Case Study: Alice & Kev (Make Money Blogging)

August 4, 2009 by 2 Comments


About a month ago, I wrote about an interesting blog: Alice and Kev. Alice and Kev is a blog about life in the fictional world of “The Sims 3” game. Basically, the writer (Robin Burkinshaw) is playing The Sims 3 and then writing about his gaming experience. Pretty simple, right? Well, Robin is a master storyteller and his blog has become wildly successful. So much so that that each “installment” of Alex and Kev has more than 100 comments (this is rare for even the most successful blogs) and it enjoys a very very passionate readership.

Note that this particular blog started out low key as a personal project of Robin’s but because it was just too damn good, it exploded onto the scene and is now very popular. That’s how you build a successful blog: you offer something that is just too damn good; something that is remarkable.

As I’ve always said (to anyone who cares to listen 😛 ), once your website or blog has a dedicated group of people that actively visit/read it, then you can make money with that site/blog. Alice & Kev has a huge number of people who actively and passionately follow it. Therefore, of course, the blog’s owner is making money off it.

How does Alice & Kev make money?
The writer of this blog never intended it to be a commercial money maker and so has not really tried to make as much money off it as he can.

Since the blog is about The Sims 3, Robin has set up a system in which he earns a commission if anyone buys The Sims 3 game after reading Alice & Kev. He’s done this through Amazon’s affiliate program – you help Amazon make sales and they give you a cut of what the buyer pays – this is called affiliate marketing and it is how Alice & Kev makes money.

With his thousands of readers, I’m sure Robin has made some good money. Can you do something similar and earn money too?

Filed Under: Blogging, Case Study Tagged With:

You Are Not In High School Anymore!

August 2, 2009 by 2 Comments

I had the privilege of having an interesting conversation with someone I look up to very much. We talked about a lot of things but one thing caught my attention, she told me she always advises university students that, upon graduation, they should get jobs at small companies – where they get to work directly for the CEO and actually get to make mistakes, learn, and do something and not just share opinions (which will be discarded anyway).

It reminded me of my own time at university. University is not high school. You can do anything at university: start a business, organise a movement, live in a hole, whatever – you have the ability to choose. But most people refuse to choose. They take the easiest classes and do the absolute minimum to make sure they pass their classes. These are the people who spend a lot of their time in the library, reading their textbooks. You can do whatever you want to do, but most people do only what they think they must.

You have a job now and you have more freedom that you think you do (aren’t you reading this on ‘company’ time?) but most people do nothing with that free time other than try to be good enough to keep their jobs. What if you did something worth doing; something remarkable; something that you enjoy?

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

How To Make Money With A Blog

July 31, 2009 by 8 Comments

I once wrote elsewhere, “What is a blog? A web log, which is usually shortened as blog, is a type of website in which entries are made much as in a journal or diary and displayed in chronological order. But that’s just the technical mumbo-jumbo. A blog can be anything you want it to be. Your diary, your magazine, your newspaper, your photo album, whatever.”

Three years later, the definition of a blog hasn’t changed much. Enough with definitions, though – I’m sure many people don’t know (or don’t care) what a blog is. The more important question is, how do you make money from a blog? There are lots of ways to do it, and I shall talk about a few today.

Traffic
Before you even think of earning from your blog, you have to think of how you will attract visitors to your blog. If no one ever reads/views your blog, then you can be certain that you will not make even a single shilling from it. Got it? Good. On the internet, traffic is key.

Please have a look at this: How to build a successful website.

So, how do you make the chapaa?
I shall assume that you have somehow managed to build a successful blog, and that a reasonable number of people visit it everyday. Also, I shall assume that your blog is filled with content (words, videos, pictures, etc) that people find interesting or useful.

Here’s how you make money from such a blog:

Advertising – The obvious way to earn from a blog is by selling advertising space. Look at it this way, you have a good number of readers who visit you everyday – advertisers will be interested in pay to reach those visitors.

There are two ways to earn from advertising:
1. Self served Ads – basically, ou approach a company and tell them that they can advertise on your blog. If they agree, well, you get paid.

2. Advertisement networks – if you don’t want to go through the trouble of approach companies directly to advertise with you, you can join an advertising network where they approach the companies themselves and all you do is display the adverts and earn. This is a very popular way of making money online and thousands of websites (including blogs) survive and thrive on this model. Normally, you are paid a few cents (US $) when someone clicks on an advert. If you have many visitors then you can earn millions.

RSS Advertising – all blogs have an RSS feature. (What is RSS?). The idea is basically the same as above – place adverts in your RSS feed. Feedburner is a popular RSS advertising service.

Sponsorship – You know how Project Fame is sponsored by Tusker? The same thing could happen on your blog and is already happening at a lot of other blogs.

Consulting and Speaking – So you’ve built a really successful blog and it is widely read. This means people will start viewing you as an authority in the topic in which you write about. For example, if you write extensively on relationship advice, you may one day get the opportunity to be a paid get speaker at some event somewhere. Another example: even though Like Chapaa is young, we’re getting offers to act as consultants guiding new internet business owners. The returns are gooood.

Merchandising – In my own opinion, this one is tricky to pull off but it is possible. Suppose that you built such a wildly successful and popular blog named “Example Blog”. Maybe some people would buy and proudly wear Tshirts and other merchandise bearing your blog’s name and logo. Cafepress is powering an increasing number of bloggers to earn in this way.

Digital Assets – Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, e-courses and e-seminars being run by bloggers.

Affiliate Programs – basically, this is using your blog to sell other people’s goods and services for a commission. It is one of the most popular ways of earning on any website (not just blogs). Where do you find these goods and services that you can sell at a commission? try: Clickbank, or CJ.

Blog Network Opportunities – Blog Networks are groups of blogs which work together to attract visitors and earn incomes. Blog networks these days are high profile and popular. Joinging such a network could be lucrative. It may not be easy, though. Why should you join a blog network?

Business Blog Opportunities – many companies (internationally, not sure about Kenya) are now starting blogs. (Because blogs are too important to ignore). Some companies use their existing staff to write their blogs. But an increasing number are hiring specialist bloggers to run their blogs for them.

Writing Opportunities – When you have a popular blog, people notice you. They know how good you are at writing on the subject matter of your blog. It is therefore not uncommon for bloggers to get jobs or freelance gigs at magazines and newspapers. (For example: I’ve been approached several times to have things I write on Like Chapaa printed elsewhere).

Flipping Blogs – Build a big beautiful blog and sell it for huge profits. This actually happened with NBB.

Donations – put out the tip jar and ask your readers to support you. It’s a simple concept 😛 Kottke.org is the only example I could find of a blog doing this well.

I realise that just mentioning the above is not good enough. I shall therefore follow up with case studies of each or most of the above methods being successfully used. Stay tuned! Subscribe to my RSS feed (free) or sign up for free email updates so that you don’t miss a thing!

Filed Under: Blogging, Make Money Tagged With: , ,

Receiving Online Payments In Kenya

July 30, 2009 by 116 Comments

Update: PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA

Update: PayPal now works in Kenya! You can also now withdraw from PayPal through Babawatoto or LibertyReserve.


Anyone who does e-commerce from Kenya or wishes to receive payments online from Kenya knows the pain and hassle of it all. In other countries, the process is pretty straightforward but this is not so here in Kenya. For example, Paypal is the most popular online processing service but it is no good in Kenya. Kenyans using paypal can only send money and not receive it. Is there a way to go round this?

This is a question that was placed before me by Titus in my previous article about accepting payments online. As I sought to answer him, I felt that the answer would be useful to everyone interested in making money in Kenya and hence this post. When deciding on how you want to receive money, the first consideration is deciding who you intend selling to. If you want to sell to people in foreign lands you will face different challenges to that of selling online but to Kenyans within Kenya.

Receiving Money Online From Kenyans In Kenya
Generally, if you want to sell within Kenya, your choices are limited since many Kenyans do not have credit cards and those who do are still reluctant to buy from a website.

That leaves ‘off-line’ payments. These can be cheque, postal order, bank transfer, MPESA, ZAP, etc. Of course the problem with this is a matter of trust. MPESA (and possibly ZAP) is the closest that Kenya comes to an ‘online’ payment system. However, it is still not truly an automated system since the payment has to be processed manually. Here’s how to use MPESA to accept online payments.

Additionally, you can use some of the methods that follow to receive payments via credit card.

Receiving Money Internationally
The problem here is just that Paypal doesn’t work in Kenya. So we need a replacement that is just as good, or better. So I went out looking for third party payment processors who: can work in Kenya; have a solid reputation; seem professional. This is what I came up with:

AlertPay – A friend recommended AlertPay to me and I checked them out (very smooth website) and even signed up for an account with them. They seem to work well and I’d recommend you to try them out. Guess what? You can also make money online with AlertPay.

Other services which should work in Kenya: Moneybookers, Ikobo, 2CO.

If you still really want to use Paypal,it can work if you can get yourself a bank account in a country in which Paypal offers money withdrawal services. Alternatively, you can deposit your Paypal funds in GetAfreelancer (or similar sites) and request them to pay you by bank transfer, for example.

What payment processing method do you use?

Filed Under: Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With:

Build An Online Shop You Can Be Proud Of

July 28, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Indeed there are many many stories of people who have made millions on the Internet and become fabulously wealthy by establishing online businesses. With billions of people surfing the Internet daily, surely one particularly attractive ‘type’ of Internet business is an online shop, right? Just look at the likes of etsy, Amazon and eBay.

Setting up an online shop is easy, with very little bars to entry. However, many online retailers are surprised at the dismal performance of their shops. This article shall attempt to address this.

Selling On The Internet
There are dramatic differences between selling online and in a physical shop. In an online shop, the shopper’s experience is limited to a computer screen. How can selling best be done through a computer screen?

Do you remember the old rule of business? The customer always comes first; she is always right. This is important even more in an online shop. It is so very easy for the shopper to click away at any time so you as the seller have to work hard to keep shoppers happy and interested – make it very easy to get any information that the shopper may need. And make the buying process as easy as possible – there’s no need (and little sense) to make people fill endless forms and register for anything.

Building an attractive physical shop is hard work. Similarly, building a good online shop takes careful planning and masterful execution. You have to make sure that the products and all information is displayed correctly as well as ensure all the back end operations work perfectly. No one wants to buy from a broken shop.

Remember that the shoppers are probably new to your website – they must learn to use your navigation and ordering system as they decide on whether to make a purchase. Sadly, these systems are often designed by tech. people who, quite honestly, don’t often put too much thought into the user experience. This is the number one reason why an online shop has low sales.

Finally, no one will purchase from your shop unless they completely trust you. Establishing trust and confidence in your site’s visitors is a complex affair but shops that function without glitches and with no typos or poor grammar are definitely ahead of the rest.

Search Engine Optimisation For Online Shops
So, you have an elegant shop. How do you attract shoppers? There are very, very, very many ways to do this. One of the most effective, however, is making it possible for people to find you when they search on Google or another search engine. The process of improving the chances of people finding your website through a search engine is called search engine optimisation (SEO).

How do search engines work? At a very basic level, search engines access your website and, in some way,decide on whether your website’s pages are more important than those of other websites. They then rank all web pages so that when people search for something, they see more useful/important pages ranking higher than others. SEO is about making your pages rank higher than others’ pages.

SEO is complex and can get very technical. However, in my experience, there are two major, Major things that you need to worry about. These are:

a. Content
Search engines do not in fact see websites as a whole and thus do not see the whole online store. A search engine indexes individual web pages and each web page in a sense stands alone. If your online store web page includes only the information provided by the manufacturer, then your product page looks no different from similar web pages put up by other online stores for that product. The trick is to have unique content for each of your website’s pages.

For example, if you are selling Kiondos online, you will want to list each kiondo on its own page. You want people who search on Google for “Kiondo” to find you so you will put unique and descriptive content on your site that mentions the term “Kiondo” and describes your content.

It is important to realize that the search engine uses only the information content and picks up nothing from any images or Flash content on the web page. However, do not forget that the people who will buy from your store are not search engines but real people – do not SEO your page so much that it puts off human visitors.

b. Links
One of the methods that search engines use to determine the importance of your website is the number and quality of websites which link to yours. It works a little like voting. If yahoo.com links to your website, search engines take it to mean that yahoo.com is saying “I vote for this site, it is useful”. So the more sites that link to you, the higher your site’s “importance”. Also, it maters if the sites that link to yours are virtually unknown or already popular/important. Links are very important in SEO and should strive to get as many as you can.

c. Things that can hurt you
Search engines try to index as many web pages of websites as they can. This is done by search engine spiders or robots that are continuously surfing the Internet to find whatever web pages they can. Unfortunately there are many ways an online store can create technical barriers that block or confuse these search engine spiders. Here are some of the more common ones: frames, session IDs, Dynamic URLs, Redirects, etc. Google publishes webmaster guidelines which will help you to avoid these.

Online Shop Internet Strategy
I know, I know, this article is not very encouraging. As I said earlier, the problem is that setting up an online shop is relatively easy and so you are bound to have strong competition. When competition is fierce, SEO often proves to be very difficult and running your business sometimes resembles trench-like warfare where you tussle and struggle with competing websites.

Many companies who believe they are selling good products spend a lot of their time and resources trumpeting the strong points and features of their products. Other companies, however, try to get into the mind of their potential customers and understand what they want. Often, such companies are more successful than those which are product-centric.

If the online shop believes it is only selling products, then the purchaser will choose based solely on the company’s product web page versus the competitors’ comparable product web pages. But what if you made your shop stand out? What if you provided more than just product pages and descriptions?

Once a potential customer is in the online shop, he or she can be encouraged to do a little exploration. If the online shop has something special about it, then the purchaser may in a sense ‘buy the shop’ before in turn buying a product from the shop. Equally a repeat buyer who has had a good first experience may well use their bookmark to return to the online store. Customers with good experiences are also more likely to refer their friends to come shop at your place.

SEO’s place is important in that it draws in potential customers to your shop. However, it is more important to make your shop stand out from the crowd.

Branding
A useful approach is to establish a brand for your shop. Your brand is something that your customers remember you with. The best brand is something that implies a promise to your customers of what benefits and experience the should expect. Another way of looking at it is establishing a unique selling proposition (USP). That is something that customers want but which is only available from your shop.

Once it is clear why customers should buy from you and not any other shop, then additional web pages can be created to demonstrate this USP further. Since the benefits of your USP is something that potential purchasers are looking for, the additional pages created should rank well in search engines and draw visitors to you. The Internet marketing strategy should thus be ensuring that more and more people are aware of the online shop and the associated USP.

The beauty of Internet marketing is that you can measure everything in great detail and decide what works and what doesn’t and your strategy can be adjusted to improve performance.

Hire Us
At Like Chapaa, we have been on the internet scene for years and we understand Internet marketing and how it works. If you want help with setting up or marketing your internet shop, we are available for hire.

Contact Us.

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Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,

Blue Monday? Here Are Some Jobs To Cheer You Up

July 27, 2009 by Leave a Comment

More Freelance Jobs

AppAfrica Hiring Bloggers – Appfrica.net is a blog that wants to be Africa’s leading source for news related technology, culture and development when it grows up. =) Right now we’re looking for a savvy writer who wants to reach a broad audience covering social media, African startups and technology, as well as offer personal insight and opinions to the blog’s community.

Freelance designer – We need a great web designer to work with us on a project by project basis. This role does not require you to slice designs, nor any web development, only design. Your job will be to interpret a brief and create a stunning website design around this, and any tweaking that’s required.

Write about dating – We’re looking for a few good men to blog about their dating life on a dating advice site for women so the women in our community can get better insight into how men think. If you’re a single man between the age of 30 – 60 we’d love to hear from you. By single I mean not currently married. If you’re divorced we definitely want to hear from you.

Mobile phone programmer – Butterfly Works is interested to find someone who can program and test a game to work on mobile phones in East Africa. We will design the game and send you the specs, it needs to work on all phones with a color screen from different manufacturers.

We want writers like you – If you enjoy dabbling in many topics, making your own hours, and, above all, writing, Textbroker.com is looking for you. As the World Wide Web grows, a vast amount of clients are requesting written content on a nearly limitless range of subjects. Textbroker lists these requests for you in one convenient place where you can find the subject matters that most interest you. Whether you want to provide handy real estate advice, relate your experience dealing with bridesmaids, or review a newly released movie, you get to choose the assignment that draws you the most. Produce well-written, error-free content, and watch your earnings on Textbroker grow.

Arabic Engineer – Looking for an Arabic software engineer to work with on a start up idea.

Green Living Experts Wanted – Examiner.com, a Quantcast Top 100 website, is growing and looking for freelance writers (we call them “Examiners”) to share local insights, knowledge and experience. It’s a great way to cover what you love and communicate what’s happening in your city.

Freelance blogger – Looking for a blogger, English mother tongue to post on their own sites and to find other sites to post on for a variety of niches.

Freelance web designer – Itrend Solutions is looking for some designers for a start-up international company that will sell logos, brochures and websites design packages.

Task.fm blogger – We’re looking for a blogger to write for the Task Blog. Task Blog covers productivity, lifehacks and time management.

Remote web designer – Are you a passionate, multi-talented designer with a desire to help be involved in an exciting new organization dedicated to entrepreneurial innovation? Are you that rare type of professional who possesses an equal ability to design incredible websites and brand identities? Do you want creative freedom as well as the chance to collaborate? If so, Grasshopper Labs wants you.

Finally, Some Hot Freelance Jobs


Need help?
How to get an online job.
How to avoid online scams.

This post is a weekly feature – we post a list of online, work-from-anywhere, jobs every single week. Be sure not to miss the next list of jobs. Subscribe to Like Chapaa today, or sign up to receive free email updates.

Filed Under: Online Jobs Tagged With: , , , ,

How Does A Website Work?

July 26, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Lately I’ve been talking to a lot of people trying to explain this “make money online” thing and I’ve slowly come to realise that many of those people have very little knowledge of what makes a website work, knowledge that I take for granted. Having a website is vital when you are trying to make it online so I think it is important that I attempt to explain how a site works in simple English. I will strive to steer well clear of any technical jargon.

As far as the creation of a website is concerned, there are three main things that are involved.

1. Web Design
Someone, ideally a web designer, has to sit down and actually make the website – design its look, feel, and any other needed functionality. Making a basic website is a pretty simple affair but the websites of today….are pretty challenging to make.

2. Domain Name
We learnt about domain names recently. For your website to be visible to the public, you have to get a domain name. This is so that when people type in your website in their browser, e.g www.example.com, they will be able to find your website.

3. Web Hosting
So you know, a website is made up of pictures and words and sometimes video and sounds. These have to be stored on a computer somewhere so that when people visit your website, they load and the visitors see all your cool stuff. The pictures, words, videos, and sounds that make up a website are stored on special computers called servers. A server that contains your website’s files and makes them available when people visit your domain name is your web host.

So, that’s why a website works. Someone designs it, you register a domain name for it, and it gets hosted somewhere so that it is available for the general public to see and use.

Filed Under: Blogging