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  • StarCraft 2 Taking Root in Kenya

    Posted: December 16, 2011, 12:53 pm by Kelvin

    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!

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  • Sitting in First Chair, but Playing Second Fiddle

    Posted: December 12, 2011, 10:31 am by Like Chapaa

    Before I start out using a musical metaphor, I better define a few things. A ‘first chair’ is the leader of an orchestra. When the conductor is not there, they take over. It is usually the best violinist or ‘fiddler’ of the group. The person next to them is usually ‘second fiddle’, or, to use another metaphor, an understudy. If the first chair gets sick, they take over.

    But what happens in business, and in life, when the conductor is almost always absent, the first chair decides to take an extended leave, and YOU are the second fiddle?

    You’d think playing second fiddle would be easy. It isn’t. Being first chair is hard, everyone agrees to that. They have all of the responsibility of the conductor, plus they have to play an instrument. Being the conductor is a breeze in comparison. But when the first chair hits the road- your supervisor goes out to lunch mentally, your spouse says adios to responsibility- you, as second fiddle, have to take over.

    Second fiddlers are not respected. They have to fight for every ounce of power they have. They not only have to take over the responsibilities of first chair, but they have to prove that they are capable and that the position, in fact, does need to be taken over. How do you prove the absence of something? Especially if the person is still, technically, there? Let me tell you, it is hard.

    But somehow, you succeed. You are sitting in first chair. You have taken over the ‘seat of power’ and now it’s all up to you. There’s only one problem. You’re not ready.

    It’s one thing to get the power; it’s a whole other thing to be able to wield it correctly. In your family: can you be both mother and father to your kids? Disciplinarian and comforter? Judge and intercessor? In your business: can you be co-worker and boss? Leader and listener?

    You’re in the hot seat now. You are sitting in first chair, but you’re still only a second fiddle. You know that at any moment, the real first chair could speak up and you’d be knocked back to your former position. But, at this time, someone has to take control. How do you survive?

    First, remember who you are. You are second fiddle. Either by choice or by design, you are who you are. And that’s fine. Not everyone is cut out to be first chair, not everyone wants to be first chair. Your objective is to do the best you can with what you have.

    Second, relax. This isn’t your job and everyone knows it. If you take yourself too seriously, you’re doomed to failure. Listen to others, keep a cool head, and don’t make the same mistakes your predecessor did.
    Last, be prepared to step down. Eventually, someone will come in to take over. Don’t fight it. Do your best to help out the new first chair, or support the returning one, without censure or blame. It won’t help anyone to add conflict to an already difficult situation.

    Many second fiddles are taking on first chair responsibilities nowadays. Just remember who you are and why you’re doing it. You can only do the best you can. Everything else is in the Lord’s hands.

    Author Bio:
    This is a guest post from Laura Backes, she enjoys writing about all kinds of subjects and also topics related to internet service providers in my area. You can reach her at: laurabackes8 @ gmail.com.

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  • BorderLinx Stops Working For Kenya

    Posted: December 8, 2011, 12:51 pm by Kelvin

    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.

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  • Niche it down!

    Posted: December 8, 2011, 8:51 am by Kelvin

    I got an interesting email from Ramit Sethi that I’d like to share with you. Here it comes:

    “Today, a quick story on niching it down.

    As you know, most people try to appeal to EVERYONE. They can’t fathom the idea of choosing a specific audience, and focusing deeply on them, which often means repelling others.

    Yet when they try to appeal to everyone, they end up with products/services like “Personal Finance For Serious Investors” or “Unisex Salons” — which ironically appeal to nobody.

    So let me share another example I recently found.

    • To start, I’ll first tell you that Indian people have very specific things we like. For example:
    • Food with tons of flavors
    • Long, flowy clothes (kurta pajama for men, salwar kameez for women)
    • Most importantly, LONG HAIR ON WOMEN

    The vast majority of men would agree with me that long hair is hotter than short hair.

    Yet there are women who have short hair. And although I cannot understand them whatsoever, there is a group that can: A publication called Short Hair.

    There is an entire magazine devoted just to short hair. It’s called Short Hair, and it turns out it’s been around for many years. While it sounds silly, one of it’s main selling points is that if you see a cut in there you like you can buy the glossy and show it to your stylist.

    Some things to consider:

    1. I seriously hate short hair on women
    2. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to appeal to “everyone.” But the tighter your niche is, the more of that audience you will attract. For women with short hair, this is almost as tight of a niche as you can possibly create — while repelling people like me
    3. For example, I will never buy this magazine. But the creators of Short Hair magazine don’t care about people who aren’t going to buy like me. They deliberately engineered their product and marketing to appeal to people who WILL buy.
    4. This is why the “Unisex Salon” I walked past last week might as well rename their shop to “Men’s Barber.” After all, what woman would go in a unisex salon? Why not simply acknowledge who you’re going after and tailor/target them?

    Hope this was useful.”

    More: I will teach you to be rich.

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  • 16 Types of Websites You Can Create to Make Money

    Posted: December 6, 2011, 6:37 am by Kelvin

    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.

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  • How To Price You Product/Service For Maximum Profit

    Posted: December 5, 2011, 8:44 am by tranx

    Do you sell anything? I bet it was quite difficult coming up with the price, right? Trust me, I’ve been there. You want a price that ensures you make maximum profit yet you do not want to alienate your customer. What to do?

    Here’s a very interesting article on: Pricing experiments you might not know, but can learn from.

    The article gives concrete examples of interesting price experiments that you can learn from.Similar Posts:


  • The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems

    Posted: December 3, 2011, 12:12 pm by wham

    This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post: Find A Small Problem, Provide A Simple Solution.

    Many have made money and built reputations by solving problems. Doctors cure the suffering of illness, psychiatrists help heal the troubled mind, lawyers protect names from being tarnished, consultants offer marketing advice and a dazzling array of products help to remove any inconvenience you might possibly encounter in your daily life.

    Many people are solving problems. They’re all offering solutions to people who need them. Some are giving them away for free. Others are selling them for a price. When problem and solution is a perfect fit, a relationship of trust is built between two parties. If this helps me now, it might help me again. If this solves my problem, it might solve my friend’s problem too.

    There’s a connection. The problem solver becomes more popular as more problems are solved for more people. Every time you solve a problem in a way that’s better than others, you add undeniable value to the person in need. After performing a search engine query on a topic, what pages do you bookmark? The ones that offer you the best possible solution.

    As a business or website owner, you have to face the challenge of getting people to consume what you’re offering, be it free content on your blog, a piece of merchandise or premium service. You’ll have compete with other problem solvers in the market. Other blogs, other companies in the same field, other service providers. All offering different solutions.

    For instance, there are many different products to solve the problem of dirty dishes. A plethora of different washing fluids, sponges, machines and racks. In most scenarios, there are more solutions than there are problems. Solutions themselves become problems to be solved.

    Most of the time problem-solvers are already engaging your target audience but that doesn’t mean you should stay away. There’s always room for another solution, especially when its one that addresses the problem with more elegance, more force, more precision or more style.

    First, identify the problems facing your target audience. Go deep into the user-generated recesses of the web: monitor forums, social networking websites, blogs and places where people interact and talk online. Understand the problem more deeply than your competitor. Go after nuance. Absorb feedback on current solutions. Know what they want but isn’t available.

    Then, create a solution that builds on the flaws of other solutions. Or one that completely circumvents the existing paradigm by addressing the problem from a different angle, using different methodology or a combination of existing solutions. Be daring and creative.

    Try going wider for broader appeal or swim in narrower channels to reach hardcore fans in order to gain a support base. The same applies to online publications like blogs on specific topics. What problems do your readers have? How are you solving them with your content? If solutions already exist elsewhere, how can you do better so you’ll be the go-to site?

    Nobody is able to constantly solve problems in the best possible way to please every single person. All solutions have flaws because consumers evolve. People are also going to look elsewhere because of boredom. But understanding exactly what problems and solutions are out there, allows you to better score points or gain favor with any audience.

    Source: DoshDosh.

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  • Find A Small Problem, Provide A Simple Solution

    Posted: December 2, 2011, 1:37 pm by wham

    Here’s the story of a young guy in Mexico who started his own small business immediately after college and has now moved from his bedroom to his own office, bought furniture, computers and has a substantial amount saved up.

    He studied mechanical engineering in uni and after graduating, he decided to start a small business since he had some experience building websites. He noticed that small business owners wanted to do online marketing but they had little idea of how to do it. So he started offering a very simple service of charging companies to handle their Google Adsense (Google’s advertising product). In as little as 4 months, he had achieved impressive sales.

    Sounds nice and simple, eh? That’s the moral of the story. Sometimes we try to think up these elegant and complex business ideas when all we need to do is find a small problem and provide a simple solution.

    Come on, this is something you can do, right now. What are you waiting for?

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Fish cakes

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Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes

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