Helping you pay the bills
We had a mini-competition the other day. So, here is the winner:
Dear readers, thank you for participating. Please enjoy the book Naomie. Do let us know how you like it.
If you are late and you want Scientific Advertising, you can get it by clicking here.
The very first time that I got interested in making money online was around the time when I hit puberty. I was reading this magazine – sikumbuki jina – and there was this story of a woman with three kids who had quit her job to take care of her babies. Since she was home a lot, she started spending a lot of time on the Internet.
One day, she discovered a nice little website where she could set up an online shop for free. At the time, she had nothing to sell online but the idea stuck with her. Weeks later, she started a little duka selling hand-made jewelery (she made it herself at home). According to the magazine article, in a few months her little duka was making her twice the amount of money she used to make at her old job.
This story just spoke to me and I promised myself to one day make money online somehow. I later realized this dream through Like Chapaa and other online businesses that I am a part of.
How about you? Have you ever wanted to make money online? have you managed to do it?
Only you know the answers to that. Today, though, I am very pleased to announce our newest project! OurDuka.
What is OurDuka?
OurDuka is a site that enables you to start a simple online shop easily and for free.
Why are we doing this? because of public demand. Since we launched DukaPress, we got quite a lot of people telling us they love it but also telling us they have no idea how to get started – few people understand how to download it, upload it on a server, bla bla… A lot of you just want to “get a shop” without worrying about the technical details. Well, now you can do just that, just signup at OurDuka and you’re good to go! All 100% for free.
Do you have anything you think can sell online? Why don’t you get off your behind and try sell it? You have no excuses since we’re giving you a shop for free, ama?
The site right now is still a bit crude but as we engage with you, we hope to make it better as we go along. Hop on, make money, be happy! Don’t worry if you get little things here and there that seem out of place, we’re fixing that.
Why would you use OurDuka?
How do we make money?
We feel that before we even try to make money from this project, we need to make sure that you make money from it. Therefore, right now, this thing is free. Completely. We’ll be experimenting with how to make money using this in the future (when we have 1,000 users, if we ever do :p).
So, well, the ball is in your court. If you ever wanted an online shop, now you can get one that is very powerful and easy to use, and free. Visit OurDuka and sign up ASAP.
Well, we had yet another mini competition the other day. Today, we’re announcing the people who won themselves a copy of “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days“. They are:
That’s how easy it is to be a winner over here, stay tuned for more and better competitions.
Incase you want this book, we’re sorry your only ope is Amazon or a bookshop near you.
If you are interested in entrepreneurship, innovation or you are just fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging insights—straight from the source.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?
Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.
But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you. – Amazon
This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderful meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica (the author) also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.
You want to buy this book, trust me. Head over to Amazon.com to get it from about $5 (plus shipping). It is sadly not available (and probably will never be available) in our Chapaa Shop.
Alternatively, dear readers, you can get a copy of this book free from us. We recently gave away 4 copies of “The Richest Man in Babylon” and, today, we’re giving away a copy (or copies) of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. Interested?
All you have to do is leave a comment below. You can say anything at all (but it helps if you add constructively to the discussion). We’ll pick a winner randomly in three days. Good luck!
Update 25/10/2010: This competition is over and the winners have been picked.
Have you ever started your own business? Why not? What was it like?
Over the last two months or so, the number of people who visit Like Chapaa per day has increased by roughly 60%. This increase has resulted in more business for us and we are, naturally, incredibly happy at the fruits of our labor. Today, I wanted to share the things we did to make this increase a reality. (We hope that it is the things listed here that the actually resulted in our site-visitor surge but it may well have been caused by factors beyond our control).
How we increased our site’s visitor numbers
1. We invested in social media
We built a Twitter Application and a Facebook Application. This has resulted in increased numbers of people from those social networks coming to Like Chapaa. See, normally, people wanting to grow in social media just create quick profiles in Facebook and Twitter and start getting friends, etc. We realised we did not have that kind of time so we chose to build applications so as to automate things a little bit (everyone should do this!). This resulted in us being able to do some really cool things: for example, you can leave comments on this site using your Twitter/Facebook profile, among other things.
Twitter and Facebook combined now send us about 30% of the visitors to this website.
2. Continuous SEO
Our strong point, of course, is search engine optimisation and making sure everything that we do earns us favorably as far as SEO goes is a priority.
I must say we have done pretty well as far as this goes. For example, when you search for “make money in Kenya“, our website dominates the Google search results pages. Search engines, and Google in particular, send us 60+% of all the people who view our site.
If you are looking to grow your site, please do not forget Google. Social media may be sexy but you just cannot afford to ignore Google!
3. Uniqueness/Creativity
I do not know how to fully explain this. It seems that the Internet “rewards” you for uniqueness and creativity. Like Chapaa is, strictly speaking, a blog. You would not expect us to create or be involved in projects such as DukaPress, yet we are. The “side projects” have earned us both money, and countless new visitors to our websites. Two examples:
4. Getting Like Chapaa on other websites
Well, perhaps surprisingly, Like Chapaa is now listed at both Mashada and KenyaMoja. It seems that these two sites get quite a lot of traffic because they send us quite a lot of visitors. We were only recently listed on Mashada and that resulted in a visible bump in the number of people who come to Like Chapaa. Like Chapaa has also found its way onto Wazua, Kenya Unlimited, several Kenyan blogs and other smaller sites. The traffic that these nice websites send to us is significant!
I would not say that this is our doing because we did not ask anyone to include Like Chapaa on their sites. I would put it down to “if you create good and useful content, people will notice you”.
5. Email Marketing
Perhaps not many know this: Like Chapaa has a self-grown email marketing list of about 800 people. We do not send newsletters out often but all the articles published by Like Chapaa end up in the inboxes of our subscribers. Most of them always click back to Like Chapaa. This is a steady and stable source of website visitors for us.
Conclusion
The story of how we have grown Like Chapaa should inspire you. We have never ever spent any money to market this website and we started very quiety and, for months, got about seven visitors a day. But we persevered and, now, it is almost on autopilot – we just grow bigger. I put most of it down to luck and good fortune but here are some tips that may help you:
Good luck with building your site. 🙂
PS, Incase you do not know, you can hire us if you want help to grow your website.
Many business owners are very focused on their business and its profitability, but most of the time when failures happen, they begin to wonder what they did wrong. They cannot figure what it is, especially if they have the impression they did every possible thing to succeed.
The explanation is simple and obvious. It is called planning, a process on which every business should be based. Lazy business owners simply forget to sit down and make a plan for at least a week in which they should write all the steps to be taken in their business development.
Here are some suggestions to be taken into consideration if you want to plan your business efficiently.
First, if you have an idea to grow your business, do not hurry to put it into practice as it is. The chances to fail are quite big. So, write down your idea and try to change it into a SMART goal. If you have several ideas, it helps to take a dashboard for each of them.
Think at an objective that is achievable on a short term because it is easier to accomplish. Establish all the steps you have to make in order to achieve it. If there too many parts to take into consideration, break the large tasks into smaller ones and set clear tine frames.
Pay attention to the information seeking part – it is better to delegate and request your employees to look for valuable information such as: customers, suppliers, competitors. You may also consult experts for technical advice.
It is also very important to do some monitoring. Once you get a feedback, revise your plan and adapt it to the new situations. This is the right way to performance.
Another advice is to do some assessing before setting a specific goal to see from the beginning if you have the necessary resources to achieve it. See if you have the right premises: for instance, if you want to expand your production line or modernize your equipment, you have to see if there is enough space or enough money to do these changes.
If you are dealing with customer service systems, maybe a more sophisticated system will help you business be more profitable. If you have a strong financial support, maybe outsourcing will make things easier for you and you will have the possibility to concentrate on other parts of your business.
See what facilities you have in your company to achieve your goal as it is easier than starting from scratch.
Do not forget to take into consideration your most valuable resource you can rely on – your staff. See if you have the right people to achieve your objectives, if they know what is expected of them. Delegate tasks according to the skills they have, ensuring this way the job is done accurately.
After you have studied carefully all these issues, all you have to do is to set a clear goal, plan each step as we taught you to achieving and you will surely be successful. Bear in mind that it is extremely important to assess the results of your efforts, especially from a financial point of view.
The Richest Man in Babylon is the kind of book that I would give/recommend to anyone regardless if their interest is outside of business/finance. Since finance can seem daunting these days due to its complexity, the book simplifies it through short stories. The insights that it provides allows me to step back and look at finance in simple terms. It opened up my eyes by introducing new possibilities, and adds positive reinforcements as to what a person can achieve in her lifetime. The wisdom that the book teaches is financially enlightening and it can change how you view your finance in many ways. Although the messages are delivered in a very unique fashion, the underlying nuggets of wisdom are direct and concisely to the point.
Clason, the book’s author, uses parables set in Babylon to make his points throughout the book. One chapter does a really great job of encompassing several financial points, The Five Laws of Gold. Each of the five laws are very simple and if used can work wonders in building your wealth.
The Five Laws of Gold
The concepts in the book may be a refresher to individuals who already has a solid grasp of their finance, but nonetheless, it solidifies what you already know in many ways. This is a book that I can refer back to time and time again. If you apply some of the concepts that are presented in this book to your life, you will definitely be on your way to financial freedom. If I can sum up the book in one word, it would be “refreshing.” I recommend this book to everyone regardless of your interest or age. Read, apply, then repeat.
Do You Want A Copy Of This Book?
We’re giving away a copy of The Richest Man in Babylon to one of you, dear readers. What do you need to do? Just leave a comment below – anything goes (but it would help if you added to the discussion in some way). We’ll choose a winner randomly in three days. Good luck!
Update 21/10/2010: This competition is over. Here are the winners. For those who missed you can get the book here.
What do you think of the book? How do you manage your money? Need help?
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