Archive for June, 2009

How To Find Profitable Internet Business Models

June 29th, 2009

So, the much-hyped fibre optic cables are finally here! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting for them for years… Why? The cables are very likely to change the way the internet is accessed and used in Kenya. The main benefits are going to, eventually, be cheaper and faster access to the internet. This probably means that:

  1. There is going to be a sharp increase in the number of people who access the internet
  2. There exists a big HUGE opportunity to make money online in Kenya and this opportunity shall increase as the number of internet users increases.

So, the big question (apart from reading Like Chapaa regularly – subscribe for free if you haven’t yet) is: how do you make money online? There exists big opportunity, but how do we take advantage of it? What can you do to make money online?

How To Find Profitable Business Models
When thinking of starting a business, any business, the part where most people struggle is the conceptualization of the business model. They don’t know what kind of business to start, what market to target, where the revenues are going to come from and so on. The same applies for web businesses, perhaps even more so. People often do not know what sites to create, or how they are actually going to earn money.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a place where you can go to and study, in detail, successfully employed web business models? Is there any place where you can go to to generate web business ideas?

Yes there is, and it is: www.flippa.com

Flippa is a place where people buy and sell websites. The site has had a lifetime total of USD 24 million in sales so a lot of business gets done there! When you visit the site you will find lots of sites for sale. Obviously, some of them are not worth your time so you need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You can do it in two ways: click on “just sold” or “browse all listings“.

Clicking on “just sold” will let you view websites that people actually bought. These sites are obviously built on sound web business models as they would not have been bought otherwise. You can click on each site sold to learn more about it and, possibly, why the purchaser paid for and bought it.

Clicking on “browse all listings” is even better. It lets you see a long list of sites up for sale but not yet sold. The thing to do is to browse through the list and check on the number of bids. If people have actually placed a bid on a particular website, it means that they are prepared to buy it. This probably means that the website in question is built on a good and workable web business model. You can click on each listing to learn more about the website.

Now, this is where things get interesting. Since people genuinely want to sell those websites, they will give all sorts of information about them, including details of how they built them, where they get traffic from, where their revenues come from and so on. Better yet, you can ask questions about specific points and the seller will gladly respond to them. Think of the possibilities: you can learn the ins and outs of a web business and then just duplicate it elsewhere.

Just today, I learnt that you can actually be paid for offering free magazines to your website’s visitors. I sincerely do not know anywhere else where you can learn so much detail about existing businesses for free. It’s a goldmine.

I haven’t even touched on the very hot prospects of buying a web business and running it yourself, or improving it and selling it for HUGE profits. Therefore, stay tuned to this site…subscribe to receive free email updates. Or by RSS.

Have a question? Don’t hesitate to ask!

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Posted in Cool Sites, Make Money, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews

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Alice and Kev

June 28th, 2009

In a brilliant blog, games design student Robin Burkinshaw tells the tragic but fascinating story of what happened when he stripped two game characters of their possessions and left them in a place designed to look an abandoned park, letting his simulated humans fend for themselves.

It’s a virtual social experiment that relies almost entirely on the programming of the characters to decide what happens next.

I’ve read through the entire blog in one sitting (it is that amazing) and I recommend the blog to all of you! While reading through it, it felt like a good book and I could not stop thinking that it would make a great movie or TV series. It just goes to show how good games are getting these days, particularly this game.

Calling the Sims a game is an understatement – it is so much more and you just have to play it to find out that for yourself.

Please have a look at Alice and Kev.

Do not just look at it for its entertainment value. Think about what Robin is doing. He’s drawn a huge amount of attention to his blog and, ultimately to himself. In the process he’s proven what a great storyteller he is (this should work well for his career in game design) and probably earned quite a lot from Amazon.com (if you buy The Sims 3 from one of the links on his site, he gets a commission).

It is a prime example of using what you already have in hand to try and get ahead. What talents/skills/strengths do you have in hand? Are you fully exploiting their potential?

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Customer Service

June 27th, 2009

I was at a bank today, one of the nice big ones (the mighty KCB, in fact). Guess what? I was in line for a hole hour and, get this, there were only two people ahead of me in the queue! The lady who was serving us kept disappearing into some back room for long stretches of time. God knows why!

So it got me thinking. Why do banks in Kenya always, always have long queues? And why is it that there is always a counter or two with no teller present? I cannot find a logical reason why “management” would let this happen. Can you? Perhaps it is the same flawed logic that opened up the opportunity for, and led to, the rise and rise of Equity bank. Who knows?

This just goes to show yet again that the average customer in Kenya is maltreated. And not just by banks, by everyone – with Safaricom being the chief and most visible culprit!

If you think about it, you will realise that that the maltreatment of the customer is not just a Kenyan affair, it happens everywhere. Often, the mentality is that customer service is some sort of necessary evil. Why else is customer service often an afterthought? Why else would companies, by the truckloads, be signing up to outsource customer support services (think overseas call center)? Jeez, outsource customer service? Really?

Customer service is not a cost center. Customer service is a profit center. Indeed it is the cheapest form of marketing.

Photo by 23am.com

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The 13 Principles of Starting a Start-Up

June 24th, 2009

Paul Graham shares 13 sentences on startups. (Click the link for more info).

1. Pick good cofounders
Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.

2. Launch fast
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched.

3. Let your idea evolve
This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate.

4. Understand your users
You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent
Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away.

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service
Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service.

7. You make what you measure
Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it.

8. Spend little
Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money.

9. Get ramen profitable
“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.

10. Avoid distractions
Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects.

11. Don’t get demoralized
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.

12. Don’t give up
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.

13. Deals fall through
It’s very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don’t, but because it makes them less likely to.

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How to do what you love

June 22nd, 2009

What do you love?How many people do you know who really love what they do? How many people would keep on doing what they do even if there was no pay? I bet there aren’t so many such people, are there?

But yet, we are always told that to really excel at something, you need to love doing it and be passionate about it. How do we get there, how do we find such things?

An interesting and practical way to do what you love is to “keep producing”. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? Or are you waiting for that undefined moment in time when you can *start*? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.

“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof. (Paul Graham)

So that’s my advice to you, don’t wait till God-knows-when to start doing what you love. Do you even know what you love? How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions. That’s why you need to start doing something, anything. “Always Produce” until you find something that really tickles your fancy.

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Respect

June 17th, 2009

Yesterday I had the good fortune to make a presentation to a potential buyer to one of the companies that we are trying to sell. The young man just oozes self confidence and, I must say, some cockiness. He was very interested in the company up for sale and we spent a good while talking at length about it. Then things went to the dogs.

This young man, being very eager to see us have him buy the company, did something that pissed me off. His self confidence grew into self importance and arrogance. I felt the change, when he started viewing me as someone he could manipulate and/or coerce. Believe it or not, he delved deep into personal questions and made some not very subtle hints that if I should “assist” him, he would assist me – his main form of assistance being the implied subtle offer of a job with his company. How sad. The man could possibly have known that I do not care about jobs in the slightest.

So what’s going to happen next? His bid was immediately disqualified and he lost the deal. Why? He failed to respect me, and the organisation that I represent.

How do you treat the people and organisations that you come in contact with? Do you treat them with the respect that they deserve?

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Scribd and Other Web Delights

June 13th, 2009

Scribd is a social publishing site where millions of people share documents. It has been called a youtube (sort of) for documents. Scribd lets you upload Word, PDF, text (.txt), PowerPoint, Excel, PostScript, and LIT (.lit) files for private use or public sharing.

Why would you share your documents with the world? Well, Scribd’s CEO, Trip Adler has the answer: by sharing documents you make them social objects that a community can add onto.

“I was skeptical about scribd – yeah, not a great name – but it is helping me change the game for my long children’s book. I needed a solution that was plug and play and enabled me to give readers a terrific experience for my 400+ page book on my web site, and I really wanted a way for them to easily give me feedback on the book. Whala! Scribd. For authors, legitimate ones especially, what a great way to get real market data. Kids read it the book on my site, I count the hits, get their comments, and direct them to buy the paper copy on amazon. Awesome.” – John Wolpert

Like scribd? Try it: www.scribd.com

Other Web Delights:
Opera is about to “reinvent the web“. No one seems to know how, exactly, but I can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeve.
Windows 7 will launch without IE in Europe. Wow.

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Posted in Cool Sites

How to Start A Business With 3000 Or Less

June 10th, 2009

Whether you’re starting a business on the side while still employed elsewhere, a student or homemaker looking for extra income, or unemployed and trying to figure out what to do, there are plenty of opportunities for you to start up a side business inexpensively. We’ll take a look at 10 such opportunities and, most importantly, tell you what to do with the 3K!

It’s unlikely any of the following will make you a living in the first few months, but they all have the potential to grow into full-time businesses.

1. Web Entrepreneur
It’s what everyone who’s ever surfed the Web dreams of — just stick a web site up there and watch the cash roll in! Well, that just doesn’t happen overnight, but the fact of the matter is it’s really not very hard to do. To do it right, start by picking a subject matter you know a lot about. Then get a domain and create a web site. It doesn’t even matter what technology you use — just make sure it looks good and provide plenty of original content. Now find some appropriate affiliate programs—that’s where your revenues are going to come from. Next, learn everything you can about search engine marketing and promote the heck out of your site. Last of all, set aside time every week to put new content on the site, delete dead links, and other maintenance. Now do this three or four times, and you’ve chosen your topics well, you might actually have some decent income from it.

Spend the 3,000 on: 800 or less for a domain and 1,000 for hosting. You can get cheap web design too (kitu 500).

2. Consultant
Getting into consulting is relatively simple. All you have to do is know how to do something better than most people do, and be able to either teach people how to do it or be willing to do it for them. Networking is the key to success in this business, so start by making a list of everyone you know and giving them all a call.

Spend the 3,000 on: 1,000 on a box of clean business cards and 500 buying your first prospect a cup of coffee one morning.

3. Housesitter /Babysitter
Nowadays, people feel an increased need for security, and house-sitting gives them some reassurance while they’re out of town. This one’s great because it basically requires no particular skills, just trustworthiness and reliability. Be sure to have personal references available, and you’ll also need reliable transportation. If you’re a baby lover, babysitting is an easy add-on.

Spend the 3,000 on: 200 on flyers to put up on bulletin boards and to pass around.

4. Professional Organizer
People these days are simply overwhelmed by their “stuff”. While there is an ever-growing trend of people wanting to simplify their lives, most of us haven’t done it yet. It’s not that people really have no clue how to get organized, it just keeps moving to the bottom of the stack, both figuratively and literally. There’s a prime opportunity for people to come in at a reasonable rate and get houses organized. And mostly it takes common sense, organizational skills, and a familiarity with where to get frequently used items cheaply. You can also do this online.

Spend the 3,000 on: Classified ads.

5. Independent Sales Representative
Sales has to be one of the most well paying ‘jobs’ out there. Just find a product you know people will love and sell it on commission. You can try this product, look here, or just ask around – the people you know are very resourceful, trust me.

Spend the 3,000 on: Possible sign up fees, maybe some samples; the rest on advertising.

6. Personal Services – Shopping & Errands
Believe it or not, there are people who are just too busy(or lazy) to do their own shopping. In addition, running petty errands is quite in demand – things like delivering small parcels and paying utility bills. Again, trustworthiness and dependability are the key traits for this. Also, make sure you know your way around the town/city you live in.

Spend the 3,000 on: 200 on flyers and the rest on classified ads.

7. Desktop Publishing
It’s amazing how many people have a computer and still don’t know how to do really simple stuff! If you’ve got a good design sense, are familiar with your word processor, and already have a laser or high-quality inkjet printer, you can get into desktop publishing. You can make fliers and posters for people. Create a really great-looking portfolio for yourself and go door-to-door.

Spend the 3,000 on: Some high-quality paper to create your samples on.

8. Tutoring
There’s an unprecedented need for tutors these days for kids of all ages—even adults! If you’ve got a topic you can tutor in, contact the local schools, particularly private ones, and even try door to door, and offer your services. Don’t be worried if your topic is highly specialized—even those are in demand.

Spend the 3,000 on: 1,000 on a box of clean business cards and 500 on flyers.

9. Online Freelancing
If you have a certain skill or if you can just do something really well, chances are there’s someone out there willing to pay you for it. Finding such people online is easy and all you need is the skills, the right attitude and reliability. Try look here.

Spend the 3,000 on: A nice looking website and reliable web hosting. Try these guys.

10. Secretarial Service – Typing / Transcription / Proofreading
Many small businesses and individuals have a need for these services, but not enough need to hire a full time employee. Assuming you’ve got a computer, a printer, and e-mail (and the necessary skills), you’re all set. Be prepared to charge by the job, not by the hour.

Spend the 3,000 on: 1,000 on a box of clean business cards and 500 on flyers.

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One last thing — beware of small business scams that promise overnight riches or ‘easy money’. Sure,one can get rich overnight but practically speaking, it just does not happen.

Be prepared to work, and work hard, for your money.

Note: This post was modified into Kenyan terms (as much as I could) from the original writing found here.

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Posted in Small Business

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Starting Your Own Business; The Gruesome Details

June 6th, 2009

Inari Media has an interesting series of posts on how to start your own small business. The series of articles is really very well written and should be helpful to anyone wanting to step out into the world of entrepreneurship.

Here’s how Inari Media describes the series:

As a freelancer, I deal with a number of small companies who have grown from circumstances very similar to my own: rather than submit to life on the corporate treadmill, they have struck out on their own to see if they can make a go of things while still keeping a happy work-life balance and a degree of personal autonomy. We only differ in that they hire me, while I get ansty at the thought of getting help with my accounts (there may be time later in the week for my confession of control-freakery).

Nevertheless, it has to be said that self-employment or running a business is not for everyone. Just as not every infantryman makes a good general, not every worker makes a good boss. While there are a number of brilliant resources out there, I thought that it might be an idea to put a series of posts together that detail the ins and outs of starting your own business, and how to proceed.

Interested? Go check them out:

June 23 2009: Added the rest of Inari’s articles. Stephanie has addressed the topic of starting your own business at length in the above series of articles. She gives a wholesome, well rounded description of what you need to know. I highly recommend you read up on what she wrote.

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How I Made $150 in Two Hours

June 2nd, 2009

At the moment there are an awful lot of people online who are not making money online! In fact, it is reasonable to assume that there are a significant number of people who lose money on the internet, daily – by not making enough to cover their bills (website hosting and suchlike).

Making money online may seem like a daunting task indeed. I can testify that it can be a long hard struggle especially if you have to learn everything and do not have the means to either enlist the help of friends or anyone, really. So the question is can you make money online?

Yes you can, but it is not easy. Some so called ‘gurus’ may tell you that you can become rich overnight. This is indeed possible but usually, however, it is not possible to amass riches overnight. Sometimes it can take months or even years and in extreme cases maybe never!

All that is needed is not just hard work and determination. One is required to work smart. For example, many people online try to reinvent the wheel – they want to make money in a unique original way. While this is fine, even commendable, it is not necessary when you are just starting out. As regards making money online, there is usually a basic tried and tested system. Usipuuze hii system, follow it carefully and diligently and sooner of later you will reap from your effort.

Another is honesty. I personally feel that you cannot go very far if you try to lie and cheat.

Anyway, so how exactly can you make money online?

There are many ways to make money online. Some of these are: drop-shipping, affiliate marketing, selling your own products/services, selling adverts etc. They are different ad require different approaches but, to me, the business principle in each is on: use the power of the internet to create connections.

Seth Godin puts it best: “Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.

The essence is this: connect.

Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value.

* Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.
* Connect job hunters with jobs.
* Connect information seekers with information.
* Connect teams to each other.
* Connect those seeking similar.
* Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.
* Connect people who are proximate geographically.
* Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.
* Connect like-minded people into a movement.
* Connect people buying with people who are selling.”

Read the rest of Seth Godin’s writing here.

Some people describe it this way: find a niche market in which some need is under-served in some way and fill that need.

An Example (How I made $150 in two hours)

I used to actively run this website: http://iexplor.blogspot.com (I got busy and semi-abandoned it). I worked at it for a few months and managed to collect about 300 emails of people who had voluntarily agreed to receive emails from me whenever I updated my website. The site used to earn me about 500 a month from adverts but now it averages a few shillings. This is because I don’t really update this website anymore because of my tight schedule, but I still have that list of emails. So, I sent an email to some of my list, telling them of my current web host’s nice web hosting package, and enticing them to host their sites with my webhosts. I sent this email and went to sleep. When I woke up, I found that in the space of two hours some of them had signed up to the web hosting deal and I got paid a commission for the sales I had driven to my web host.

What can you do to make money online?

  1. Get as much information as possible on this subject. Pay for it if you have to. Perhaps you’d like to bookmark this website because we teach how to many money online here
  2. Decide how (specifically) you want to make money
  3. Make a plan
  4. Follow your plan and stick to it no matter what
  5. Never quit until you get what you want

God bless you, and good luck.

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