Archives for October 2010

Sintel

October 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Ahh, the marvels of the Internet. Sintel is an open movie – meaning that it is licensed in such a way that you are allowed and encouraged to give it out, or sell it, without seeking permission from anyone. The people who made the movie are also giving away all the production materials – right down to the movie script!

The movie is a fantastic animation featuring a young girl who befriends a dragon, and somehow (I won’t tell you how) loses her new friend. She then goes out to look for the little dragon…

Amazing, eh? Watch the movie:

Filed Under: Internet Culture

The 3 Easiest Ways To Make More Money

October 5, 2010 by 2 Comments

1. Freelancing
This is simple – take your skills and find someone who will pay you to do something for them.

Advantages of Freelancing

  1. It is extremely easy to get started
  2. It is extremely easy to set a price for your work – there are lots of example to copy.
  3. The relationship between work and income is very clear – if you work, you get paid certainly.

Disadvantages of Freelancing

  1. Freelancing is hard work and freelancers often get stuck in a “rat race” i.e. you need to work to eat
  2. It is hard to raise your fees and there may be an upper limit to how much you can charge
  3. It is sometimes difficult to know if your skill set can earn you money. For example, not many people may care about how fast you can read a book.

How do you get paid?

  • Per hour
  • Per project
  • ‘Subscription’-based – for example, “you have access to my expertise for 3 months”

Examples: web designer, marketing consultant, babysitter, freelance writer, programmer, etc

2. Productizing
This is related to freelancing – instead of, for example, offering yourself as a freelance marketing consultant, you could write a book on marketing and sell it. When you make your knowledge into a product, you can generate revenue even when you are sleeping. However, while this method can generate higher revenues, it is also higher risk as you are not sure if anyone will buy your products.

Advantages

  1. You can make money even when you are sleeping, or sick, or…
  2. It is easier to make more money than in freelancing – you can sell your book to hundreds of thousands of people but you cannot write for that many people as a freelancer in a short period of time
  3. You get more freedom

Disadvantages

  1. The logistics of selling products include specialist software like shopping carts, payment processors, email marketing software etc
  2. You need to know how to market your product online – this may include blogging, SEO, social networks, etc
  3. It is difficult to know who will buy your product, at how much, and how to price it
  4. The Internet is a sea of horribly crappy products and so it is difficult to convince people that yours is any different

How to earn money

  • Freemium model where you give something for free and then charge for upgrades e.g. DukaPress
  • Charge for single products like books or ebooks e.g. Kiosk 3CB
  • Create a product where you can charge recurring fees e.g online courses e.g. Membership Site Masterplan
  • Create valuable content and then market affiliate products. Here’s how to do this.

Examples: OBS, Kiosk 3CB, DukaPress, WooThemes etc

3. Getting a Higher Salary
Truth is, the vast majority of us are employed so this is an obvious strategy. Yet, very few of us think about it in this way. To get a higher salary, you need to improve your skills at work and demonstrate this to your boss. Hopefully, this will translate into increased responsibilities at work and a higher salary. Simple enough for you?

Advantages

  1. You already know what to do! Just make your boss happy with the quality of your work.
  2. Salary increases tend to follow you through to the end of your career and they are cumulative. If you get a 10% salary increase, it will likely continue like this for the rest of your career and often can only go upwards.

Disadvantages

  1. It is hard to know exactly what kind of behaviour will get you a raise
  2. Everything is out of your control and depends on your boss’ discretion and your company’s budget

Which road will you take?

Filed Under: Make Money, Online Jobs, Small Business

Biashara 30 Confessions II

October 4, 2010 by 29 Comments

Does anyone else like that Usher song, Confessions II? Well, I love it! And, keeping with the spirit of that song, here are our Biashara 30 (Season 2) confessions….

What is Biashara 30?
Biashara30 is a premium club meant for people interested in making money online. People who join Biashara30 will learn everything we know about making money online and, to complete the program, will be required to set up an internet business either as a group project or alone. A very important part of Biashara30 is ensuring that everyone who participates earns online before the end of the program. At every step, we will be on hand to guide and advise the members of Biashara30.

Some Background Info
At the beginning of this year, we accepted about 20 people into the second season of Biashara 30. We received well over 150 applications to the program and decided to pick 20 or so of what we felt were the best presented applications.

And, honestly, the people of Biashara 30 Season 2 were pretty amazing. At the beginning of the program, I felt very confident that we’d have lots of fun and that someone (lots of someones) would make some money!

Sad Happenings
Sadly, things did not turn out the way I had hoped. Slowly, the whole thing degenerated into the oblivion of inactivity. Biashara 30 Season 2 was not successful. Why?

  1. At the start of the program, myself and wham (we run Like Chapaa and Biashara 30) unfortunately got a really huge job that we just could not pass up. This meant that we could not participate as directly as we wished we could.
  2. A good number of the Biashara 30 Season 2 participants were simply inactive. It beats me why you would take the time and energy to apply and then never even show up.
  3. With all due respect to all Biashara 30 Season 2 participants, I would say that in general I felt a lack of sufficient focus and sense of purpose. I am willing to say that this was in part our fault in that we suddenly did not have enough time to spend on the program. I feel that, ultimately, the buck stops with you if you want to earn more money online or elsewhere.
  4. I do not know how to put this last point respectfully. I apologise if anyone feels badly for this. I had various one-on-one chats with the Biashara 30 Season 2 participants and while some of them were simply unimaginably amazing, some were less amazing than others. Let me give an example, one participant wanted an online shop, of sorts, and we helped that participant get a domain name and gave that participant free webhosting and even helped set up the website for that participant. These are things we charge for daily but they are available free for B30 guys and gals. I would have imagined that giving so generously that the participant would have gone on to do great things with the new shop. But no, the participant always came back to us in a situation which turned out to be sort of us doing all the work for the participant. I don’t appreciate laziness, and B30 will never spoonfeed anyone.

Some Thoughts

  1. We have to rethink the whole approach to B30. It is easy to sit back and blame the participants for two failed attempts but I realise that this is more likely an indicator that something is fundamentally wrong with how we handle the program. We have to find a better easier and more efficient way of transferring knowledge from us into other people.
  2. It seems to me that there is something of a general attitude problem in our great country. People very often have grand ideas and the skills to match them but they end up doing nothing at all with that. It almost feels like people (especially those wanting to earn more) read all these books and websites and…..instead of actually trying to do something, they seek yet more information and read more stuff and never do anything about it.
  3. The expectation of spoon feeding is a serious problem. People are looking for silver bullets and magic formulae instead of being ready to do real and hard work.
  4. There probably needs to be some “real life” (offline) element to B30 to make it feel more real to the participants.

Some Good News
So, was there any success story from this edition of B30? Well, yes:

  • The seeds for DukaPress were sown during Biashara 30 Season 2 as there was a lot of talk on online shops. In fact, we build DukaPress so as to enable ordinary people in our great nation to set up online shops that just work easily and quickly and be able to work with local currencies and akina MPESA. DukaPress has gone on to make wham and I lots money, too. 🙂
  • One of the Biashara 30 Season 2 participants, Crystal, continues to amaze me with her hard work and “get-it-done” attitude. I can testify that she makes lots of money online! Though I would not say that B30 helped her achieve this. It is more a case of a dedicated individual following her passion and her dreams to fruition.

The Future & Biashara 30 Season 3
So we just laid it bare for you to see. Biashara30 1 and Biashara30 2 both failed to achieve my own personal goals for the program.

However, my dear readers, we know how to make money online. We do make money online. We believe firmly that we should all be making money online and it can be a significant force in helping even just one person in our nation earn more and live a better life. We believe in helping people. We, therefore, are preparing to go through all this again. Yes, Biashara 30 season 3 is coming soon. Would you participate? Do you know anyone who would?

Since B30 Season 2, we have spent a lot of time soul searching and thinking of how to deliver a better program. We feel that we are now ready to try again. Here are some of our thoughts:

  1. B30 Season 3 will be even more selective. We only want to work with people who won’t end up to be a waste of time for us.
  2. We’re thinking of hiring someone to lead the program so that if we get another big job, it will not impact on the program negatively.
  3. The focus of B30 Season 3 will be on the three easiest ways of earning (that we have identified) money and we hope that by the end of the program, everyone will have made money online, or elsewhere.

But We Need Your Help
We realise that we are not authorities in anything. We need your ideas and input on how to make this thing better. How do we solve the problems identified above? Please help us by commenting below.

Are you an aspiring applicant? Would you please share your ideas, questions or queries with us by leaving a comment below?

Is anyone out there willing to help us run this thing? Please leave a comment below.

How To for B30 Season 3
We have not yet put up the application form. However, the application process starts TODAY! If you want to participate in Biashara 30, Season 3, you have to leave a comment here on this article. The comment should not be telling us why we should pick you, it can be anything else that is relevant. Remember that if you do not leave a comment here, you have no chance of joining B30 Season 3. Good luck!

Filed Under: Biashara 30 Tagged With:

Earning More Money Has LITTLE to Do With Uni Degrees

October 4, 2010 by 2 Comments

Let’s play pretend. Let’s say you are a woman, with one beloved son. Just play along. So your son is in From 3 and is having REAL trouble with Math at school. So for the school holidays, you decide to find a tutor for him. Who would you hire:

  1. Mr. Mike – a math professor who teaches at the University
  2. Mr. Bob – a down-to-earth math tutor who specializes in high school math and all your friends and neighbors testify to his ability to tutor high school math.

Who would you hire? My guess is that you, and almost everybody else, would hire Mr. Bob. Would it matter if Mr. Bob never went to uni? I think all that matters is that Mr. Bob can get your son’s grades up, no? How many kids would Mr. Bob need to teach to make huge sums of money at today’s rates?

“Most people are looking for a magic bullet, and rather than trying to figure out how to earn money themselves, they ‘outsource’ it to some university or degree program. That way, the reasoning goes, they can read some books, take a couple tests, get a degree, and…then what? Money falls down from trees?” – Ramit Sethi

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way! So what if you get a degree? If you want to earn significant amounts of money you have to WORK. You have to work hard at understanding your customers, and presenting yourself in such a way that they will just come to you. Like Mr. Bob did (above).

The alternative is to dream about earning money and do nothing about it. Or worse, get a worthless degree that costs you lots of money but doesn’t help you increase your earnings.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

Some Interesting Kenyan Sites #7

October 3, 2010 by 6 Comments

Nairobi Swahili – this is the website of one Oloo, a Swahili teacher in Nairobi. I think the site is very well done and a rare gem in the (sometimes shocking) Kenyan web design industry. The site is pleasing to look at and does a good job of selling Mr. Oloo’s Swahili courses. Kudos to him, and the web designers.

Mara Enkipai – there’s a big drive to “sell Kenyan tourism” online spearheaded by the government. The sad truth is that 99% of all tourism related sites in Kenya are rather shoddy jobs that may actually detract from Kenya’s image. This is NOT the case with Mara Enkipai – the site is extremely well done and something that I’d be proud for people all over the world to see as the first glimpse of what Kenya has to offer. May other tour firms and operators follow suit!

Flops
Kenya Teachers’ Service Commission – for an organisation as big as the TSC, this is a pretty shameful site – it looks unfinished and the design, well, is poor at best. It looks more like a student’s high school project than a professionally done website of a national organisation.

Filed Under: Cool Sites

Just Earn More Money!

October 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I got an interesting email from Ramit Sethi:

“Kelly, have you ever noticed how every financial “expert” says the same thing over and over?

“Stop spending money on lattes!”
“No, you can’t afford those jeans.”
“Keep a budget! Really!”

None of those tips work. In fact, they’re inherently flawed because they try to RESTRICT you from doing what you want to do.

Here’s something interesting.

Ever wonder why no personal-finance “experts” write about earning more?

Because they don’t know how.

That’s right — 99% of them have a 9-5 job and have no idea how to earn more money. So they focus on bite-sized tips that they think will satisfy most people…but these tips are the same old things you’ve heard for the last 20 years.

Today, I’m going to help you focus on the Big Win of earning more money.”

Follow the link: 5 Reasons Why Earning More Is WAY More Powerful Than Frugality

Interesting, eh?

Filed Under: Make Money

Opportunity: Online MPESA Agent?

October 1, 2010 by 12 Comments

If you look at the sidebar here on Like Chapaa, you will notice a “Most Popular” section. This lists 10 of the most popular articles, ever, on this website. If you look closely, you will see that FOUR of those 10 most popular articles are talking about How to Receive Money Online in Kenya. What does this mean?

It means that there is a very great amount of interest on how to efficiently and conveniently receive money online in Kenya. This is probably because if you are doing any kind of business online from Kenya, you know that getting the money you earn has been and continues to be terribly difficult. It seems to me that people would jump at anything that would make this easier. It seems to me that there is an amazing opportunity that no one has addressed very well.

What would the ideal solution be?
I have done no sort of extensive research on this but I believe that the ideal solution would be a service that:

  1. Allows people to easily and cheaply transfer their money from services like PayPal, MoneyBookers, AlertPay, etc into a more locally accessible location
  2. The best “more locally accessible location” would be the mobile phone – MPESA, YUcash, or ZAP. SO the ability to transfer your money from akina PayPal into your phone directly.
  3. The whole thing needs to be done to international quality and security standards
  4. The service needs to be VERY transparent
  5. The service needs to exist for, and make us that its primary aim is not just to make money but actually to serve us. Other organisations offering similar services have struck me as being out to ‘make money ruthlessly’ instead of offering good service.

Can anyone build that? I’d be your first customer! I know that several Kenyan establishments are offering services that may come close to what I describe them but the fact that so many people who need this are still looking for a suitable solution means that this “market” is untapped.

Other things
Apart from transferring money from akina PayPal into services like MPESA, I would love the ability to transfer money from akina MPESA directly into services like PayPal.

I’ve been thinking about this a long time (because I feel the pinch and I need this badly) and it just seems so very doable that I wonder why no one has yet stepped up and tried to do it.

What would you need to do this?
As you read this section, keep in mind that I have not done any extensive research into this and what I say may just be plain wrong.

As I stated earlier, I think building such a service is not particularly challenging, at least not technology-wise. Here’s my idea on how it can be built:

  • You need an agreement with one of the Mobile Networks. I feel that Zain is the most approachable of the four Kenyan mobile operators. I remember having good conversations with their engineers on how to more deeply integrate ZAP into DukaPress. The kind of agreement you need from them shouldn’t need to be too different from the agreement that they currently have with ZAP agents. Something similar, but they need to know you will operate online.
  • You need to notify akina PayPal, obviously, that you will be offering this kind of service. Paypal, in particular, has elegant APIs that should make building your service easier.
  • You would need to build your application in such a way that it accepts money from akina PayPal into your registered customers’ accounts securely and then, on demand, transfers that money into your customers’ mobile phones. The good thing with ZAP is that you can send money to any phone network in Kenya.
  • You would, obviously, need to structure your pricing in such a way that you take a small (it has to be small) percentage of the money that passes through your systems as your fees. As you plan this, you need to work around withdrawal fees za akina MPESA as well as the fees due to akina PayPal
  • It would be an extremely good idea to make your whole application work fully from a mobile phone and not just the web!!
  • Your system needs to be secure; it needs to inspire confidence.
  • You need to anticipate the possibility of PayPal partnering with local banks (it is rumored they shall be partnering with Equity). This poses a significant threat to your business. You need to build your application with this in mind and strategize on how you shall deal with it. Which I personally think is very do-able.

So, what do you think? Is this build-able? What do you think of the whole idea? Leave your comments below. 🙂

Filed Under: Lazyweb Tagged With: