Archives for February 2011

How Great Entrepreneurs Think

February 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“I always live by the motto of ‘Ready, fire, aim.’ I think if you spend too much time doing ‘Ready, aim, aim, aim,’ you’re never going to see all the good things that would happen if you actually started doing it. I think business plans are interesting, but they have no real meaning, because you can’t put in all the positive things that will occur…If you know intrinsically that this is possible, you just have to find out how to make it possible, which you can’t do ahead of time.” – advice from an expert entrepreneur

What distinguishes great entrepreneurs? Click here to read about an academic study whose goal was to get inside the mind of great entrepreneurs and determine how they think.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Tandaa Symposium on Growing Your Brand Online

February 9, 2011 by 1 Comment

The content of this post is courtesy of Tandaa.

Delivering your brand promise in an increasingly digital world requires a whole new marketing strategy.

A recent TNS study* indicates that internet usage in Kenya has more than doubled in the last two years. An estimated 4 million Kenyans have access to the internet and according to TNS, 76% of Kenyan internet users are on Facebook. With increasing access to laptops, broadband internet and web enable mobile phones, Kenyan consumers are changing the way they interact with their favorite brands.

So should your brand be on Facebook? How should you manage your Twitter handle? The first Tandaa Symposium of the year will explore the opportunities and risks the Internet and social media offer Kenyan brands today.

The internet may seem like an overcrowded platform in which to compete. With real-time news, celebrity gossip and millions of intriguing web pages to browse–not to mention engaging and all consuming social media sites–attracting and holding consumer’s attention may seem like an uphill task. But today’s savvy marketing or brand manager must find innovative ways to maximize online spend in a crowded and competitive platform.

Beyond offering a platform to communicate your brand promise, the Internet, especially social networks, also offer the unique opportunity to better understand your customer. The data and insight from online social interaction with consumers can contribute significantly to how your company designs new products and campaigns.

Understanding how to effectively grow your brand online is therefore crucial for every marketing or brand manager. The Tandaa Symposium will give you insights on how to update your marketing strategy to make the most of today’s digital world.

Register Here.

Filed Under: Internet Culture

New Free WordPress e-Commerce Theme: Begi

February 8, 2011 by 2 Comments

Begi e-Commerce theme

Begi e-Commerce theme

Another day, another freebie 🙂

Begi is a clean, minimal and highly customizable WordPress e-commerce theme. It is based on Vanilla Cart whose development ceased a while ago.

Theme Features

  • Clean, minimal and stylish
  • Drop-down menu support
  • 2-column layout and widget-ready sidebar
  • Support for WordPress 3.0 custom menus
  • Support for custom backgrounds
  • Styled to work elegantly with DukaPress

View the live Demo
Download For Free

Simply put, this is a ready made online shop design that you can use for free, just download and set up! Here is how to get started in 10 minutes or less.

If you are familiar with WordPress, you may be interested to know that instead of downloading a whole new theme, you can use DukaPress Styles to make DukaPress look GOOD on your current theme.

Filed Under: Internet Culture Tagged With:

How to Open a US Bank Account

February 8, 2011 by 15 Comments

This post was made possible by sobbayi.

There are many reasons why one may want to open a US bank account, including wanting to withdraw money from PayPal. Now to open a US based bank account as a none US resident is still possible.

The only catch is that you cannot open it online, you have to physically go into the bank with your passport and a second form of identification eg your DL (no need for social security number if you tell them you are not a resident).

You then fill the forms AT THE BANK and you set up you internet banking details right there as thats where all your transaction Bank transfers etc will take place.

Once you are done you must deposit some money into the account immediately and you will walk out with you temporary ATM card. You then need a Kenyan address and a US address. The US address is where they will send the permanent ATM card within 10 days and other documentation whenever they need to as they wont send it out of the country. Once you have your ATM card and are going back to Kenya there is a number you will need to call to activate your card to work in Kenya. Make sure you get that number before you leave the bank.

This information is based on Bank of America. (Not all banks offer accounts to non residents living abroad). Their ATM cards work just fine in Kenya but it will cost you 5 bucks ($5) per use so be careful.

Filed Under: Tips Hacking and Reviews

EVERYONE Can Be An Entrepreneur!

February 7, 2011 by 1 Comment

In his article 8 Alternatives to College, James Altucher brilliantly tackles one of the largest myths about entrepreneurship: “not everyone can be an entrepreneur”. This is a myth, and this is why it is wrong to say that not everyone can be an entrepreneur:

First off, there’s no law against being an entrepreneur. In fact, everyone can be an entrepreneur. So what they really mean is: “not everyone can be a successful entrepreneur”. And as far as I know, there’s no law against failure either. When someone loses a tennis match or a chess game. how do they improve? They study their loss. As anyone who has mastered any field in life knows: studying your losses is infinitely more valuable than studying your wins. I failed at my first three attempts at being an entrepreneur before I finally learned how to spell it and I finally had a success (i.e. a company with profits that I was then able to sell).

Failure is a part of life. Better to learn it at 18 than at 23 or older when you’ve been coddled by ivory blankets and hypnotized into thinking success was yours for the taking. Get baptized in the river of failure as a youth so you can blossom in entrepreneurial blessings as an adult.

What do you learn when you are young and start a business (regardless of success or failure):

  1. you learn how to come up with ideas that will be accepted by other people
  2. you begin to build your bullshit detector (something that definitely does not happen in college)
  3. you learn how to sell your idea
  4. you learn how to build and execute on an idea
  5. you meet and socialize with other people in your space. They might not all be the same age but, lets face it, thats life as an adult. You just spent 18 years with kids your age. Grow up!
  6. you might learn how to delegate and manage people
  7. you learn how to eat what you kill, a skill also not learned by college-goers

Source: 8 Alternatives to College

Filed Under: Small Business

Interesting Kenyan Sites #18

February 7, 2011 by 15 Comments

Nairobi Living – is a local search and business directory. I find the site to be well thought out and nicely designed. Kudos to the makers! Though one is tempted to say “….yet another local directory?”.

Shameless Clones
Tokea Online – it seems to be an East African social network (like facebook, but for EA). it looks brand new and so it is “sparse” as far as content goes. But the design, I must say, is well done. Let’s wish them luck!

Update 7/2/2011: it seems that TokeaOnline is a shameless clone of a site design and setup freely available all over the net. Another site using the same setup is FunKenya. it is good to try and build an online business, but one could surely do better…

Flops
mmiarch – this seems to be the website of “mmi architects”. Even by the presumably low Kenyan standards, this website is particularly poorly done. One wonders what the hell the “web designer” was doing…

beckyzshoes – an online shops selling men’s shoes. Except that it is run on a .blogspot blog. FAIL. I cannot believe that these guys actually advertised on Facebook!! if you want to sell anythign online, 1) do not do it from a free website and 2) use professional e-commerce software (like DukaPress which is 100% free).

Filed Under: Cool Sites

Investing in Virtual Real Estate

February 5, 2011 by 1 Comment

A little-known way of making money online is that of investing in virtual real estate i.e. buying websites.

I know you are conversant with the idea of buying land or houses so I will use that as an example to make a point. If you buy a house at Kshs 5 million and then rent it out, the monthly rent that you can charge is usually 1% of the buying price (this sometimes varies but it is the average). Therefore, the expected rent of a house worth 5 million would be Kshs 50,000 a month or Kshs 600,000 a year. To get back your 5 million investment, it would take 8.3 years. This is considered a good investment.

A better one would be to buy a small business. The average rate of return on a small business is about 20% – i.e. if you buy a business at 5 million, you should expect to make 1 million a year. This means that it would take you 5 years to get back your investment.

What about buying a website? The strange thing is that the value of a website is usually only about 12 – 24 times its money income. That is, if a website makes Kshs 10,000/- a month, the selling price should be a maximum of 240,000/-. This means that it only takes you two years to get back your initial investment.

Sounds like a good investment to you?

It is not a silver bullet though – you’d be throwing your money away if you do not know what you are doing. Before buying a website you have to invest time and energy to learn how websites work and to do due diligence on any particular website before buying it. The good news is that you can get websites at extremely low prices of $100 (Kshs 8,000) only. Therefore, you can start small and learn as you make bigger and better investments.

Daniel Scocco has a very good guide on buying websites for profit. This is the advice that Daniel gives i.e. how to do your homework before buying a website:

  1. Do you have the technical knowledge to manage it? Some websites are quite simple to run, and you’ll just need to update the content via a content management system once in a while. Others, however, are quite complex, and you’ll need some technical skills (e.g., PHP, MySQL, JavaScript). Make sure you know what is involved.
  2. Do you know how much traffic the website gets? The best way to assess this is to ask the website owner to install Google Analytics on the website and to give you a user account so you can see the numbers by yourself. If he is reluctant to do this, be skeptical.
  3. Do you know how much money the website makes? Similarly you need to be 100% sure of how much money the website makes. Ask for screenshots, and if necessary even video screencasts, and those are harder to fake.
  4. Is the website solid and established? You want to make sure that the website you’ll be buying has solid roots, else both the traffic and the revenues could vanish after a couple of months. You can verify this by checking the age of the domain name, the number of pages indexed by Google, the number of backlinks pointing to the website, and by the traffic and revenue history (e.g., ask for at least 6 months of data for those metrics).

You can buy (and sell) websites online at Flippa.

Interesting in investing in websites? If you want to get into this but have no idea how to search for, value, evaluate and manage a website, give us a call. We’ll work something out.

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business