The American Government is Trying to Ruin the Internet … and Can Affect us in KENYA!!

December 24, 2011 by 1 Comment

In case you haven’t heard, PIPA (PROTECT Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) are bills working their way through the US Senate and House of Representatives, respectively. They both propose giving the USA government the power to censor web sites in much the same way that China, North Korea, and Iran censor web sites today. [Read more to learn more]

Why is this important to Kenya? Sadly, many of the companies that “control” the Internet are based in the USA. This means that the above pieces of legislation will affect these companies and they, in turn, will affect everyone in the world directly or indirectly.

The US also controls the top-level domains (.com .net), so websites on those domains would be affected. .com and .net are administered by Verisign which does come under control of US laws.

Some of our favorite websites (google.com, youtube.com, facebook.com, twitter.com etc) are at the risk of being shut down if these bills go through.

Please watch the video below to learn more:

Here’s an infographic that explains it all:

Behind SOPA: What It Means for Business and Innovation
Via: Business Insurance Blog

Here’s an extremely detailed article that describes the dangers of these horrible American bills: The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas

What can you do to help stop this?
Sadly, as Kenyans, there is little that we can do. Basically, you need to spread awareness about this. Let everyone you know who cares about the Internet know about this impending doom. America needs to know that they are trying to fuck up the Internet for everyone.

If you can call/write to the American embassy to voice your opinion it might help.

Sadly, those who can help directly are American citizens who must contact their congressmen/women to fight this.

Filed Under: Internet Culture

StarCraft 2 Taking Root in Kenya

December 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Something exciting: the most professional-looking and run StarCraft 2 tournaments in Kenya just came to a close, the Safari Cup #3.

We take this opportunity to all the players and the organisers of that tournament. Kudos to them all. We hope that everyone who took part had a lot of great fun.

For those who have no clue what StarCraft is:

StarCraft is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The first game of the StarCraft series was released for Microsoft Windows on 31 March 1998. With more than 11 million copies sold worldwide as of February 2009, it is one of the best-selling games for the personal computer in history.

Many of the video game industry’s journalists have praised StarCraft as one of the best and most important video games of all time, and for having raised the bar for developing real-time strategy games. StarCraft’s multiplayer is particularly popular in South Korea, where players and teams participate in professional competitions, earn sponsorships, and compete in televised tournaments.

Right now in the developed world, StarCraft is very very hot and is helping to grow the worldwide competitive computer gaming scene. It has seen the scene grow immensely in the last year, with huge tournaments being held monthly and extremely large corporations taking part as sponsors (think Intel, AMD, Nvidia, CocaCola etc).

This is why I feel that the growth of StarCraft in Kenya is important for several reasons:

  1. It puts Kenya at the forefront amongst ‘developing’ nations. We are among the first of these nations to have professional competitive StarCraft.
  2. Our youth are able to engage in a positive activity that may lead them to earning quite the living (the highest earning players worldwide this year clocked in more than $200,000 and this is only going to rise)
  3. It markets our country: as a tourist destination; and as a tech-savvy place ideal for outsourcing IT services to. Both of these are things that our government is trying very hard to market Kenya as.

I do hope to see StarCraft grow bigger and bigger in the country.

Unrelated interesting fact
The Naivasha Jaza Resort was one of the sponsors of the Safari Cup #3. Through this modest sponsorship, they got unparalleled international exposure and have reported that they got quite a number of international inquiries when the Safari Cup was noticed prominently in the StarCraft community. Is this something that your business may like to experience? Talk to kalongo.com!

Filed Under: Internet Culture

BorderLinx Stops Working For Kenya

December 8, 2011 by 4 Comments

BorderLinx is a service which allows you to create a US or UK shipping address. You can then shop online and have the items delivered to your BorderLinx-created address.

Later on, you can consolidate all your items in one package and have it shipped to your home country. It is a nice service that allows you to access US/UK online shops that do not deliver outside their own countries. It also allows one to save on shipping by consolidating all their items into one package.

Sadly, BorderLinx recently announced that they will no longer be supporting Kenya. (Just like PayPal!).

Cessation Of Cross-border Delivery Service To Kenya
Dear ,

After several months of investigation and attempting to reduce the incidence of fraud, we have found ourselves in the unfortunate position of having to cease providing cross-border delivery services to Kenya with immediate effect. We have considered a number of options to avoid this action, but the incidence and risk of fraud for Kenyan transactions is too great for our business to absorb.

Regrettably, we will be closing the accounts of all Kenya customers. If you have any packages which are still in one of our export facilities, please give us your instructions to release the shipments no later than Friday, 16 December 2011.

For those customers who have used our services for legal and honest purposes, we are truly sorry that we have been forced to take this difficult decision. If you have any questions, please contact our live chat service via the website.

Yours sincerely
The Borderlinx Team

Visit www.borderlinx.com

Kwani how prevalent is fraud in Kenya, jameni? If this goes on, we shall not be able to do any online business. 🙁

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

16 Types of Websites You Can Create to Make Money

December 6, 2011 by 4 Comments

Every website idea or type is a potential winner. None of them can be ruled out definitively because a big part of any site’s profit potential depends on how well you market the site and grow it from the ground up. If you are an excellent marketer and strategic CEO, it’s not difficult to make even the most common ideas a success.

What sites are worth developing? Most sites are, if you have time and are willing to invest time/funds and energy on growing the sites aggressively. Being an optimistic webmaster, I would say that you can turn a profit on anything if you really work at it.

The Sitepoint marketplace and Digital Point marketplace are probably two of the more popular places to buy websites of all sorts. Monitor them if you’re interested in expanding your virtual estate. You’ll find all of the site ideas below in both forums:

  1. Affiliate Review Website. Create a website that reviews affiliate products like make money online programs, web hosting services etc. Run it on WordPress and update it everyday with affiliate feeds or articles. How much you’ll make depends on how thick (amount of content) the website is.
  2. Product Fan Blog. Create a WordPress blog around a popular product and update everyday with news about the product. The iPhone is a good example of a hot product to choose. Traffic will be quite decent over time if the product/s have longevity.
  3. Auction websites. Create a website that is similar to eBay to allow users to sell and buy products from each other. You will generate income by monetizing through ads and drawing a commission through each sale. You might get some steady revenue if you sell high ticket products or go niche enough to get a loyal user base.
  4. Dating Websites. Dating websites are communities which allow users to register, chat with and meet other interested users. They can be easily setup with turnkey scripts although you’ll really need a customized template and some coding work done to make it competitive or attractive enough to get some users. Markus Frind is currently the biggest individual Adsense publisher and makes well over $10K a day from his free dating site, Plenty of Fish.
  5. Made for Adsense Websites. These are websites with a keyword domain and they come with a bunch of pre written articles around a specific topic. Examples of common topics include acne, cancer, health and finance. These are generally boring, low maintenance sites that are plastered with contextual ads. Incredibly easy to create using the WordPress platform.
  6. Affiliate Product Website. This is a salespage which sells an electronic product like an eBook. Create the product, buy an existing one or just get someone to do it. The main way to make money is to drive or buy traffic to your salespage and make money when they buy your eBook or opt into your email list. This is an easy way to generate some real income, especially if you are have a great niche product or am skilled in promoting your personal brand and salespage.
  7. Online Games/Arcade Sites. Get someone to develop an online game that is for members only and earn money by selling points, which allow users to unlock extra options within the game. Arcade sites are simply sites with a collection of flash or online games. They are monetized through display ads. Games can spread quickly if they are very well designed and appealing.
  8. Forums or Social Network. Pick a topic that is able to attract a decent amount of users and create a forum or social network. Income will not come quickly and a lot of work is needed to build the community. Create a blog on the same domain and use for promotional purposes. There is a potential to earn a good amount of money when the forum gets big or popular.
  9. Specialized Search Engines. Build a search tool that allows visitors find media of specific types. Include your adsense ads within the search pages. This sort of tools usually don’t do very well unless you provide additional value on top of search. Examples of things to add include ajax search, folksonomy and recommendation engines.
  10. Paid Membership Site. These are membership sites which provide ongoing educational lessons on a specific topic or offer a large archive of resources, along with a forum. An example of this is the Teaching Sells website. Members will pay a fixed fee every month to maintain their membership.
  11. Design/Coding Service Site. Create a website that offers customized logo or website design, alongside coding for PSD to XHTML, WordPress and Joomla. Hire freelance coders and designers and manage them. Pay them a portion of each sale and promote your website through blogs and webmaster forums.
  12. File Hosting Website. Set up a file host which allows users to upload and share their files online with other users. There’s a tremendous amount of competition in this niche so its very difficult to make some real money unless you innovate on features or market it well.
  13. Web Directories. A web directory provides listings for websites and makes money from both display advertising and sale of premium listings. Most of the work needs to be focused on marketing and branding the site. Niche directories with a good reputation might find it easier to make money.
  14. Online Web tool. This includes URL shorteners, spell checkers, picture editors, file converters and various webmaster tools (keyword volume, link popularity). Visitors will often return to your site to use these tools if they are comprehensive enough or if your site is well designed and genuinely useful.
  15. Proxies. Proxies are websites which allow a websurfer to not only surf anonymously but bypass certain filters which prevent one from viewing a site. They are popular with the Myspace crowd and will often require a dedicated server. There are many proxies on the market but they may be worth exploring. Income is largely passive.
  16. Commercial Template Sites. Basically this involves the creation of readymade website templates for sale. They can be bundled up into sales packages and traffic can be obtained through PPC advertising. If you’re not interested in producing original templates, you can run the site using affiliate feeds from the other more established template websites like Template Monster.

The ideas mentioned can all be created by yourself using an existing script or you can set up your own by hiring a coder and designer. It’s more or less DIY, although you will need to some research on the market and have some basic webmaster skills

Now for your opinion. I imagine that some readers might want to start purchasing or building up some of these websites. What do you personally think has the most potential for profit and which idea would you recommend?

Source: DoshDosh.

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.

Filed Under: Lazyweb, Make Money

Six questions for analyzing a website

November 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Seth Godin brings us this gem of an article that is very useful when you want to analyse whether a website is a good investment.

It’s tempting to believe that any website can become a perpetual motion machine of profit. But before you start one, invest in one or go to work for one, a few things to ask:

  1. What’s the revenue per visit? (RPM). For every thousand visitors, how much money does the site make (in ads or sales)?
  2. What’s the cost of getting a visit? Does the site use PR or online ads or affiliate deals to get traffic? If so, what’s the yield?
  3. Is there a viral co-efficient? Existing visitors can lead to new visitors as a result of word of mouth or the network effect. How many new visitors does each existing user bring in? (Hint: it’s less than 1. If it were more than 1, then every person on the planet would be a user soon.) This number rarely stays steady. For example, at the beginning, Twitter’s co-efficient was tiny. Then it scaled to be one of the largest ever (Oprah!) and now has started to come back down to Earth.
  4. What’s the cost of a visitor? Does the site need to add customer service or servers or other expenses as it scales?
  5. Are there members/users? There’s a big difference between drive-by visits and registered users. Do these members pay a fee, show up more often, have something to lose by switching?
  6. What’s the permission base and how is it changing? The only asset that can be reliably built and measured online is still permission. Attention is scarce, and permission is the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Permission is easy to measure and hard to grow.

Do the math on successful companies online and compare it to those that are struggling and these six metrics will help you understand the difference. For example, if the RPM is less than the cost of getting a new visitor, you’ve got trouble. If the site is relying on fads and occasional PR but isn’t building a permission base, that’s trouble too.

The good news is that each of them can be changed if you’re alert and willing to do surgery on the business model and structure of the site.

The ideal structure is a business that’s a platform, not merely a place to stop by. Once people move in and become members, they’re hesitant to leave, they share permission over time, they tell their friends, their RPM goes up and the cost of acquiring and hosting members goes down. The real question is: are you on that path?

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.

Filed Under: Make Money

Do You Know About This Amazing Investment Opportunity?

November 25, 2011 by 11 Comments

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:

Recently sold websites

Recently sold websites

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!

Filed Under: Make Money

An Opportunity to Make Money as a Developer in Kenya

November 13, 2011 by 7 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Make Money