In this economy, where do you invest your money? What gives the best returns? We still believe that one of the best, least-known investment opportunities is investing in websites.

In fact, over the last few months, we have been quietly purchasing websites both for ourselves and some clients. Why do we think this represents a good investment? Here’s a quote from an earlier article:

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? (Read More)

Think about that. If you spend Kshs 5,000,000 on a website you should expect to make up to Kshs 500,000 every month. And, guess what? Some types of websites require NO input from you. Can you imagine making a passive 500k every month? I don’t know what to say – I simply cannot think of a better investment in this economy! Can you?

Let me share with you a snapshot of recently sold websites to further drive the point home:

From the above, the average cost of purchasing a website is about 10.7 times its expected monthly revenues.

This means that if a website makes $100 (about Kshs 10,000 currently) every month, then its expected purchase price would be $1,070 (about Kshs 100,000 currently).

A website that cost you $1,070 (about Kshs 100,000 currently) will earn $1,200 (about Kshs 120,000 currently) in one year.

Sijui if this makes any sense to you. Personally, though, at Nickel Pro we have been aggressively investing in websites to the point where now a significant part of our revenues is on “autopilot” (it comes whether we work or not). Hakuna pesa tamu kama hiyo, let me tell you! 🙂

So, as you are thinking of where to invest your money. Spare a thought for websites. In my opinion it is one of the best investments out there. 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.

Cheers!

This is an article adapted from If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker.

99% of people you interact with in life are jokers. You’re used to joker behavior.

We’re all middle class. That sucks. We should be wealthy. But to be wealthy, we need to NOT BE JOKERS.

What’s a joker? A joker is someone who says they’re going to do something, and then doesn’t. A joker always has excuses. “Oh well, I tried…” -> No, I don’t care that you tried. Did you do it or not?

DID YOU DO WHAT YOU SAID YOU’D DO OR NOT?

If not, you’re a joker.

“We will find a way. Or make one.” – Hannibal Barca, 247 BC – 182 BC

That’s my favorite quote. Hannibal is one of my greatest heroes.

He almost conquered Rome. He could have, actually, if he’d been willing to have all his men die to do so, but he loved his men too much so he didn’t do it. Think about that! The man almost conquered Rome!

There’s so many stories of him doing the impossible. Breaking out of ambushes, setting crazy fires, marching elephants through the Alps to invade the Italian Peninsula… dude, he took ELEPHANTS from Africa and MARCHED THEM THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS INTO ROME.

The Romans thought Hannibal had the FORCES OF HELL ON HIS SIDE. Why? Because of that quote: “We will find a way. Or make one.”

Look. When something doesn’t get done, there’s always a good reason. Yeah, you’ve got your job. Or you’ve got to go some class. Or the server crashed. Or whatever!

I don’t care. No one does. You need to get your part done. FIND A WAY. OR MAKE ONE.

I’m writing this blog post cuddled up in a tent in Naivasha’s Crayfish Camp while attending the 2011 Kenya WordCamp.

WordCamp Kenya is a conference about the world’s most popular blogging software WordPress. Developers, designers and users will come together for talks and workshops related to WordPress and to publishing on the web, and to network.

WordPress, of course, is the rockstar of online web publishing. It is so good that it is used to power 14.7% of the top one million world’s biggest websites. In the USA, WordPress has been used to create and manage 22% of all new websites in the year 2011. It is used in 8% of the websites on the entire web. Clearly, WordPress is the one of the biggest and most widely used CMS.

I’m here primarily because I am one of the speakers at this conference. I had an interesting presentation on DukaPress yesterday. If you are not attending this event, well, pole kwako.

I would say the majority of the people who made it are bloggers from Kenya – very prominent Kenyan bloggers. It has been wonderful meeting some of the people I look up to. It is very good to see that Kenya has a very strong and thriving blogosphere.

However, I am disappointed in that I found that the number of WordPress developers here is relatively small. In fact, my observation is that in Kenya, generally, WordPress developers are few and far between. For example at DukaPress last year we wanted to hire a number of WordPress developers but could not find more than one or two who actually had experience with WordPress from all those who applied for the jobs.

I feel that this represents a massive opportunity for developers in Kenya. WordPress is HUGE. In fact, on almost all of the “freelancer” websites (like freelancer.com, guru.com, elance.com etc) the vast majority of all programming/web development jobs are related to WordPress. If as a developer you know how to work well with WordPress, you can easily make money online, offline or both. Just look at what our small team has been able to do with DukaPress.

Think about it. Can you take advantage of this opportunity?

PS: You can get more information on WordCamp Kenya here. You can follow the event live on Twitter by following @WordCampKE or #WCKE which is the official hashtag.

How does money work? Many people know that money is “printed” at the Central Bank so that we can use it in our economy. But how, exactly, does this process work? How did we go from using gold and silver to paper as our money?

“Paper” money was invented due to necessity. At the start of the industrial revolution, businesses were expanding at rates never seen before and they needed money to finance their expansion. At that time, people used gold and silver coins for money. So if it cost one million gold coins to build a new factory, then you had to actually find one million gold coins. But gold and silver are rare so there was not enough gold to satisfy the demand for money.

A man named John Law solved this problem by inventing what would later be known as the fractional reserve system. He invented a new type of money to replace the use of gold coins. It is important to note that his invention created the mechanism to finance the industrial revolution and, indeed, our modern technological world.

Law’s solution was to create “paper” money, a.k.a banknotes, and use it instead of gold coins. The banknotes would then be officially recognised as “real money”. The advantage was that paper money could be expanded infinitely (unlike gold) and was much cheaper to make. To get and keep initial public confidence (people questioned why they should stop using gold and start using paper), Law suggested that a fraction of gold always be kept on hand for the few people who wanted to redeem their notes for real actual gold. Through trial and error, it was found that gold reserves could safely “back up” up to ten times their value of paper money. That is, if a bank had Kshs 100 worth of gold, they could safely print up to Kshs 1,000 bank notes.

As stated above, at the start, banks had to have real gold reserves roughly equal to 10% of all the paper money that they printed. However, in the 1930s, the ability for people to convert their paper money into gold was dropped. This removed the need for central banks to have gold reserves in their possession and, indeed, virtually no central bank in the world today has gold reserves that can fully back up all their paper money. John Law’s method of money creation is still the dynamo that powers our present world.

However, there exists a grave problem. Let’s imagine that the Central Bank of Kenya wanted to print Kshs 100 today. They would print it and then would lend it to the government of Kenya or any one of the local banks. Naturally, the Central Bank incurred some costs while printing the money so it has to charge interest to whoever takes the newly printed Kshs 100. That is, if the interest rate is 10%, the Central Bank will expect to be paid back Kshs 110 for every Kshs 100 that it prints. Think about this. Who prints the Kshs 10 to pay back the initial amount? The answer is no one. This money is created out of thin air.

When presented with this scenario, there is often a tendency to think:”Ah, but the borrower can always make the extra Ksh 10 somewhere else, through hard work or a deal overseas.” However, although we frequently interchange the two sayings, earning money is not the same as making it. Earnings are simply a transfer of money from one ownership to another and neither increase nor decrease the total money in existence. Making money actually does increase the nation’s money supply but no-one can do that but the central bank itself.

The result of creating Kshs 100 but demanding Kshs 110 in return is that the collective borrowers of a nation are forever trying to repay an amount that they will never be able to repay: the mythical Kshs 10 that was never actually printed. This debt is, in fact, unrepayable and every time more money is printed, the nation’s overall indebtedness increases by the amount of interest due to the Central Bank.

Many economists know about this problem but pass it off as irrelevant. The idea is that if the economy keeps expanding, it fuels an increase in the total money supply in which case there is no problem with meeting interest payments on an increasing debt load. It is important to note that when John Law lived, the need to continuously expand to meet growing debt repayments was seen as a minor problem. Today, however, we are faced with the reality that our world cannot support infinite growth. In spite of this, we have to grow consistently forever or face total economic collapse due to the eternal debt inherent in our monetary system.

This “eternal debt” creates some interesting problems which I will cover in a later article.