Archives for September 2010

How NOT To Make Money Online

September 30, 2010 by 7 Comments

One of our nice readers sent this email:

“I spend too much time on the internet doing nothing. Sometimes it is fun but it does not pay the bills. I’ve been sort of freelancing for awhile and paid a web designer to do a fancy website that I couldn’t maintain myself, and that thing didn’t generate any leads. Now I don’t have a website, but I have a blog that I don’t even use. Nini mbaya na mimi?

Hakuna kitu mbaya na wewe!

What we all need to do is to stop building all these fancy websites and complex marketing strategies. Are you making money online? Would a blog and Twitter and Facebook help you get your first three paying customers? The plain simple answer is NO. At the beginning your focus should be to get three paying clients (because one or two may just be a fluke).

After you do this, you will have established that your business idea is actually viable; you will have proven that people will actually pay for whatever you are selling. Afterwards, you can start thinking of the blogs and Facebook and other fancy stuff. Not before. I’ll say it again: skip all the fancy stuff that you hear (SEO, social media, etc) and just get your first three paying clients!

The funny thing is that almost everyone who hears this advice does not like it one bit! Instead, you like hearing things like:

  • You need a Twitter page with lots of followers
  • Everyone spends his time on Facebook, you need to get a facebook page
  • You can’t do business without registering a company…and don’t forget business cards

You know why most people prefer the above to actually getting down to work and getting paying clients? Because it is so much easier to start a blog and Twitter and pray that somehow money will just flow in. It is much harder to sit down and make a plan on how to get three people to pay for whatever you are selling.

I have been blogging for more than six years and I’ve pretty much seen it all. If you ask me, 99.9999999% of all bloggers make a shameful amount of money, something like $2 per month. Does that really tie in with your high horse dreams of making it big? We have to be realistic about things, my friend. If your goal is to make money, do not waste time on social media.

Focus on setting up your business, not on the technology; focus on understanding your customer; focus on testing whether your idea is profitable; focus on how to build the best product or service that you can.

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With:

3 Steps To Internet Business

September 29, 2010 by 1 Comment

Step 1: Content
Good Content is the key to a good long-term online business. Why? Because marketing costs time and money. You want to have content that gets passed on naturally through the internet. You still need to do marketing but you’re hoping much of your marketing will be done freely through word-of-mouth. And to leverage word-of-mouth, you need to have quality content worth talking about.

So, spend a lot of time planning and producing your content. Create a ‘content blueprint’ to organize your content ideas. For me, this blueprint is a list of different types of content. For example:

  • Tutorials
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Commentary on industry happenings
  • Videos
  • Series of articles on one topic

Step 2: Marketing
Next comes marketing. With the growing amount of information on the internet, marketing has become more important. There are many sites with great content that don’t have much traffic because no one knows about them. Marketing is simply the activity of letting people know about your site.

I would create a ‘marketing blueprint’. However, I spend most of my marketing time in a few marketing channels. It’s not advisable to stretch your marketing efforts too thin. Marketing channels take time to cultivate before they’re fully effective. Of course, if you have a lot of time for marketing or the money to outsource, go ahead and use more marketing channels.

Here are some marketing methods that have proven effective for webmasters:

  • Blog commenting
  • Social media sites
  • Press releases
  • Forum posting
  • Guest blogging
  • Article submission
  • Video submission

Step 3: Monetization
Finally, we have monetization. Now that you’ve thought about content and marketing, you can focus on converting your traffic into dollars. The key here is understanding your traffic. Why are they coming to your site? What are their problems? What can you sell them that would solve their problems?

Also, think of advertisers with products your audience would find useful. Contact those advertisers and see if they would be partner with you.

Here are some methods for monetizing your site:

  • Contextual advertising
  • Advertising through a broker
  • Direct advertising
  • Reviews
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Sell your own product or service
  • Donations

That’s it! Do you have any questions? We have answers!

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With:

Interesting Kenyan Sites #6

September 28, 2010 by 7 Comments

Easy Fax – this is a website that provides virtual fax services, in Kenya! I must say that the site is pretty well done and the user experience just seems miles ahead of most Kenyan offerings, kudos to the people behind this. Now you can receive faxes for free, via email, in Kenya. Check it out.

Kenyan Listings – well, I would say that directory-type sites in Kenya have a heck of a lot of competition. It shouldn’t be a reason not to try make one successful, though. Kenyan Listings seems to be well done and functional. Good luck to them.

Flops
Penumos – this is just a shamefully poorly made website – made by a supposed web designer!!! yet another reason why you should be careful who you hire to do your web design.

Mike Sonko – for a supposedly filthy wealthy individual, you would expect a better designed website, no? Hopefully it’ll get a face-lift soon.

Special thanks to Jaffar Mohamed and Shiko Nduta for contributing to this week’s article.

Update 29/9/2010: The Penumos guys have promptly updated their site.

Filed Under: Cool Sites Tagged With:

5 Rules For Your “About Us” Page

September 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Seth Godin shares some wisdom on how to build effective “About Us” pages for our websites. This page is often one of the most important pages on any website but also one of the most poorly done pages. Here’s what Seth has to say:

When someone comes to your site for the first time, they’re likely to hit ‘about’ or ‘bio’. Why? Because they want a human, a story and reassurance.

Here are some helpful guidelines (okay, they’re actually imperatives):

1. Don’t use meaningless jargon:
… is a recognized provider of result-based online and mobile advertising solutions. Dedicated to complete value chain optimization and maximization of ROI for its clients, … is committed to the ongoing mastery of the latest online platforms – and to providing continuously enhanced aggregation and optimization options.

2. Don’t use a stock photo of someone who isn’t you (if there is a stock photo of you, congratulations). The more photos of you and your team, the better.

3. Make it easy to contact you. Don’t give a contact address or number that doesn’t work.

4. Be human. Write like you talk and put your name on it. Tell a story, a true one, one that resonates.

5. Use third party comments and testimonials to establish credibility. Use a lot of them. Make sure they’re both interesting and true.

– Seth Godin.

Filed Under: Internet Culture Tagged With:

Our Archives Are Now Live

September 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment

We’ve gotten frequent emails from people asking questions that we have answered very well in past articles – even though those may be from a year or two away. Other people have simply been asking for an easier way to access past articles from Like Chapaa.

Well, we listened. We have just completed building an elegant Archives section where each past articles is listed by month, all the way back to 2007 when we started!

Click here to access the Like Chapaa Archives.

We’d like to think that there’s a lot of information that may help you in our past work, now you have an easier way to access it so go ahead and do just that. Good luck!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

Free Internet Marketing Textbook

September 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment

In this day and age, it is almost suicidal to ignore the Internet’s role in marketing. If you want to do any kind of online business, Internet marketing is, of course, critical. The strange thing is that even for normal, “brick and mortar”, businesses, it is folly to ignore the Internet.

“We live in an era where companies that are not positioning and marketing their brands online are suffering for it. Alas, the Web is a scary place for traditional marketers, whether they work on the agency or client side. After years of successfully relying on conventional media, there is suddenly a technological monster that demands to be addressed. With eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing, marketers everywhere can become skilled at harnessing the power of the Internet and using it for the benefit of their brands. With a little help from the experts, it’s never too late to learn.” – Quirk eMarketing

Download the Free Internet Marketing Textbook.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

The Perfect Business

September 26, 2010 by 1 Comment

I’ve always disliked multi level marketing (sometimes derogatorily called ‘pyramid schemes’) like GNLD. But today, I watched the video below and it changed my perception of these models. Allow me to explain.

In the business world, there are four types of people:

  1. Employees
  2. Self-employed people (solo acts)
  3. Business owners
  4. Inverstors

The poor people of this world are employees and self-employed people. Employees work hard to build businesses that they will never own and are always at risk of losing everything. Self-employed people are safer than employees – what they build, they own but the business depends wholly on them and if anything happens to them, the business fails and financial doom ensues.

Business owners and investors are the rich people of the world. They do not work for money, their money works for them. Clearly, we should all try and learn how to build businesses and invest wisely. It is a subject that should be taught in every school, but sadly is not. Therefore, an overwhelming majority of the population of any country, Kenya included, grows up into adulthood with little idea of how to actually build and grow a business.

Because we should all learn how to build businesses, a great challenge exists for the majority of people – how do you learn how to do business? In the video below, Robert T Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad says that the simplest, fastest and safest way to learn how to do business is through companies that offer multi-level marketing. Think about it. If you join a company like GNLD to sell their products, they will support you in all sorts of ways to make sure that you make sales and become successful. While you are doing this, you are learning how to do business in a safe and supportive environment. You could then easily stop the GNLD stuff and set up your own venture using your newly acquired skills and experiences. Makes sense? Watch the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGMUspZyNuo

What do you think?

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business