Some of you may recall that a while back I gleefully reported having made $150 in two hours. That was like a wake-up call, and I have since been applying myself online in ways I had not thought of previously. The results have been amazing!

See, I started blogging (and this internet thing) when I was still in high school (in the delightful town of Nyahururu) so I’ve been around the net quite a while. And I’ve always been tech-savvy so I got to know my way around the net pretty quick. I think I know how to do most things online. However, making money online has always been like that elusive Holy grail – I never seemed to “get” how it’s done. But now I do.

I’m not quite sure how, I didn’t see it coming. It’s been a very gradual process, though. A lot of small payments led to that ‘big’ one of $150, and as I said earlier on, the $150 spurred me on to vigorously try my hand at other projects I have been thinking of. The results were really nice and the earnings pretty sweet 😀 It’s been a slow gradual process getting to this point and nothing happened overnight. But, boy, the education and experience is priceless!

Guess what, though? Making money online is not hard. Anyone can do it, even you. The two most important things you need are the will to do and patience/perseverance. With those two in place, I’m 100% sure that you too can make money online. It’s not that hard – there’s usually a well known set of steps to follow and all you need to do is to apply them diligently. I’m no expert but I do make good money online. www.likechapaa.com is my attempt to teach what I know, if you care to read. You can even subscribe (free) or sign up to receive free email updates if visiting the site often is too much of a hassle.

Most of the sites that write about making money online are pretty good. They also all talk about making money from a distinctly non-Kenyan viewpoint. However, I have come to learn that being in Kenya makes a huge (yet subtle) difference to the process of making money online. Specifically:

I’ve seen many many small websites run by Europeans/Americans that make money off advertising, especially Google Adsense. This doesn’t work very well back home. I’m not saying it is not possible, I am saying that it requires a lot of hard work, and a large userbase. Unless yours is a pretty big/well known website, making money off advertising is a pipe dream. So don’t depend on it until your website is very well known.

But then, does that mean that small Kenyan websites cannot make money online? Nope. I run several of these, so i should know. The trick is, since you cannot really rely on selling adverts, you have to sell something else. Find a product or service (yours or not) that is appropriate to your website and sell it.

Finally, many Kenyans are yet to come online. Some other Kenyans do access the internet, but don’t go beyond Yahoo mail. This means that a lot of people do not frequently access the internet. This also means a lot of your potential customers/clients simply have no way of getting to you. This is why a healthy dose of traditional, real world, marketing should be included in your marketing strategy. You cannot rely on purely online marketing without mixing it with some offline stuff.

That’s it, my take on the nuances of making money online in Kenya. Why aren’t you making money online? Are you going to try? You know, I go to sites where people make money online (e.g. Rent A Coder) and I’m just amazed by the numbers of Indians (or people from that part of the world) who are out there, making hundreds of US dollars a day. Can you imagine that? Hundreds of them, broken English and all. Yet they are making it. Why can’t we in Kenya? I don’t know if it is pride, but I feel we can do a better job than most of them do. We just have to seize this opportunity.

God bless you.

Photo by timbrauhn.