Helping you pay the bills
The WooThemes story is an incredible story right from here in Africa! This is the story of how a young South African built an online business that makes USD 2 million plus a year. You do not need to be in the USA or Europe and get massive amounts of funding to build a wildly successful online business. You just need to believe in yourself, and go do it!
Click here to go see the video interview with WooThemes co-founder that details how, exactly, they built their online business.
Much thanks to Kunule of KenyanLogic who kindly informed us that oDesk users can now withdraw their earnings directly into a Kenyan bank account for a fee of just $3.99!
Click here to read more about this.
Things seem to be slowly getting better, eh?
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:
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.
Over the years, I’ve heard many business ideas that revolve around making money online from my friends, family, and even complete strangers. Many, many of the ideas usually go like this: “I will start a website and put adverts on it and many people will visit it and every time they visit I will make money. I’ll be rich.”
The sad truth is that many people feel that making money online is just easy. Unfortunately, many of these people come to realise that this is not the case the hard way: they lose money while trying to implement their “killer” ideas.
If you are looking to make money online by launching some type of online business, especially a website, then you have to have a very good plan on how, exactly, you shall grow this website to the point where it is making you rich. How do you grow your website to profitability? Normally, this means that you have to grow the number of people who visit your website to be so many that you make your required amounts of money. Do you have any idea how you would do this?
Let’s take an example: do you remember the last time you went into a cyber cafe in town? On average, you went online to do a very specific thing: you logged in, checked your email, checked some other sites, and then quickly left. What I am trying to say is that people are busy; people already have websites that they visit on a daily basis. When you launch a new website, you have to convince people to visit your website instead of those others that they already visit. To put it bluntly: why should I visit your website instead of Facebook, Twitter, LikeChapaa or any other?
If you can satisfy yourself with your answers to the above questions: indeed, if you can actually translate your answers into your business plan/strategy then you can definitely make money online.
I used to wake up every day and hate going to work. I had to wake up hours before I started work in order to get the kids ready for school, get myself groomed and breakfasted and ready for my lengthy commute – a commute that took me to a place that I didn’t want to be. I realize though that this is not only my reality, it is the way many people live their lives, and I’m so glad that I took the initiative to change mine.
Like most people, I keep a budget at home and for the first time I am able to stick with it comfortably. Now, as long as I make Ksh 50,000/-, I can do what I want without feeling like I’m skimping on anything. These are my monthly expenses that I am able to reach each month. In fact, when I have met this quota, I can rest easy and relax.
So, after I make the 50,000 goal that I set for myself for the month, then I know that everything I make after that is going to savings, a new toy, a vacation, or what have you. I can take it easy, knowing that I do not have to actually be anywhere for the next how ever many days area left in the month.
Sure, I don’t just sit back on my haunches counting my money after I have made my quota, or met my goal. I answer a few emails, I prepare for the next month. I think about the future of the business, and so on. But, I know that I don’t have to be anywhere, and that frees my time up to do the things that I actually want to be doing in my life; spending time with the kids, recreational activities, working on the house, gardening, and so on.
But you will find, as I do, that once you have met that quota, you actually want to keep working and making more and more money to save for that rainy day. The difference is that you don’t have to; it isn’t an obligation, it’s a choice, and that is the kind of freedom that few have, and most want. This freedom will inspire you to make changes in your business, make it better, more efficient, in short—more enjoyable. It is a very different experience altogether to be able to choose whether or not you want to invest more in your business, and yourself than simply waking up every day to go to a job each day that will make you just enough to meet your monthly expenses.
I find that most months, I keep working once I have met my goal. However, having that choice makes all the difference.
In any job, there are certain signs which predict future dissatisfaction with one’s career. Here are five of these good indicators that it could be time to move on to a new employment opportunity:
1. You do not earn what you deserve
If you are performing the work of multiple employees, across multiple skill sets, you may be better off being self-employed. The hours can be longer, yet the compensation can be significantly higher when you are the boss. If you are not earning what you deserve, then you may wish to consider a second job, or a different job entirely.
2. Your current job no longer challenges you
A dead-end job can be tiring, exhausting, and stressful once it does not demand your peak performance. This can spill over into other aspects of your life, affecting them to your detriment if you are not careful. If advancement, additional duties, or other changes to keep you fresh are not available, then other employment can be highly beneficial for multiple aspects of your life.
3. You no longer get meaning from the work you perform
When your work environment no longer satisfies the deepest parts of your personality, it could be an indicator that you need to be working elsewhere. People change and grow over time, and if you have outgrown your job, or need more satisfaction from the results you contribute, then a change could be just the thing to keep you stimulated, engaged, and ready to tackle new challenges. Work is a big part of one’s life, and without meaning, it can be a hollow victory, even if everything else goes well.
4. You do not get added career enhancements from working there
A great job should provide you with more than just a paycheck. Additional skills, new experiences, and even new contacts can all be valuable assets in your career progression. If your current job offers none of these, then it may be time to re-evaluate your current working situation.
5. You have problems with the people at work
People problems can range from challenges with customers, all the way to issues with coworkers, bosses, and others. Sometimes, a clash of incompatible cultures is no one’s fault. However, if you have tried your best to resolve the issues, and yet they seem to be getting worse instead of getting better, then a change may be in everyone’s best interests, before things really get out of hand.
Therefore, if your current job does not pay you what it should; if it no longer challenges you or provides meaning; if you get no career benefits from working there; or if the people you work with are no longer a good fit; then it could be worth examining the other opportunities available to you. Then, whether you decide to take on a second job, or switch to a different job completely, it is more likely that you will be happier in the future.
Why starting a business is better than getting a job
It’s much better in the long run to build your own business, build your own list of contacts, employ others to work for you, control the fruits of your labor, but this path doesn’t usually mean an instant paycheck. The revenue comes later.
So if it’s otherwise a clear choice to start one’s own business instead of working for someone else, why would someone choose the latter? The main reason is urgency. If you need an extra 10,000 per month right now, you’re going to go out to get a part-time job because once you’re hired, the paychecks usually come in. If you don’t need an extra 10,000 per month right this moment to cover your current expenses, but instead want to improve your income and diversify your revenue streams, then it will likely be more profitable to build a business yourself than to support and build someone else’s business. This is the track you can take if you don’t need the extra income urgently.
One of the founders of this website (www.likechapaa.com) is a trained accountant. When we started Like Chapaa, it was very much (and still is) a for-profit venture. Along with wanting to help people, we wanted to make money with this site. Now, none of us was what you call a “computer” or “Internet”, or even “business” expert. But we believed in ourselves and we believed that we know how to do things with computers and the Internet that make business sense. The problem was how to convince people – our customers – that we really did know our stuff.
Are you faced with this problem? How do you become an expert in your customer’s eyes? How do you become the person the customer most wants to work with? How do you then increase prices 300% (which we have done) and still have customers wanting to work with you?
I mean, think about it. Would you hire a boring old accountant to do your website or even just improve it? Would you hire an accountant for anything other than accounting? That’s the kind of challenge that we faced. No one knew us as experts. Now, it didn’t matter how many times we looked in the mirror and called ourselves experts. We still were not getting any respect, let alone money in the bank. And it drove us crazy.
(For the record, I would personally not hire an accountant for anything but accounting!)
Interestingly, that is precisely why Like Chapaa was born. We thought that the easiest, fastest way to convince the world that we knew what we talked about was to start a site and write about the content of our brains. We started Like Chapaa to show the world what we knew. So yeah, we started pole pole but surely. We wrote articles. We used to get 7 visitors a day but we continued writing articles. Day after day, week after week. It was hard, extremely hard – and we had few, if any, successes right away.
Then it all changed. We suddenly started getting emails and calls. Emails and calls from people who wanted us to work on their websites, their Internet strategy, their projects, and so on. We had planned for this, but the success of our little plan shocks even us.
A lot of people struggle with marketing their business, and we did too. But we figured we could either go nuts calling people and walking the hard roads of Nairobi, or we could sit at our computers and write an article. And have a customer call. (Ooh, I did like the sound of that phone ringing). That is the power of the Internet, if you ask me.
Information is expertise – just ask any author; any consultant; any trainer. Just ask us.
The thing is, anyone can do this. You do not need any special qualifications; all you need is creativity, imagination and time. You have all three so go for it!
If you need any help you can always hire us to help you, you know?
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