Another Way to Withdraw Money From PayPal in Kenya

April 28, 2011 by 16 Comments

Following our recent article on how to withdraw cash from PayPal via Liberty Reserve, we found another much easier way. This is thanks to bonchisdecha.

Update: PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA


Babawatoto.com
BabaWatoto.com have an innovative service which they call “Tuma Pesa“. This is tailored for Kenyans in the diaspora who want to send money back home. However, nothing restricts you from using the service to send money to yourself – ama?

Babawatoto.com will let you send money to anyone in Kenya and he will receive it on his mobile phone. The useful thing is that Babawatoto.com will let you pay via PayPal. This means one could easily send, say Kshs 20,000/-, through Babawatoto.com to his own mobile number and pay via PayPal. This will effectively mean that you have transferred money from your PayPal account into your mobile phone – ready to use locally!

You just need to visit this page to get started.

Kudos to Babawatoto.com for providing such a needed service.

Update 17 May 2011 – The above method does NOT work from within Kenya. Learn more. 🙁

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Make Money Tagged With:

How to Withdraw Money From PayPal in Kenya

April 26, 2011 by 60 Comments


Update: PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA

Update 20 May 2011: It has been reported that www.exeauto.com is a scam. Proceed at your own risk.

Some time last year PayPal did us a favour and made it possible to maintain a PayPal balance with a “Kenyan” PayPal account. This meant that we could finally receive money via PayPal in Kenya. However, withdrawing that money turned out to be a whole other story. Why? Because PayPal has no relationship (currently) with local banks. They need this in order to allow “Kenyan” PayPal accounts the ability to withdraw to a local, Kenyan, bank account. In plain English, this means that you can have money in PayPal but you cannot take it out.

The only way to take it out – and this is what PayPal themselves recommend – is to withdraw to a US bank account. Unfortunately, not many Kenyans have one so this is a very real and very serious problem when it comes to dealing with PayPal from Kenya.

Fortunately, there is another way.

Liberty Reserve
Liberty Reserve is a digital currency and online payment system with similarity to Paypal, E-Gold, Pecunix, E-Bullion and other E-Currency services. You can send or receive money to or from anyone in the world.

How do you use it to get money from your PayPal account? It is simple, actually. This is what you need to do:

  1. Create an account at LibertyReserve. It is free.
  2. Once your account is up, then you need to move your money from PayPal into your new LibertyReserve account. The different ways of doing this are listed here. At this moment in time, the one that will accept money from PayPal is this: www.exeauto.com
  3. Once the money is in your LibertyReserve account, you can withdraw it in a lot of different ways. You can, for instance withdraw straight to your bank account, via Western Union, AlertPay etc.

Please note that getting money into or out of LibertyReserve is done via the third parties listed here.

Easy enough? I have not tested this method (will be doing so shortly) so if anyone can quickly vouch for it wqe would all be happy.

Filed Under: Make Money Tagged With:

Starting an Online Business – Deciding What To Do

March 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

So you want to make money online but have no idea what you can do? This post is for you. We shall look at a number of ways through which real (Kenyan) people make money online.

This is Part 2 of How To Start a Simple Online Business in Kenya.

Last year we published a report on the most common ways of making money online. If you haven’t read it, here is the link: How to make money online in Kenya, 2010. The good thing about that report, in my view, is that it not only discusses how to make money but it gives examples of Kenyans who are using those methods.

So, how do other Kenyan make money online?

  1. Selling adverts on your site – basically, you set up a website and make it popular, and then sell advertisements.
  2. Consulting – whereby you work to be seen as an ‘expert’ in some field. People then pay you for consultancy.
  3. Selling other people’s stuff (affiliate marketing) – where you sell goods on behalf of other people and get paid a commission.
  4. E-commerce (selling your own things) – simple put, find some things to sell, and sell them online.
  5. Freelancing – also known as ‘getting an online job’. You basically get paid to do something for other people.

What you choose to do is up to you but you have to realise that “making money online” is not something that will take a short time. When thinking about making money online, you should think long term. You know those stories of people making millions online? Yeah, it usually takes years and extremely hard work. be prepared.

The purpose of this series of articles is to learn how to start an online business and therefore we’re going to pick “e-commerce” as the example that we will use for the rest of the series. Why?

  1. We believe it is very easy to understand for people with no prior experience online – it is very much like starting a little shop anywhere else.
  2. We believe it is relatively easy to start and straight-forward to run
  3. We can set up a sample e-commerce business as an example to go with this series of articles

In the next article in this series, we shall be taking a closer look at how to plan for, and start your own online shop. Subscribe to Like Chapaa today, or sign up to receive free email updates so that you do not miss any updates on this!

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business

Online Business Vs Offline Business

March 15, 2011 by 3 Comments

So, basically in this post we’re going to think about what makes an online business different from an offline business. This is Part 3 of How To Start an Online Business in Kenya.

Business is business everywhere you go, even “online”. You are basically selling something that people want. However, I would strongly argue that doing business “online” is better than doing it anywhere else. Why?

  1. It is relatively cheaper to start and run an online business. You can get started for as little as $25 (about Kshs 3,000/-) and your monthly costs could be even lower.
  2. It is also generally less difficult and easier to get people to visit your business premises – your website.
  3. It is generally easier to scale. You can have very many customers without investing in infrastructure to support them. While an “offline business” may need to get new offices to serve more people, you can just use your one website to serve more people. You can even serve all of them at the same time.
  4. You can do absolutely anything under the sun. There are endless options when choosing your business online. You can sell bananas, have a service based business, sell affiliate products or create websites that make money through the hundreds of different monetization options. What you can do is limited only by your ingenuity.

Unfortunately, this makes the idea of starting an online business so attractive that people think it is easy. This could not be more far away from the truth. I would strongly argue that doing business online is harder than doing it anywhere else because:

  1. While it is easy to get people to visit your website, it is quite difficult to convert these visitors into paying customers. In most cases, people find it easier to spend money “offline” than “online”.
  2. You are competing with the whole world. While a Nairobi-based business may have a few competitors in town, an online business probably has hundreds of competitors from all over the world.
  3. It is extremely easy to get distracted. There are so many options that many online business people simply get lost in trying to do everything.

I know you’ve read those stories – you know, those stories of people becoming millionaires overnight online. Exciting, eh? And to think that you could be next… it is indeed true that you can make millions online in a very short period of time. However, if you look closely at anyone who made millions online, you will discover:

  • That they are very smart and/or talented
  • That they followed a very strategic and focused plan
  • They work (or worked) VERY hard

As you think of doing online business, be prepared for the extremely hard work that you will have to do to see real success.

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Filed Under: Internet Culture, Make Money, Small Business

How To Start a Simple Online Business in Kenya – Part 1

March 14, 2011 by 17 Comments

So I just got off the phone with a Like Chapaa reader who was pleading with me to show her how to start a simple online business. I personally do not think it is something that is simple enough to explain on the phone – is it? I believe that doing business is a personal journey that you must take on your own. But then again, I also believe that everyone should be doing their own business – enough with this employment maneno. You know?

I talked the reader into letting me sit down and send her an email with a very basic guide on what to do but as I was doing that email I thought, “Hey other people might like this too”. So here I am, readying myself for mission impossible. Basically, this week – on this very website – we are going to write a series of articles that attempt to show you how to start an online business from scratch. Sounds fun?

The idea is to write a very simple guide that anyone can follow to set up a small, extremely simple online business in ONE WEEK. To make it easier to understand, and follow, we shall be attempting to start an online business in this one week and show you everything that we did. In other words, as we try and show you how to start an online business, we shall be applying what we talk about on an actual real life business* that we will be starting up this week. I think that will work. You?

So this is what we hope to cover:

  1. How does a business work?
  2. Online business Vs Offline business
  3. Deciding what to do
  4. Building a simple website for your online business (a.k.a. web design 101)
  5. How to get customers (a.k.a. how to do this ‘internet marketing’ thing)
  6. Legal & tax issues
  7. Final thoughts & conclusion

The list may change as we go along because right now it is all coming off the top of my head.

Finally, I must say that I, and the Like Chapaa team, have some experience doing online business. We have had some satisfying successes and many failures. While I am very proud of what we have achieved, you are advised to take what we say with a pinch of salt! We do not pretend to be experts on anything.

Also, this series of articles is meant to give the basic bare-bones ideas on doing online business. To achieve real, long lasting success you must do much more than what we shall be talking about.

Anyway! So who’s up for this? Please comment below, click the “Like” button and tell all your friends. Cheers!

*The ‘actual, real life, business’ we shall be starting as part of this series has not been thought-up yet. We’re currently putting our heads together for an idea that won’t embarrass us.

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Filed Under: Make Money

How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps

February 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

There’s a great article on Inc.com written by Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals. He gives valuable insights on how to make money and breaks it down into 6 easy steps:

  1. Understanding the buyer is the key to being a strong seller
  2. Sell only things you’d want to buy for yourself
  3. How, and why, to charge real money for real products
  4. There are different pathways to the same dollar
  5. The true value of bootstrapping
  6. Try, Try Again

Go read the article here: How to Make Money in 6 Easy Steps

Filed Under: Make Money

How To Make Money Online – For Absolute Beginners

February 25, 2011 by 6 Comments

When we set up this website, one of our primary goals was to teach people what we knew about making money online. This continues to be our goal – we would love to teach as many of our fellow Kenyans as possible. Over the years (its now been tow years!), by and large, we have achieved this goal. We’ve helped grow many business and shared our thoughts and ideas with even more.

However, we feel that even this is not enough. We have not been able to adequately address the needs of a person who is very new to the whole idea of earning online. What is the easiest way to start? How do you start? What do you do? Where do you go? We would love to answer these questions for everyone. we would love even more to take every one of these people by the hand and show them what to do, and how.

Alas, things have changed since the time when we started this website. We now get mountains of email daily and it is just too much work to be able to address everyone individually. And as you are aware, our previous efforts largely failed. Yes, I am talking about Biashara 30.

But we have a plan!
We have been secretly developing a resource – you may even call it an online course – that is targeted at absolute beginners. The aim of this resource would be to act as something of guide that will teach what we feel is the easiest and fastest way to make money online if you are a beginner. Sounds interesting? Here is what it will cover:

First, I must say that we believe the easiest and fastest way for absolute beginners to make a significant amount of money online is to get an “online job”. This is what will be the focal point of the guide, specifically:

  1. Getting Started : Understanding the freelance world – international business hours, worldwide clients, international currencies, language problems, range of clients (professional and personal), working at home (separating your home and work lives)…
  2. Preparation for working online: Study yourself, your abilities, what you will/can and won’t/can’t do (working hours/days, combining skills, price range). Are you more specialised in languages, programming, graphics, marketing, media… Several sectors or specialised. Qualifications, experience, references… Skills requested online – a few examples of sectors.
  3. Your Presentation: Photo, logo, profile, message presentation, website…How to write, what to write (and what not to write!)
  4. Where to work
  5. Employer relations: Clarity, efficiency and cordiality (explaining relations and approach, the employer’s point of view)
  6. Getting paid : Payment (online payment methods, payment through freelancer websites and withdrawals)
  7. Protection and Security: Escrow, feedback, work samples, privacy policy
  8. Copyright issues
  9. Etc

Why did we chose for this guide to be about getting an online job? If you go any site that deals with only jobs – freelancer.com, or guru.com, or elance.com, or anything else – then you will find that these sites are vibrant markets and that people make significant amounts of money through them. We believe that when you are getting started, making money through such sites is the easiest way that you can go. It also opens your eyes to see what can be done online and you will be able to later transition to doing something else.

What do you think? Interested? Subscribe to Like Chapaa today, or sign up to receive free email updates so that you can up to date on developments regarding this project.

Filed Under: Biashara 30, Internet Culture, Make Money