commission Juntcion, Linkshare, Amazon ...), Drive traffic and earn affiliate commissions.

4) Market complete websites to small business for under $500 using the technique in (2) above. ....