How to Succeed in Business in Kenya

November 23, 2010 by 1 Comment

“Our greatest weakness is giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.” – Thomas Edison

I had the priviledge of hearing Joanne Mwangi, whose company, Professional Marketing Services, was voted the best of the top 100 SMEs in East Africa. Joanne spoke at length about entrepreneurship and how to start/run your own business. Here’s some nuggets of information shared by her:

First, the most important thing about starting your own business is that you have to choose the right type of business to start. Your choice needs to be:

  1. Something that you are very, very good at
  2. Something that you love
  3. Something that can make you real money

Do not copy what others are doing. Joanne gave an example of the ‘phenomenon’ that a few years back it was it was almost a “fashion trend” for people to go to Dubai to buy things and come sell them in Kenya. Most people who did this did it only because they heard that it would make them a lot of money. Starting a business by trying to copy someone’s success is not a good idea.

Think Big. let your dream be as big as possible. if you think small, you will find that there’s an upper limit to the amount of success that you can enjoy.

Other pieces of advice:

  • Do not give up until you have been running your business for at least 18 months
  • Hire right
  • Take intelligent risks
  • Accept failure and move on
  • Never stop learning
  • If you help others, it almost always comes back. Therefore, share your experience and advice with others and train and mentor others if you can.
  • Pay yourself a salary. A real salary.
  • Pay your taxes!
  • Embrace God in everythign you do.
Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

November 19, 2010 by Leave a Comment

What’s a cookie? How do I protect myself on the web? And most importantly: What happens if a truck runs over my laptop?

In an attempt to teach the average person about the fundamental of browsers and the web, Google has released an interactive online book that explains concepts like, TCP/IP, HTML, browser extensions and malware.

The short book, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web, is a step-by-step explanation of the web and how it works. It was created by the Google Chrome team using HTML5, but it also features a lot of clever illustrations by award-winning German illustrator and children’s author Christoph Niemann.

The focus of the book is on 19 different topics (plus a recap, making for 20 things). It starts with “What Is the Internet?” and then dives into cloud computing, web apps, web programming languages, browsers, privacy, security and open source.

Source: Mashable

In your quest to do business online, is there anything that you do not understand about the web? This is your chance to learn:

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.

Filed Under: Cool Sites, Internet Culture, Small Business Tagged With:

How to Start a Successful Web Business

November 19, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Ever dreamt of making millions on the Internet? Then this is for you.

This is a series of “lectures” making up over 12 hours of audio on how to start and grow your web business into a multi-million business. It covers the following topics:

  1. Deciding on an idea
  2. Building your idea
  3. Launching and marketing your idea
  4. Turning your idea into a $1M/year business
  5. What to do after you’ve made millions

You can find all this information here: How to Start a Sucessful Bootstrapped Web App Business.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

5 Reasons Working From Home is a Bad Idea

November 18, 2010 by 3 Comments

Thinking of starting your business by working at home? Here are 5 reasons why that is a bad idea:

  1. Productivity – You’re functioning at about 75 percent productivity in a coffee shop or at home. The distractions are everywhere. At the coffee shop it’s the annoying person on the phone; at home it’s the cat, the dog, the neighbor, the internet is down, the TV is on…
  2. Space to think – If you’re serious about building a company –a real company, not an app or a feature – than you’re going to need space. You’re going to need whiteboards and desks and printers and stable Internet service and phone booths and meeting space.
  3. Don’t lose that third space – Without space, your boundaries between work and play dissolve to the point that you don’t know how to work and how to play. When you live in coffee shops or work at home you tend to go at one speed, whether you’re crushed for time or not. When you have an office with a product deadline looming, you stay there until it’s done.
  4. World-class teams don’t work from home – For a little while you can get away with attracting people to your kitchen table, but very soon you’ll be competing with other start-ups/companies for talent – and your comfy couch is not going to get it done.
  5. Space is cheap – Office space is cheap and plentiful assuming you don’t need super nice digs. It’s also surprisingly cheaper than you think when you do a fully loaded cost analysis. When you’re not at the office, the chances of you bringing your lunch are probably lower and the coffee is definitely more expensive.

Adapted from VentureBeat‘s “5 reasons working from home (or Starbucks) is a bad idea“.

Filed Under: Small Business

Sometimes Price Does Not Matter

November 12, 2010 by 2 Comments

I got a nice email from Ramit Sethi today:

Hey, Kelvin

A few days ago, I threw a party in my NYC apartment. I went to the nearby liquor to buy some drinks, and when I got to the vodka area, I started trying to decide which brand to get.

Absolut? Ketel One? Grey Goose? Vladimir?

Interestingly, I know all the research about taste-testing for drinks. When you subject people to a double-blind test, they essentially cannot tell the difference between vodkas, wines, or soft drinks. In fact, I wrote about this extensively in my book, where I cited a famous wine study where the world’s top experts could not even tell the difference between white wine and red wine when the drinks were disguised.

So there I was, standing at the counter deciding which vodka to buy, steeped in research, knowing full well that my friends wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in taste.

Yet I still bought one of the most expensive bottles.

Why?

This will be useful to you when you sell your services to earn more money on the side.

The bottles ranged from about $10 to $40/bottle. In my budget, $30 makes no difference to me. Yet I was throwing a party for friends. I was a little nervous to show off my new apartment. I was in a rush. All of these things add up.

What went through my head — as someone who has extensively studied the research behind marketing and decision-making?

“Yeah…I know all the research…but I have a nice apartment, and what if my friends think I skimped on the drinks? It’s only $30…I might as well get the good stuff….damn, I’m running late…this lady has been watching me stand here for 9 minutes and probably thinks I’m a weirdo…I should just get this one and go.”

Notice what’s going on?

I’m not stupid. I know that “premium” vodkas cost more, with essentially no difference in product, and the owners take the extra money as pure profit. I knew all of this logically….yet it didn’t matter.

No matter how educated or smart you are, you are STILL subject to the same influences as anyone else. I’m influenced by social approval…and scarcity…and price.

And so are the people you’re trying to sell your services to.

If you like that, you may want to join Ramit’s Earn1K course.

Does price always matter to you?

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business

Getting Free Advertising Online

November 11, 2010 by 1 Comment

You. You are in business for yourself, hopefully in a field you know a little something about. And while you know something about it, chances are a lot of others don’t. That means you have something to share. And there’s your ticket to a little free advertising on the internet.

Blogging
First off, if you do not have a blog for your business, start one now. A little thing worth noting: Google LOVES blogs. They index blogs and their spiders are all over blogs. So, by starting a blog and writing effective and helpful content which targets your target market, you will get into the search engines. Do so effectively and often and you will be established as an authority in your field.

Blogging is a very effective means of free advertising for your business, but let’s take it the next level.

Article Hubs
Article hubs are sites which collect content written by a large collection of authors into one site. What makes a hub different is that the authors put their content up there for the specific purpose of being republished. An example of this is Ezine Articles. There a LOT of them out there.

Now, a TRULY lazy blogger would go to a site like this, grab some content for free, and republish it on their own blogs. That’s a way to go, but the real benefit comes in being on the author side of the equation. If you are running a blog site (and you should be), you are obviously writing some content. You are making the content public anyway. Why not put some of that stuff out onto the article hubs and allow other sites to republish it? One of the conditions of doing so is that the person republishing your article has to include your short bio and a link to you with the article. YOU write this bio and you can link it using your own keywords. When they republish your article, you get credit for it and, more importantly, a link to your website.

That’s free advertising, guys. Your articles can go viral, just like a video on Youtube.

It Takes Writing
Yes, this method of online promotion takes writing. I know we have some lazy website owners on this site, but all owners (lazy or not) would like to get free publicity on the internet. So, it’ll take some writing.

Happy marketing!

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business

How to Start a Niche Website

November 9, 2010 by 2 Comments

A lot of money can be made by creating niche sites that generate you a little bit of income every month. Once they are up and running they have literally no upkeep and the money just continues to come in no matter what you do with your time. It is a great source of passive income. I want to share with you the basics of creating your own niche website.

The idea behind niche websites is fairly simple. Create a website in a certain niche, obtain the top search engine rankings for that niche and get loads of visitors to your site. Place advertisements on your site to make money and update your site maybe once per month or less (or maybe never) and continue to get income month in month out without doing much work at all.

Finding a Niche
Finding a niche that will get enough people going to it for it to be profitable is an important first task. For this I recommend:

How To Find a Keyword Phrase
Finding a keyword phrase which you can rank highly in and which can bring you a significant amount of traffic is the next step towards creating a profitable niche website. One of the great tools you can use for this is the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. You can type in a keyword and it will show you keyword phrases which people use to search for that certain keyword. For example if you type in Miley Cyrus into the tool it will show you phrases such as “Miley Cyrus”, “Miley Cyrus nude”, “Miley Cyrus naked”, “Miley Cyrus pictures” and so on from the most popular searches down to the least popular. This is a great tool to find out one keyword phrase you can focus on. All you need to to be rank first for one of the keyword phrases which gets over 500 hits per day and you can make the $1-$5 per day we talked about.

Buying a Domain Name
Now, this is a very important part. You want to buy a domain name that has your keyword phrase in it. This is because it will help you rank higher in search engines for that keyword. If you have chosen Miley Cyrus as your niche then you want to try all the keyword phrases as domain names and see which one you can get as a .com.

Write Keyword Rich Content
Now that you have your domain name and keyword phrase you want to focus on you need to make your website as SEO friendly as possible. Your title needs to have your keyword phrase, use images with your keyword phrase and include your keyword phrase in the ‘alt’ section of your images. In your content which you write for your website write with keywords in mind and put in bold your keyword phrase you are focusing on. Do everything you can to make your website as search engine friendly as possible because we are trying to get to the number one spot for your search engine rankings.

Building Backlinks
Once you have optimised your website for search engines then start building backlinks to your website. Try and create backlinks which include your keyword phrase, you can do this through commenting, through swapping links with others, by buying links, by using your own website to link to it. Do whatever you can to gain backlinks because the more links you have the more likely you are to get ranked higher in the search engines

Monetise
Make sure you put some advertising on your website so you can make money from it. Try Google Adsense for starters, and maybe try private advertising later.

Sleep
Now you can make money in your sleep and you don’t have to do anything. If it takes you a month to set up but then you can make $5/day for the rest of your life wouldn’t it be worth it? I think the answer is YES!

If you really want to get into this, I suggest you take a look at this course: How to make Money Online: Niche Websites. This will guide you through the whole process and make it easier.

Good luck!

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business