How To Make Money Online In Kenya, 2010

August 6, 2010 by 30 Comments

Facebook.com is currently valued at $15 BILLION! That makes the young founder, mark Zuckerberg an extremely wealthy man at such a young age. What about you? How are your finances doing? You could seethe with envy at Mark, or you could try your own hand at making money online!


Last year, we wrote one of the most popular articles on this website: How to make money online in Kenya. The gist of that article was that advertising as a source of online income may not be the best way to go….that was way back in 2009, though. This is 2010! How does one make money online in Kenya?

This time, we’re going to do it a little different: since last year, we’ve come across countless numbers of Kenyan who are already making money online! So this article will talk about how those people are doing it in hopes of inspiring you to start making money online in Kenya!

1.How we make money online in Kenya

We run www.likechapaa.com and a number of other websites. Of course one of the main goals of running all these sites is for us to make money online. How do we do it?

  • Advertisements – Like Chapaa has these adverts on the side (you see them?). They make us peanuts. Honestly.
  • Consulting – as it happens, a lot of the people who read Like Chapaa tend to email us asking for help in setting up online. We make a tidy some from this. How can you do this? It is not a hard concept: just pick out a topic that you are interested in and know a lot about then start a website to talk about that topic and set yourself up as a “consultant”. It works, trust us.
  • E-commerce – this is unbelievable even to us. DESPITE not having an online shop yet, we do sell a few books from our site Jua More. The lesson here seems to be if you have a website talking about a certain product that people want, then you can probably sell this product to those people. Jua More is a book review site which is still very small yet it already makes some money. Can you replicate this with a site of your own and another product? I bet you can! Just pick out something you have passion talking about (and marketing). I’m thinking things like movies and music, clothing and other such stuff can do pretty well! We even built DukaPress for you so this is super easy to do with no technical skills whatsoever!
  • Web Design – Wambere, one of the founders of Like Chapaa, also runs Nickel Pro which is a web design and development company. Like Chapaa drives a whole lot of customers her way. How can you do this? This is all about marketing, if you offer a service and want to make money online from it, you need to find somewhere (online) where the people who would buy your service hang out and then talk to these people and subtly showcase your skills and experience. They’ll buy.
  • Referrals (Affiliate income) – incidentally, most of the things we recommend you use – akina Freelancer.com, AlertPay, etc – have affiliate programs. This means that if you sign up to those sites after reading about it on Like Chapaa, we get paid. How to do this: this is pretty easy, in my view. You shouldn’t start the process by looking for companies that offer affiliate programs. Instead, look for what interests you. If you love shoes and want to start a website about shoes, you will come to find there are tons of sites out there that will pay you good money to drive people to them. Affiliate programs exist for almost everything under the sun – just find something you love, start a blog/site around it, and voila!

Also see: How to make Money With A Blog.

2. How Other People make Money Online

We realise that we aren’t the only Kenyans making money online (hehe) and so this section is dedicated to everyone else that we have come across this past year.

A. Advertising
Like Chapaa sucks at making money from advertising but these sites do it amazingly well:

  1. Career Point Kenya – this is one of the most visited sites in Kenya and, rightly so, they make a lot of money from Google’s Adsense program. This means that whenever any of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit Career Point Kenya every day click on the Google Ads, the guys running that site get paid. Sweet! To replicate this you just need to build a website that gets huge, HUGE, numbers of visitors and you’ll get paid like you won’t believe. This is not as easy as it sounds, though, and I would caution against betting on advertising as your sole means of earning online.
  2. Bankelele – the ever popular Kenyan blog. I think this is one of the oldest blogs in Kenya. It has only survived this long because the guy who runs it is a master at what he does. Unlike Career Point Kenya, Bankele makes advertising money by selling his own ads at his own price (you get this luxury when you have a site as good as his). Here’s how to do this on your own site!

B. Selling Stuff
Jua More, mentioned above, is just a lucky occurrence. If you want to really make money by selling something tangible (or digital), then you need to look at, and learn from, the guys below:

  • Mama Mikes – Mama Mikes is one of the first e-commerce sites to serve Kenyans. It is a site that excels at selling Kenyan stuff to Kenyans who do not live in Kenya. For example, you can pay power bills for your family in Kenya while living in Spain – or buy them gifts and groceries. Brilliant idea, eh? I think so too. Mama Mikes found a niche market very early on in the game and took it over.
  • Fab Guru – a fascinating business run by a lady off her Nairobi apartment. This is the face of “make money from home”. Fab Guru sells ladies shoes, bags and other items. She particularly excels at marketing her wares on Facebook where she has a large following of “fans”. Fab Guru makes quite a lot and the ingredients seem to be: a)find something to sell (preferably something that you love) and b)find a group of people who love what you have to offer (in this case, Fab Guru didn’t find those people, she built a place for them to come to).
  • Career Point Kenya – these guys have written a book that resonates well with the people who visit their site. I’m not sure of the sales figures, but I’d bet they do very well.

Do you see a trend here? If you want to make money online by selling things, then you need to first find a good product (or products) – something you love working with and which is likely to have a market large enough to support you. Then you need to find, or build, a place where people who would be willing to buy your product(s) can be found. If you manage to do that, you’ll be home free!

C. Freelancing
Of all the ways people make money online, this is the one way used by most of the people we have come across. Quite simply, this is nothing but being a hired hand. That is, being paid to do something for someone because of your expertise, experience or both. Here are examples of Kenyans who are already doing this: Wuogard, Linda Cherotich, Maria Maina and our very own Crystal.

How do you do this? Well, first off you need to be able to do something better than most people can do it. It can be anything, from writing to art, to web design.

Next, you need to build out your portfolio and then try your hand at finding jobs/gigs at some of the more popular freelancer sites such as Freelancer.com.

To put it in a way that it is more easy to relate to, I’ll give the example of Kenyan Freelancer. She’s a brilliant writer. She set up to do business online the smart way: she set up Smurt Notes which is her ‘business profile’ used to ‘seal the deal’ – but that’s not all – she also has a somewhat less formal site, Kenyan Freelancer, which I would say does more of the ‘marketing’. A nice little one-two punch to get her clients.

Seems very do-able, eh? Good luck!

See also: Interviews with Maria Maina, Kenyan Freelancer, and Crystal.

Conclusion
In my personal experience, and as seen and proven above, you can make money online in Kenya by:

  1. Selling adverts on your site
  2. Consulting
  3. Selling other people’s stuff (affiliate marketing)
  4. E-commerce (selling your own things)
  5. Freelancing

I am sure there are more ways through which people are actually making money in Kenya, but the above are what I have actually seen proven. What about you? Are you making money online? No? Need help?

Good luck, and God bless you!

Photo by timbrauhn.

Filed Under: Blogging, Case Study, Cool Sites, Internet Culture, Interviews, Make Money, Online Jobs, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Choose a Boring Industry and Excel!

August 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of my big irritations (that I do not know how to handle) is when a friend comes up to me and says they have an awesome (often get rich quick) idea. Usually it’s something really stupid that no one is going to be interested in.

Everything thinks they have to invent the Next Big Thing to be really successful (and rich) and it’s just not true, and highly unlikely. Here’s a much better and easier option for you. Pick the most boring industry and do it better than anyone else!

Shoes are Boring
I was reminded of this from Seth Godin’s post on Zappos. In case you don’t know Zappos, they are a web retailer who only sells shoes. Think about that – selling shoes for a living (boring). Not only that, they sell them online, which seems like the worst product to sell online. Everyone wants to try on their shoes to see how it looks and determine whether it fits right. But they went against what most people would think of doing and are doing incredibly well.

Do It Better Than Anyone Else
The reason both of the above examples were so successful is they did it different than everyone else. They went against convention to give clients what they really want. That’s the real key. But I tell you what, I would rather come up with that new idea for a boring product than invent something brand new that will take a ton of money to build and might not even have a market yet.

One way I suggest doing it is create the most efficient, awesome process in your industry. Make it a great experience for your clients because you have refined your processes to the Nth degree. It’s not sexy or exciting, but it will differentiate you from the competitors in the industry.

Remember – no one wants a company that just lays concrete. But if you could be a business owner with a lot of money from that concrete business or a poor owner working around the clock for a new idea, what would you choose?

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Making Money Online Successfully

July 30, 2010 by 1 Comment

So a while back we wrote about how it is better to earn offline than it is to earn online. Part of the reason why we wrote that article is that many people are trying to build revenue around models that will either:

  1. Not be around in 5 years because the powers that be (ie: Google) have changed their operations to make the strategy unprofitable
  2. Replaced by another method or competitor with a new perspective or method to attract customers.

How can we define online success?

How Much Money are You Making Tomorrow?
I think there has to be a certain measurable criteria as to what makes someone successful online and that can be as simple as the ability to make Kshs 5,000 per day, Kshs 10,000 per day, working full-time independently, etc. that a lot of people like to use.

However, I think there are less measurable means to determine online sucess as well. If I were buying a business, I’m not buying the business on how much money it made today, I’m buying it based on how much I think it will make in the future. Because of that, there are some criteria that I would like to add to what I consider online success:

  1. Is the business defensible? Is your business model based on arbitrage of PPC ads or is it based on a steady amount of traffic from a variety of sources (PPC, SEO, direct referrals, repeat visitors, etc).
  2. Are you too reliant on 1 supplier, customer, or web site? Supply chain issues are a reality of any business. Now it’s much more of an issue in a manufacturing or product based business but it’s a reality in the online world. If you have just one web site or one source of income, then your success is at risk. If you have just one product or one major client, an innovative competitor could very quickly and easily sink your business.
  3. Is the Product commoditized? This is one of the biggest mistakes that many people make who are trying to make money online. The web sites that they are offering are, in essence, a commodity. There are thousands of other people or web sites out there who offer the same product (or could easily offer the same product). And the problem with a commodity business is that lowest-price wins. And those hyper-efficient markets are very difficult to win in.

My Definition of Online Success
A. If you are looking for some extra disposable income, Kshs 5,000 per day is a great goal to have and I would consider that a huge success.

B. If instead of just disposable income you want to work for yourself, things are a little bit different – instead of considering 5,000 a day a success, we should look at a number that permits you to live comfortably. If that is 30,000 a month, and you are earning that regularly, that’s awesome. Now if you make 50,000 one month and nothing for 3 more months, that’s not really successul.

C. If you are building a business, that’s much tougher to define. To have a successful business, you must have systems and processes, and if you have systems and processes, then you can have employees. So I think that when you get to a point where can support yourself with company profit and you have an employee on board, then I think you are moving in the right direction.

Successful Online Entrepreneurs
There are a lot of people making money online who make more per month that I do and most people would consider them to be successful. These are often people that are in the top 1% of their market. The diffference between them and the rest of the online entrepreneurs is that they have differentiated themselves.

If they run a successful blog, their differentiation is the personality behind it. If the content was written by a bunch of no-names without the personality, I doubt they would be as successful. And some of the other successful entrepreneurs have built up a portfolio of well-performing sites. They have created processes and eliminated the dependence on any one web site/asset.

Ideas from the Masters
I am a big fan of the ideas of Warren Buffett because I think they can be applied universally. Warren Buffett doesn’t follow the stock market on a daily basis and he doesn’t follow quarterly earnings reports. He’s not even a big fan of annual reports – he doesn’t think businesses should be judged based on the amount of time it takes the Earth to circle the Sun. He believes in looking at businesses over a much longer term.

I think that people looking to make money online need to look more at where they’ll be in 5 years, and not just based on the projects they would like to be working on at that point. If they have a collection of a variety of web sites with increasing traffic from a variety of sources, which have a differentiated advantage, I think they may be much more successful than someone who is making more money right now but with no prospects of growth.

So if you have a software product that you are selling online that only a few people that have discovered so far but they love it…Or you have a community web site that is very small right now but has a strong, but growing base….Or you have a collection of websites with unique content or a unique, driving idea behind them

Then I think you are well on your way to being succesul. Just make sure you have implemented the processes to really grow it successfully.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business

Hustling Online Just Became A Little Easier

July 28, 2010 by 2 Comments

DukaPressSo tuseme you want “in” on this Internet thing. You’ve heard people make money online, and you want your share. Of course the first thing you should do is get yourself onto a computer and head over to this blog and read up on all the things you can do to make money online.

There are hundreds of things you can do to make money online. One of the easiest, most fulfilling and most intuitive ways of doing so it to sell something online. This is something that most people already understand – you’ve probably sold dozens of things in the offline world. Selling those same things (or others) online may be a new experience but it certainly is something you already understand.

What do you need to do to start making money online in Kenya by selling stuff online? I’d argue that you FIRST need to think hard about your business. Selling online is no different from selling anywhere else. Your business plan must make sense if you are to succeed. You must think realistically and sensibly about what you want to sell, where you will find it, how much you will sell for, how you will deliver it to customers and how you will market and advertise your new shop. This is the hard part.

Next, you should think about technical issues – i.e. find a way to set up an online shop. E-commerce technology has existed for years and there are lots and lots of options here. A sad note is that in Kenya, even very simple online shops will usually cost you at least Kshs 50,000/-. This is a bit high, of course, but it is justifiable given the complexities involved.

Of course this was true only up to last week. Last week DukaPress was launched. What is DukaPress? It is a tool that lets you start your own simple online shop in less than 15 minutes. Have you ever tried to get a blog over at WordPress.com? That’s how easy it is to get a DukaPress shop up and running.

Why DukaPress?
There are many other options to DukaPress (akina Magento, osCommerce, CubeCart, etc etc), so what makes DukaPress worth it? In my opinion, DukaPress is probably the simplest way to get a fully functional online duka. Take Magento, for example, it has a fantastic feature-list but actually setting up and running a Magento shop is a nightmare that is too much to bear for the average person.

How Easy Is DukaPress?
Have a look at this online shop. That shop is powered by DukaPress. It was built in ten minutes! It is a fully featured shop and can accept payments via: AlertPay, Paypal, MPESA, yuCash, and ZAP among others. If you want to build the same exact shop in even less time, you can do so!

All you need to do is:

How easy is that? Should take you a few minutes in total if everything is ready! If you’re stuck, we’re here to help.

DukaPress is and always will be free to use, and it is from Kenya.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business Tagged With:

Maybe This Aint For You

July 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I hate to say it but you’re probably not smart enough to come up with a completely new idea. You don’t have the intelligence or creativity to come up with the Next Big Idea.

Newton thought up the Law of gravity; the founders of Google came up with a breakthrough by inventing the concept of PageRank to rank websites. Do you think you can replicate these feats, much less come up with one from scratch?

The reality is that 99.99% of aspiring entrepreneurs don’t have the mental chops to come up with some totally original idea. These are all smart people but chances are that even if you do happen to come up with a great idea, it will either have been done already or it hasn’t been done for a reason.

The Good News
Before you abandon all hope and embrace your life as an employee, there is some good news. There are millions of entrepreneurs in this world who had just as much originality and creativity as you do. They didn’t come up with the Next Big Thing and they’re wildly successful. What they all have in common is that they are good marketers.

Yes, that evil word – marketer. But the fact is that most successful entrepreneurs are successful because they are good at selling their business. They didn’t come up with some earth-shattering idea that their competitors couldn’t match. They just did a better job at marketing their own business.

Car Dealers Haven’t Invented Anything Lately
Car Dealers are interesting because they are basically selling a commodity product. If you don’t want to buy a car from a particular dealer, you can go to the dealer down the street that sells a car in the same class for a similar price. And if you want the exact same car, go to another dealer 20 miles a way who sells the exact same model. There is almost no room to differentiate their “product” from their competitors’.

But I’m sure that we’ve all seen or know the local car dealer that has 5 dealerships, 3 houses, and is absolutely loaded. Somehow they found a way to turn their commodity product into a goldmine for themselves. Why?

They are good marketers.

Maybe everyone knows their name from annoying billboard ads or painful TV ads. However they know them, the fact is that they do. Now I’m sure that these car dealers also run a well operated business. You can’t afford to bring potential customers in and give them bad service. They still need to be good business operators. But the fact is that their marketing skills got the name of the dealership out there and people in the door.

Do You Know How to Market?
So don’t spend all your time trying to think of the Next Big Thing. It’s a waste of your time. And honestly, you might come up with a great idea but if you don’t know how to sell it, it’s not going to be successful.

You’re may not be smart enough to come up with new ideas. Spend your time learning how to sell and market and you can sell anything. It could be the most boring product – it doesn’t matter. If car dealers can do it, you can too.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Think DukaPress

July 23, 2010 by Leave a Comment

DukaPress AvatarWell, it is finally here! We just released DukaPress and it is available for download. If you’re interested, you better hurry and get it because we’ve already had 857 pageviews on the DukaPress site (in about 6 hours). Of course if you don’t hurry you’ll still be able to download it.

Download it here: DukaPress

What is DukaPress?
I think this question is best answered with an example. Please have a look at this online shop. That is a fully functional online shop ready to start selling. It can process payments made by credit card, bank transfer, cash AND all three of Kenya’s mobile payment gateways (MPESA, ZAP, and yuCash). And you know what? We set the shop up in 15 minutes at the cost of 0 (zero) shillings.

Do you want your own online shop through which you can sell online and accept MPESA and credit cards at the steep price of zero bob? Then you want DukaPress.

DukaPress is made in Kenya, with love.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Less is More

July 17, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I find myself watching some strange reality shows at times and last week I was watching Kitchen Nightmares. It’s hosted by that British chef who’s always swearing at people in his “game show”. The premise of this show is that he goes into a restaurant that is failing for some reason and some drastic changes, brings it back to life.

Don’t Give Customers What They Want
In the show that I was watching last week, he visited an Indian restaurant that was bleeding money. The biggest problem he found in the restaurant is that they gave their patrons too many options. The customers were able to customize the sauce that they wanted. The owner came from a sales background so he had a noble strategy – he just wanted to give the customers what they wanted. Great intentions but bad results.

The problem with this strategy is that everything suffered in the business because their was no consistency:

  • The customers thought they knew what they wanted but the fact was that the experts (the chefs) could put together a better combination of flavors that the customers would enjoy
  • The orders would not come out in a timely matter because there were so many different combinations and the chefs could not operationalize the preparation
  • The waiters could not stand behind and recommend different dishes because they were all just slight variations of each other and could not be differentiated from each other in blind taste tests
  • The customers were left paralyzed with too many choices and felt unsatisfied that they weren’t getting what they want (having too many options is a classic in limiting sales because of “paralysis by over-analysis“)

Less is More
The lesson in this when running your business is that you should limit the options for your clients. Too often, we try to satisfy the wants and desires of our clients and what we end up giving to them is something that they don’t really want. They may think they want it when they “order” it but they leave our “restaurant” unhappy with the whole experience.

Even worse than a restaurant, we get clients who just get up and leave. If we don’t present a clear offer with a limited number of options, they’re less likely to become our clients.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,