Yep, we have more freebies for you – another free DukaPress theme!

Sanaa is a WordPress e-commerce theme, powered by DukaPress, that is based on the old Crafty Cart. In the words of the original creator, “It’s a fresh flavoured retro style perfect for selling t-shirts and handmade items, designed to be a starting point for your online shop.”

Theme Features

• Intriguing “retro” design
• Drop-down menu support
• 2-column layout and widget-ready sidebar
• Support for WordPress 3.0 custom menus
• Styled to work elegantly with DukaPress

View the live Demo
Download For Free

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The Good
www.economicstimulus.go.ke – a website that aims to report on the success of the economic stimulus packaged introduced in the 2009/2010 budget. We must say that for a Government site, this is pretty amazingly well done. good job all round! Though its creation was outsourced to India….

Owlses – though it does not exactly serve the Kenyan market, this is a nice shop for T-shirts based on owls. The site’s design is pleasant and professional.

Ticket Masters – this is where you can buy tickets to many events online. The site itself is very well designed and works pretty well. Good job!! Though it would do no harm to keep it more updated…

The Bad
The Kenya Police – this is the site of the Kenya Police. Besides being hacked numerous times a while back, it is not available right now. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Viva – this is a website that sells premium rate SMS services. Unfortunately, the badly dated (as in old) design makes one think it may not be legit. The look and feel of your website tells people a lot about you, and this website does the owners no good at all.

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Have you just started your own small business? Or are you doing some freelance work? How do you get new and more customers?

We’ve found that the following works for us. Maybe you too.

1. Partners
It is very helpful to team up with people who provide other related services and arrange to refer business to each other. For example, if you are a web designer you can partner with graphic designers to refer businesses to each other.

2. Profile
Building your business profile is a constant and unending task. This means a well structured and designed website, writing for/being written about in trade publications, attending business networking events, speaking at conferences, entering/winning/judging awards, and that’s before you’ve started with all the usual social networking avenues like starting a blog, commenting on other blogs, tweeting, facebook, linkedin – I think you get the idea now. An important consideration with this is to ensure you’re getting a profile that will be seen by potential clients, and not just chasing fame within your industry.

3. Happy clients (word of mouth)
Unfortunately, the most effective new business method is also the most difficult — happy clients are repeat customers, meaning more work and thus more billings. But more importantly, clients also talk, whether they have a good or bad experience. Marketing people know other marketers, business owners know other business owners — and they ask each other for recommendations, and value those recommendations highly. The better you service your clients, and the happier they are, the more likely they are to recommend you to their colleagues, friends and family.

Finally, don’t expect things to work instantly, building up a reputation takes years so your biggest asset and selling point is the standard of your work and the way you approach clients. Showing your work in the best light and having a diverse portfolio will give you the confidence to approach people for work.

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As we all know, the Kenya police website was hacked multiple times recently. Today, we report on how, exactly, the hacker got in.

Of course it is not really “hacking” (here’s why) – it is more of “defacement”. Regardless, Idd Salim has a post up that analyses this “hacking” in detail. According to Salim, this is what happened:

The “hacker”, looking for a way into the site (or maybe just curious) did the simplest of things and got the admin password to the Kenya police website just sitting there, exposed for everyone to abuse.

The “hacker” probably just entered this query into Google search: “filetype:txt kenyapolice.go.ke”

This query checks whether there is any text document on the Kenya Police website that can be accessed by the public. Unbelievably, the password to the whole police website was stored in an insecure text document and all the “hacker” had to do was read it, and log in.

Exhibit C (click for larger)

Easy peasy. The password was just sitting there waiting to be discovered.

It is such a shame that the primary security organ in this country clearly does not know, does not care, or both when it comes to cyber security.

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When we first got into business, we were dreamy about what exactly we wanted to do. See, we’re able to do many things that are internet-related. So when we started, we thought we could do everything and offer all of the following to customers: web design, SEO, social media marketing, strategy, reputation management, etc etc. Nice eh? Soon we would be swimming in clients!

Wrong. We quickly realized that this was a very bad approach to business. Indeed we did get a range of clients who wanted a range of things done for them. This earned us much needed revenue but it also stretched us thin. We were trying to do too much with too few resources. We were extremely lucky that nothing disastrous happened (for example, if one of us had fallen sick – weeks worth of work would go undone!)

Over time, we realized that we needed to reduce the range of what we offered or we would burn out. And so we did just that. Currently we offer only or two from the range that we had initially started with and are looking to niche this down even further.

It is not immediately apparent, but it is true that a small business almost always makes more money and has a better chance of success if it chooses to attack a very specific niche. We almost failed because we were trying to be too general. Do not let this happen to you. if you are thinking of starting your own business, make sure that you have defined what it is that you do down to extreme specifics!

Good luck.

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Mwendo DukaPress Theme

We’re pleased to announce the release of our second DukaPress theme, the Mwendo DukaPress theme. This is a WordPress theme for use in your DukaPress powered shop.

View the live Demo
Download For Free

Basically, this is a free shop ‘design’ (for those who have no idea what a theme is) that you can use to make your DukaPress online shop look good. Enjoy.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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One of the founders of this website (www.likechapaa.com) is a trained accountant. When we started Like Chapaa, it was very much (and still is) a for-profit venture. Along with wanting to help people, we wanted to make money with this site. Now, none of us was what you call a “computer” or “Internet”, or even “business” expert. But we believed in ourselves and we believed that we know how to do things with computers and the Internet that make business sense. The problem was how to convince people – our customers – that we really did know our stuff.

Are you faced with this problem? How do you become an expert in your customer’s eyes? How do you become the person the customer most wants to work with? How do you then increase prices 300% (which we have done) and still have customers wanting to work with you?

I mean, think about it. Would you hire a boring old accountant to do your website or even just improve it? Would you hire an accountant for anything other than accounting? That’s the kind of challenge that we faced. No one knew us as experts. Now, it didn’t matter how many times we looked in the mirror and called ourselves experts. We still were not getting any respect, let alone money in the bank. And it drove us crazy.

(For the record, I would personally not hire an accountant for anything but accounting!)

Interestingly, that is precisely why Like Chapaa was born. We thought that the easiest, fastest way to convince the world that we knew what we talked about was to start a site and write about the content of our brains. We started Like Chapaa to show the world what we knew. So yeah, we started pole pole but surely. We wrote articles. We used to get 7 visitors a day but we continued writing articles. Day after day, week after week. It was hard, extremely hard – and we had few, if any, successes right away.

Then it all changed. We suddenly started getting emails and calls. Emails and calls from people who wanted us to work on their websites, their Internet strategy, their projects, and so on. We had planned for this, but the success of our little plan shocks even us.

A lot of people struggle with marketing their business, and we did too. But we figured we could either go nuts calling people and walking the hard roads of Nairobi, or we could sit at our computers and write an article. And have a customer call. (Ooh, I did like the sound of that phone ringing). That is the power of the Internet, if you ask me.

Information is expertise – just ask any author; any consultant; any trainer. Just ask us.

The thing is, anyone can do this. You do not need any special qualifications; all you need is creativity, imagination and time. You have all three so go for it!

If you need any help you can always hire us to help you, you know?

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I don’t know, sometimes I think everyone in Kenya is a spammer.

We work a lot on Internet marketing projects so we meet a lot of people and hear – or work with – lots of companies dicing into Internet marketing. One of the most popular forms of Internet marketing in Kenya is Email marketing. Rightly so!

However, it disturbs me greatly that almost no Kenyan company gives two hoots about where they get the email addresses that they market to. It is very common to hear “hey, si you give me your list of emails I do email marketing for my business“?

Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.

Just for your information, spamming:

• is actually illegal in some places
• is morally questionable
• almost always gives a bad impression of your company/product
• does not work as well as you think it does
• wastes millions of man-hours each year

Furthermore, the alternative to spamming is, in my opinion, infinitely better (in that it makes more business sense). If you market to an email list that you rightfully own, you will find that your goals are much much much easier to achieve.

Spamming is wrong. Don’t do it.

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HubSpot has a really interesting take on the 9 worst ways to use Facebook for business:

1. Duplicate your Twitter Strategy on Facebook
2. Post Only Plain-Text Status Updates
3. Don’t Allow Fans to Share Content
4. Don’t Comment on Your Fans’ Content
5. Don’t Share Your Fans’ Content
6. Don’t use Facebook Questions to Find More Fans
7. Use a Profile Image That has a Poor Thumbnail
8. Don’t Share Your Facebook Page on Your Website
9. Don’t Develop a Personality

Do you like this list or find it interesting? Then click here to read the whole article (and get a free ebook on Facebook marketing).

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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:

• Google Trends which shows you up to 100 of the most popular keyword searches at the moment
• Google Insights for search
• Yahoo Buzz which shows you the top 10 ‘hot’ searches at the moment
• Google Adwords Keyword tool
• Twitter

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!

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Does the idea of continuous passive income from websites you can set-up and forget about sound good to you? Well that is what niche content websites are all about. Let’s take a look at this online income method.

Before we start, I’d like to let you know that you can purchase a product from the Chapaa Shop to learn all about niche websites: “How to Make Money Online Using Niche Websites“. Okay, moving on…

What is a Niche Website?
A “niche website” is one that is designed with a very specific and narrow target market in mind. The type of information that it contains is carefully produced to draw in viewers who are motivated by their interest in the subject to purchase a product or products related to the topic of the site.

Consider this example. A dog owner with a large piece of property wants to keep his dog from wandering too far from home. However, he doesn’t want to contain his entire property within a fence and likes the idea of his dog having lots of space to roam. He decides to investigate the idea of installing an invisible dog fence by doing an Internet search.

A web developer who wants to target this customer would create a website around the keywords “invisible dog fences”. He would fill it with articles about different types of invisible dog fences, how to install them, the advantages of them over a regular fence, etc.

He would choose an affiliate product or products related to this topic, most likely a specific invisible dog fence. Of course, visitors to the site are already motivated by their desire to purchase this particular item. If visitors find what they read on the site to be informative and trustworthy, they will be likely to purchase the advertised affiliate product. In turn, the website’s owner receives a commission for the sale.

The website owner can also make a profit by signing up to run web ads, such as Google AdSense. The ad program will automatically place ads on the site which are related to the content of the site. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of the links, the site owner makes money.

Identifying Niches
If you want to be sure you will enjoy the process, one of the first steps you should go through is identifying those things in which you have some interest. Create a list by brainstorming and trying to identify everything you like. You are likely to find at the end that this includes broad topics like reading along with very specific things like collecting Makmende jokes (for example). It doesn’t matter how broad or specific things on this list are because this is just the starting point.

Once you’ve compiled this list, you will want to identify which things are very broad and which are already very specific, and then use this to identify niche markets you could tackle. Our example of a specific item above shows a small niche that is the ‘Makmende collectors market. This is a topic for which you should be able to create or find a fair amount of content, making it suitable for this purpose.

Your broad items will need to be narrowed down into one or more niches you might be interested. To continue on with our examples, maybe you really enjoyed reading the Harry Potter books. In this case, since it is a series of books, movies and other merchandise, it could be considered its own niche market, and therefore be suitable. Popular authors or specific genres could also be suitable, but be careful about getting too specific and targeting a single book.

Creating The Site
To maximize the potential you have for profit, you may want to consider getting your own domain name and setting up a site in your own hosting account. However, neither of these is required in order to make some money or to create a website. Several places online allow you to sign up and create your own blog, web page, or even entire web site, for free. Many of these will even allow you to make money from advertising, or allow you to include affiliate links on your pages so you can make some money. You can also just simple hire us, we’re experts.

The most important aspect of your site is going to be the content. As mentioned above, your content should be focused primarily on the specific niche you identified. As far as this content goes, it is best if your content is unique. To get unique content, you will either need to create it yourself, or hire someone to create it for you (you can hire the awesome Crystal). Of course, these aren’t the only options you have for getting content.

Making Money
Once the site is created, you can begin monetizing it in whatever way you have chosen. If you are using a free blog or other free site to host, you may be somewhat restricted, so be sure to consider your options when choosing where to publish your content.

Two of the most popular ways to monetize a niche website include using an advertising network, such as Google’s AdWords, and affiliate marketing. These can be used separately or together. Placing advertising usually involves signing up for the program and then placing their code into your page. Affiliate marketing is similar in that you would sign up for the program and place a special link on your page, but you’ll usually want to be sure you’re linking to specific products or services relevant to your site’s topic.

Conclusion
Making money via niche websites is one of the easiest ways to make money online. However, do not expect to retire off it – a niche website can be considered to be successful if it makes $2 to $3 a day. The real power comes in when you have 5, 10, 50 or even 100 such websites all working for you. Then you can retire!

If you are interested in niche websites, how about purchasing “How to Make Money Online Using Niche Websites“? It is a nice little course that can help you greatly. Good luck!

What do you think of this method of making money online?

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How do you like the video?

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Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

That’s what I tell people when they ask me how they can sell their ideas. There’s a general misconception that ideas have some sort of market value, if only one can find a buyer. Sadly, that is not the case. Everyone reading this blog is full of great ideas. But usually we don’t have the time, talent, resources, or risk tolerance to pursue them. So we keep our wonderful ideas squirreled away in our heads, where they remain until dementia eats them.

If you do nothing with your idea, then it is worth nothing.

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Poleni, readers. On Friday evening, for about two hours, www.likechapaa.com was not available. We were down.

Why? We got an unexpected surge in visitors to this website and it crashed our servers and brought us down. While we’re excited to get so many visitors, we aren’t excited that our servers crashed. We’re investing in more and bigger servers. Thanks for understanding.Similar Posts:

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We had a mini-competition the other day. So, here is the winner:

• Naomie

Dear readers, thank you for participating. Please enjoy the book Naomie. Do let us know how you like it.

If you are late and you want Scientific Advertising, you can get it by clicking here.

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The very first time that I got interested in making money online was around the time when I hit puberty. I was reading this magazine – sikumbuki jina – and there was this story of a woman with three kids who had quit her job to take care of her babies. Since she was home a lot, she started spending a lot of time on the Internet.

One day, she discovered a nice little website where she could set up an online shop for free. At the time, she had nothing to sell online but the idea stuck with her. Weeks later, she started a little duka selling hand-made jewelery (she made it herself at home). According to the magazine article, in a few months her little duka was making her twice the amount of money she used to make at her old job.

This story just spoke to me and I promised myself to one day make money online somehow. I later realized this dream through Like Chapaa and other online businesses that I am a part of.

How about you? Have you ever wanted to make money online? have you managed to do it?

Only you know the answers to that. Today, though, I am very pleased to announce our newest project! OurDuka.

What is OurDuka?
OurDuka is a site that enables you to start a simple online shop easily and for free.

Why are we doing this? because of public demand. Since we launched DukaPress, we got quite a lot of people telling us they love it but also telling us they have no idea how to get started – few people understand how to download it, upload it on a server, bla bla… A lot of you just want to “get a shop” without worrying about the technical details. Well, now you can do just that, just signup at OurDuka and you’re good to go! All 100% for free.

Do you have anything you think can sell online? Why don’t you get off your behind and try sell it? You have no excuses since we’re giving you a shop for free, ama?

The site right now is still a bit crude but as we engage with you, we hope to make it better as we go along. Hop on, make money, be happy! Don’t worry if you get little things here and there that seem out of place, we’re fixing that.

Why would you use OurDuka?

1. You get a fully featured shop just like this one or this one or this one. Free.
2. Our shop management software is used by over 3,473 people. Would that many people be wrong?
3. You can very very easily accept money via PayPal, AlertPay, or even MPESA. We don’t charge any commissions.
4. We are known for providing top-notch support so you will never ever be stranded.
5. We will love you forever! Seriously.

How do we make money?
We feel that before we even try to make money from this project, we need to make sure that you make money from it. Therefore, right now, this thing is free. Completely. We’ll be experimenting with how to make money using this in the future (when we have 1,000 users, if we ever do :p).

So, well, the ball is in your court. If you ever wanted an online shop, now you can get one that is very powerful and easy to use, and free. Visit OurDuka and sign up ASAP.

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Well, we had yet another mini competition the other day. Today, we’re announcing the people who won themselves a copy of “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days“. They are:

• Jarman
• Samuel
• Dan N.
• Ngugi K.

That’s how easy it is to be a winner over here, stay tuned for more and better competitions.

Incase you want this book, we’re sorry your only ope is Amazon or a bookshop near you.

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If you are interested in entrepreneurship, innovation or you are just fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging insights—straight from the source.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you. – Amazon

This is an absolute must read if you’re job, your passion, or both (if you’re lucky) has anything to do with creating technical innovation. “Founders at Work” is a wonderful meander through the stories of successful company founders – across several decades. Far from focusing on just those who made it big during the first dot-com boom or those who are profiting from Web 2.0, Jessica (the author) also includes some of the true pioneers in the field. She recognizes that, not only do these industry veterans have valuable stories to convey but, since many of them are helping to steer companies and venture capital funds to this day, their advice is quite topical and current.

You want to buy this book, trust me. Head over to Amazon.com to get it from about $5 (plus shipping). It is sadly not available (and probably will never be available) in our Chapaa Shop.

Alternatively, dear readers, you can get a copy of this book free from us. We recently gave away 4 copies of “The Richest Man in Babylon” and, today, we’re giving away a copy (or copies) of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. Interested?

All you have to do is leave a comment below. You can say anything at all (but it helps if you add constructively to the discussion). We’ll pick a winner randomly in three days. Good luck!

Update 25/10/2010: This competition is over and the winners have been picked.

Have you ever started your own business? Why not? What was it like?

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Over the last two months or so, the number of people who visit Like Chapaa per day has increased by roughly 60%. This increase has resulted in more business for us and we are, naturally, incredibly happy at the fruits of our labor. Today, I wanted to share the things we did to make this increase a reality. (We hope that it is the things listed here that the actually resulted in our site-visitor surge but it may well have been caused by factors beyond our control).

How we increased our site’s visitor numbers
1. We invested in social media
We built a Twitter Application and a Facebook Application. This has resulted in increased numbers of people from those social networks coming to Like Chapaa. See, normally, people wanting to grow in social media just create quick profiles in Facebook and Twitter and start getting friends, etc. We realised we did not have that kind of time so we chose to build applications so as to automate things a little bit (everyone should do this!). This resulted in us being able to do some really cool things: for example, you can leave comments on this site using your Twitter/Facebook profile, among other things.

Twitter and Facebook combined now send us about 30% of the visitors to this website.

2. Continuous SEO
Our strong point, of course, is search engine optimisation and making sure everything that we do earns us favorably as far as SEO goes is a priority.

I must say we have done pretty well as far as this goes. For example, when you search for “make money in Kenya“, our website dominates the Google search results pages. Search engines, and Google in particular, send us 60+% of all the people who view our site.

If you are looking to grow your site, please do not forget Google. Social media may be sexy but you just cannot afford to ignore Google!

3. Uniqueness/Creativity
I do not know how to fully explain this. It seems that the Internet “rewards” you for uniqueness and creativity. Like Chapaa is, strictly speaking, a blog. You would not expect us to create or be involved in projects such as DukaPress, yet we are. The “side projects” have earned us both money, and countless new visitors to our websites. Two examples:

1. Our involvement in DukaPress has “side-effects” that just never cease to amaze. We get hundreds of people who come to use by searching for “DukaPress” on Google or directly from DukaPress.org
2. Also of note is Biashara30. For a project that has largely failed, there are still lots of people who first come to Like Chapaa looking for information regarding Biashara30.

4. Getting Like Chapaa on other websites
Well, perhaps surprisingly, Like Chapaa is now listed at both Mashada and KenyaMoja. It seems that these two sites get quite a lot of traffic because they send us quite a lot of visitors. We were only recently listed on Mashada and that resulted in a visible bump in the number of people who come to Like Chapaa. Like Chapaa has also found its way onto Wazua, Kenya Unlimited, several Kenyan blogs and other smaller sites. The traffic that these nice websites send to us is significant!

I would not say that this is our doing because we did not ask anyone to include Like Chapaa on their sites. I would put it down to “if you create good and useful content, people will notice you”.

5. Email Marketing
Perhaps not many know this: Like Chapaa has a self-grown email marketing list of about 800 people. We do not send newsletters out often but all the articles published by Like Chapaa end up in the inboxes of our subscribers. Most of them always click back to Like Chapaa. This is a steady and stable source of website visitors for us.

Conclusion
The story of how we have grown Like Chapaa should inspire you. We have never ever spent any money to market this website and we started very quiety and, for months, got about seven visitors a day. But we persevered and, now, it is almost on autopilot – we just grow bigger. I put most of it down to luck and good fortune but here are some tips that may help you:

1. The number one priority for your website should be your site’s content. Invest all your resources in this. It is what will distinguish you and win over your first few visitors. Always remember this: people already have favorite websites and things like Facebook which eat up their time – they do not want to visit your site unless you compel them to do so. Only your content can do this. Amazing content will make your site memorable and will make people want to talk about you, even include your site’s stuff on their sites. Do not mess this up.
2. Social media is tricky. You typically need to invest a lot of time into it for it to pay off. However, we have proven it to be that you do not have to follow the grain (what others are doing) for it to work. My advice would be for you to pick your own social media strategy that will work to your strengths instead of just slapping on Twitter and Facebook like everyone else does. Also, 99% of Kenyan social media “gurus” are crap and are learning, just like you. Be hesitant to hire anyone.
3. Search engine optimisation is easy if you know what you are doing and need not be expensive. But it is a very slow and gradual process. Do invest into it, heavily. It will pay off eventually.
4. They say email is dying. We say that email is still the first place that Kenyans go online. If you can get your stuff inside people’s inboxes, you win.
5. Lastly, keep in mind that there are billions of websites today. many of these websites are absolutely amazing. Therefore, the competition for website visitors is the stiffest kind of competition that has ever been known. It may not be enough to just create good content. You have to be creative and unique – do not just do what everyone else is doing; make your own mark on this Internet; think outside the box.

Good luck with building your site.

PS, Incase you do not know, you can hire us if you want help to grow your website.

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Many business owners are very focused on their business and its profitability, but most of the time when failures happen, they begin to wonder what they did wrong. They cannot figure what it is, especially if they have the impression they did every possible thing to succeed.

The explanation is simple and obvious. It is called planning, a process on which every business should be based. Lazy business owners simply forget to sit down and make a plan for at least a week in which they should write all the steps to be taken in their business development.

Here are some suggestions to be taken into consideration if you want to plan your business efficiently.

First, if you have an idea to grow your business, do not hurry to put it into practice as it is. The chances to fail are quite big. So, write down your idea and try to change it into a SMART goal. If you have several ideas, it helps to take a dashboard for each of them.

Think at an objective that is achievable on a short term because it is easier to accomplish. Establish all the steps you have to make in order to achieve it. If there too many parts to take into consideration, break the large tasks into smaller ones and set clear tine frames.

Pay attention to the information seeking part – it is better to delegate and request your employees to look for valuable information such as: customers, suppliers, competitors. You may also consult experts for technical advice.

It is also very important to do some monitoring. Once you get a feedback, revise your plan and adapt it to the new situations. This is the right way to performance.

Another advice is to do some assessing before setting a specific goal to see from the beginning if you have the necessary resources to achieve it. See if you have the right premises: for instance, if you want to expand your production line or modernize your equipment, you have to see if there is enough space or enough money to do these changes.

If you are dealing with customer service systems, maybe a more sophisticated system will help you business be more profitable. If you have a strong financial support, maybe outsourcing will make things easier for you and you will have the possibility to concentrate on other parts of your business.

See what facilities you have in your company to achieve your goal as it is easier than starting from scratch.

Do not forget to take into consideration your most valuable resource you can rely on – your staff. See if you have the right people to achieve your objectives, if they know what is expected of them. Delegate tasks according to the skills they have, ensuring this way the job is done accurately.

After you have studied carefully all these issues, all you have to do is to set a clear goal, plan each step as we taught you to achieving and you will surely be successful. Bear in mind that it is extremely important to assess the results of your efforts, especially from a financial point of view.

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The Richest Man in Babylon is the kind of book that I would give/recommend to anyone regardless if their interest is outside of business/finance. Since finance can seem daunting these days due to its complexity, the book simplifies it through short stories. The insights that it provides allows me to step back and look at finance in simple terms. It opened up my eyes by introducing new possibilities, and adds positive reinforcements as to what a person can achieve in her lifetime. The wisdom that the book teaches is financially enlightening and it can change how you view your finance in many ways. Although the messages are delivered in a very unique fashion, the underlying nuggets of wisdom are direct and concisely to the point.

Clason, the book’s author, uses parables set in Babylon to make his points throughout the book. One chapter does a really great job of encompassing several financial points, The Five Laws of Gold. Each of the five laws are very simple and if used can work wonders in building your wealth.

The Five Laws of Gold

1. Gold comes gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put aside 10% of all he earns to build an estate for his family and future.
2. Gold labours diligently and contentedly for the wise owner who finds it profitable employment.
3. Gold clings to the protection of the cautious owner who invests it under the advice of men wise in its handling.
4. Gold slips away from the man who invests it in businesses that he is not familiar or is not approved by those skilled in its keep.
5. Gold flees the man who would force it to impossible earnings or who follows the advice of tricksters or schemers or who trusts it to his own inexperience and romantic desires in investment.

The concepts in the book may be a refresher to individuals who already has a solid grasp of their finance, but nonetheless, it solidifies what you already know in many ways. This is a book that I can refer back to time and time again. If you apply some of the concepts that are presented in this book to your life, you will definitely be on your way to financial freedom. If I can sum up the book in one word, it would be “refreshing.” I recommend this book to everyone regardless of your interest or age. Read, apply, then repeat.

Do You Want A Copy Of This Book?
We’re giving away a copy of The Richest Man in Babylon to one of you, dear readers. What do you need to do? Just leave a comment below – anything goes (but it would help if you added to the discussion in some way). We’ll choose a winner randomly in three days. Good luck!

Update 21/10/2010: This competition is over. Here are the winners. For those who missed you can get the book here.

What do you think of the book? How do you manage your money? Need help?

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Thinking of starting a web-based business? Here are 100 ideas to wet your appetite and, possibly, inspire you.

100+ Web Startup Business ideas

So, what do you think of them?Similar Posts:

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If you have a blog and want to grow it to be huge, there are several tried and tested things that you can do:

1. write quality content
2. promote that content
3. use social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook)
4. use social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg and Reddit)
5. tweak your design
6. chat with readers
7. create Youtube videos
8. article marketing
9. submit your blog to directories
10. search engine optimization

That’s a lot of stuff, eh? Can you imagine that a lot of the bloggers do all this for their blogs? How hard do you work on yours? The interesting thing is that for many, many bloggers doing just two of the above produces 80% of the gain. If you just wrote quality content and promoted it, you would be good. Think about it, 2 out of ten of the activities above lead to 80% of the gain.

The Pareto Principle
An Italian economist once observed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. His name was Vilfredo Pareto, and that is where the principle got its name from. The Pareto principle, which is also called the 80-20 rule, states that for many events and things in life, 80% of the effects come from just 20% of the causes.

Did you know that Microsoft once found that by eliminating just 20%
of the largest bugs in its operating system 80% of the crashes
would stop? Interesting, eh?

Applying the Pareto Principle In Business
We all waste lots of time on trivial, repetitive tasks. This often means people are kept busy whether it is important or not, equipment is running whether needed or not, sales are made whether they are profitable or not.

“The value of the Pareto Principle is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results. Identify and focus on those things. When the fire drills of the day begin to sap your time, remind yourself of the 20 percent you need to focus on. If something in the schedule has to slip, if something isn’t going to get done, make sure it’s not part of that 20 percent.” – About.com

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So, suppose you run an event management business. How do you market it online? Do you just slap on a website and sit back? I think not.

For you to get meaningful and sustained business online, it is not enough to have just a website, you need to have a website that establishes you as an authority in your field of business. You want it to be that if someone is online and thinking of event management in Kenya, they will not miss to think about you. Now this is quite hard to achieve, do not get me wrong. However, the Internet is an equalizer and you can accomplish this by pursuing a steady well thought out and bold plan. In my estimations, it can turn out to be a really cheap (relatively) but efficient marketing strategy and while you may not be the biggest in the industry, your marketing will make you seem just as big if not bigger than anyone else.

The big idea
If I was planning my wedding, I would be so very excited and I would want the whole world to know about it. If I could, I would have a column in the newspaper about my wedding plans and the day itself would be splashed all over the papers so that the whole world sees how wonderful my big white wedding was. And my relatives all over Kenya and possibly the world would see.

Of course I am not some Prince so I cannot have my way like that. What may work to achieve similar objectives, is a simple website. What if I had a very simple site, like a tiny blog, where I could update the whole world – including all my friends and family all over the world, of my wedding plans and share photos as I move closer and closer to the big day? Then on the big day itself I would chronicle the whole day on my little site (vua a live blog or live tweeting). That little site will live forever on the Internet as a “digital journal and photo album” of my wedding. I will tell almost everyone about it and they will all come visit – probably even my kids’ kids.

Now, most people aren’t web savvy enough to do this, and they may be too busy to do it anyway. What if you, as their event manager, offer such a service for all the weddings and other events that you organize? You would immortalise your clients’ events on the Internet and they will probably share the links to those mini sites with all their friends. Now, of course, on each mini site you will make it clearly known that the event was organised by you. The more events you immortalise this way, the more people share the mini sites with their friends, the more your name spreads on the Internet.

On the wedding/event days themselves you could even announce that the day’s proceedings and pictures will be available online at some web address, on Twitter, Facebook, etc so everyone will go away thinking “wow, these organisers are thorough” and they may visit the sites and find a link to you, and so on.

You will probably also be one of the very few event organisers that do this and it may turn out to be a major selling point and perhaps even a source of additional revenue – not to mention that once you get a number of event mini sites up, you will establish your name online and get precious “viral” marketing.

Can you imagine a gleeful bride showing off her wedding on Twitter and facebook and in all the conversations your name as the event organisers comes up again and again? Can you imagine one of the really really hot parties in town having a website where there is a live update for all that is going on at the party (with pics, music and snippets of video) – won’t the people who did not make it wish they were at the party?

What would it take to do this?
Contrary to what you may be thinking, all the above is quite cheap and easy to do, if you partner with someone who knows what he is doing. Believe it or not, making this happen can be done for under Kshs 15,000/- per event (at least going by Nickel Pro rates). The idea is to make a mini-site for the event, and offer live blogging and live socail media updating on the day of the event itself.

Benefits

1. After doing a few such events, you may actually be able to charge extra for this
2. Your customers will be probably “wowed”
3. You will get material cheaply for your company blog
4. You will be an event organiser at the forefront of technology
5. Your customers will be effectively recruited as people who market you online by telling their friends and family about the mini sites you created
6. You will quite possibly get “viral” marketing effects
7. Your name will spread in the online space
8. It is quite probable that you will get many new customers who learn of you solely online

Caveats
This is not a short-term marketing strategy.

What do you think of this idea? Could it work? More importantly, who has the guts to try it out? No balls, no babies!

Photo courtesy of AZrainman.

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Nairobi Swahili – this is the website of one Oloo, a Swahili teacher in Nairobi. I think the site is very well done and a rare gem in the (sometimes shocking) Kenyan web design industry. The site is pleasing to look at and does a good job of selling Mr. Oloo’s Swahili courses. Kudos to him, and the web designers.

Mara Enkipai – there’s a big drive to “sell Kenyan tourism” online spearheaded by the government. The sad truth is that 99% of all tourism related sites in Kenya are rather shoddy jobs that may actually detract from Kenya’s image. This is NOT the case with Mara Enkipai – the site is extremely well done and something that I’d be proud for people all over the world to see as the first glimpse of what Kenya has to offer. May other tour firms and operators follow suit!

Flops
Kenya Teachers’ Service Commission – for an organisation as big as the TSC, this is a pretty shameful site – it looks unfinished and the design, well, is poor at best. It looks more like a student’s high school project than a professionally done website of a national organisation.

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In this day and age, it is almost suicidal to ignore the Internet’s role in marketing. If you want to do any kind of online business, Internet marketing is, of course, critical. The strange thing is that even for normal, “brick and mortar”, businesses, it is folly to ignore the Internet.

“We live in an era where companies that are not positioning and marketing their brands online are suffering for it. Alas, the Web is a scary place for traditional marketers, whether they work on the agency or client side. After years of successfully relying on conventional media, there is suddenly a technological monster that demands to be addressed. With eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing, marketers everywhere can become skilled at harnessing the power of the Internet and using it for the benefit of their brands. With a little help from the experts, it’s never too late to learn.” – Quirk eMarketing

Download the Free Internet Marketing Textbook.

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Have you ever sat behind the steering wheel of a car without knowing where you are going? Sounds bizarre, right? What is more bizarre is that we do this every day in our professional lives without finding it disturbing! If you are smart (which I am sure you are and that is why you are reading Like Chapaa!), then you would have figured out that we are talking about GOALS which are important when we leave the house as well as when we want to go ahead in our personal and professional lives.

In fact, my take on this is that having a goal makes life easier by giving us a direction and sense of purpose. If you want to be successful, then one of the things which you need to do is to set goals in EVERYTHING YOU DO. This may seem like a lot of work, but goal setting a habit forming activity and when you see the results, you will not regret it.

So how do you SET goals?
Goals are usually things which we want to achieve in life. Personally, you might have a goal to lose weight (ouch!), professionally it can be to increase turnover, employee productivity, customer satisfaction etc. Once you have a broad goal…you pretty much have a direction which then needs to be broken down into activities that lead towards that direction.

How do you DOCUMENT a goal?
You can have long term or short term goals and their categorization is dependent on the time frame it will take to achieve them. For example, you can give yourself two months to lose four pounds or twelve months to increase customer satisfaction. Once you categorize this, you need to backtrack a bit and break it down into activities which will lead you to the goal.

Remember my analogy about the car? Activities to reach a place, usually involve, starting the car, checking the route, driving, parking, etc. Similarly, you need to document steps which will help you get to this goal.

After documentation comes EXECUTION
This is actually the most difficult part of achieving your goal….you can only get it right if you execute the various steps correctly. This is the place where the difference between KNOWING and DOING can be understood well. Good planning makes it easy to reach a goal. Each step should be understood properly as that will influence the overall quality of the results of achieving your goal. For example, a well planned campaign for higher customer satisfaction is likely to get you close to 80% of your goal while a poorly planned one may get you only 10%.

A goal is only as good as its metrics!
Metrics are nothing but numbers which can help you measure your goals and are as important as setting a goal in the first place. I have to lose weight is a meaningless goal if you don’t tie it with a number. Similarly, a goal to increase sales numbers is unlikely to be of any point if you don’t attach a number to it…let’s say a 30% increase from current levels. In fact, it is only with metrics that it makes sense to have goals in the first place.

There…I have put up my strong feelings towards goals and their measurements and hope to cover metrics in a business in another blog very soon!

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Enjoy the video

Click here to view the embedded video.

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It has been a pretty festive weekend, but then again it’s almost always ‘festive’ in Nairobi right? We always have an excuse to have a good time. And by all means we should.

Among the ‘best sellers’ when it comes to kujienjoy in Kenya is  nyama choma – roast meat.

So let’s say that you were going out to get some nyama choma. Would you get it from this guy:

Or, would you get it from this guy:

The first guy looks more experienced right? He’s got his chef hat-thing and that no-nonsense look going on. He actually went to school to learn how to roast your meat just right. That’s right, it’s your meat now, so you have to worry about who’s handling it. But who’s to say that the second guy has no experience? He’s could have been working way longer than the first guy. And who can prove that he does not know how to roast meat? Other than the fact that he’s not looking at it at the moment of course. As long as it’s not burning right? He could probably argue that he just doesn’t have the 3000 shilling jiko that the first guy has.

How would you decide which one to go to? Could it be by how clean they appear to be? The quality of the meat? The price? Location?

All these are reasonable factors to consider before choosing one of the two. In fact, every client thinks about these factors. What differs is the order of priority that they put them in. Some are more concerned about the price than how clean the guy is, while others are the opposite.

With an online business, most of the time you do not need to actually meet your clients face to face. There is the occasional meeting when the client needs extra attention, otherwise you are good to go. So most of us don’t really need to worry about what we look like because our clients won’t see us. So they can’t really judge us based on our outward appearance.

This could be a good thing since more often than not, if you have an online business that is successful, what you look like really does not matter. Other times, this is a disadvantage since you have to make up for the lack of ‘visibility’, if I can call it that, with other things. Like say, make your website ‘appealing to the eye’. This is not so hard though since you can always just hire someone to do it for you. You have to work hard on the other departments though like customer service and product delivery. Everything else has to be twice as good as a ‘physical’ business.

Anyway, on a normal weekend the two guys above get roughly the same number of clients. Surprised? Different locations, different target groups, different priority orders, but clients all the same. So it’s pretty much your choice. What kind of guy do you want to be? As long as you market yourself well and to the right people, you’ll still do good.

PS: If I were you, I’d pick guy A. Not giving you ideas or pushing you against a wall or anything like that. Just saying Similar Posts:

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Weird topic to be talking about here, eh?

Love is a strong positive emotion of regard and affection. It is mostly used in regard to loving someone else. When you love someone greatly, much of your energy goes into making that person feel your love. You put hundreds of hours into these efforts. If you do not invest in your love, chances are that she/he will find someone else, who can do that.

A friend of mine started a new business the other day. It is an online business and so my friend does not spend the whole day working on it, he does not need to. He came to me for advice when he noticed that one of his sites was failing despite “frequent updates”. After some thought, I diagnosed his situation as being a case of a lack of sufficient love.

Managing a website is hard work. It goes beyond just regular updates. Managing a website is a popularity contest carried out among millions, yes millions, of websites. Why should I come to your tiny little site when I have akina Facebook to spend my time on? Your website may be the best in the world but I do not have time for it until I see that it would be valuable to me in some way.

Think of it this way: there may be an amazing and super interesting and motivating book available in a library. But if the library has thousands of other books, and this particular book happens to be in a top corner of some shelf, what are the chances that a great number of people will read it? Websites can be thought of in a similar way.

For the most part, in order to distinguish your website you have to love it. You have to spend hours thinking and working on it, trying and re-trying, testing and re-testing until you get something that people actually want to use.

I find that the best way to grow a site is not to try and target anyone – just target a small niche group of people who you think will relate to the sites content. Instead of making a site about farm animals, for example, maybe you could start with a site just about “white little piggies”. Niche-ing down this way has two benefits:

1. It is probable that the smaller niche is closer to your heart than a more general one. You can therefore be more passionate.
2. It is very easy for people to relate to your site. If your site was about farm animals in general and I was looking for one about “white little piggies” then I may overlook your generalized site.

If you aim to make money online through a website, be warned that it needs the kind of passion that can only come from Love.

PS
I do not know why I chose to use “white little piggies” as my example.

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These are some Time Management Tips I utilize (most of the time……) to reduce my time commitment in the business, so I can spend time on more valuable activities or just for personal time. I think they can be effective no matter what type of business that you are involved in.

1. Put a Price Tag on Your Time
Take the amount of money that you made last year and divide it by 2000 (40 hours x 50 weeks). This is your hourly rate. Whenever you are doing something of questionable value, ask yourself if you would pay yourself to do that activity? If it’s not, either eliminate that activity because it’s not productive, or outsource it to someone at a lower rate. You can now focus on more valuable work.

2. Meetings are Time Management Killers

• Don’t schedule meetings if they aren’t really necessary. I used to have a lot of scheduled weekly calls with some suppliers and other partners that we worked with. They would often be valuable at first but after several meetings, everyone felt obligated to join the meetings because they were valuable previously. Unfortunately, we spent the same amount of time in them and got less and less done. Maybe you can block off the time and meet only if someone really needs to that week. Better yet, don’t meet with them unless you have some specific business decision to make.
• Don’t schedule meetings for an hour if you need 15 minutes. If that is the time needed to cover something, schedule it for that amount of time.
• Have agendas for your meetings and stick to them. There really should only be 1 or 2 things that you need to talk about
• Meeting to talk about nothing specific is a waste of your time.
• Try to limit uncommitted conversations. In the business environment, it is perfectly natural to have small talk amongst people you work with on an every day basis. These are conversations about the weather or television shows you watched the previous night. It is important to have these conversations with others in order to connect with them and show you are a human being. However, too many of these kinds of conversations are wasteful of your valuable time . It takes hard work to know when you are doing it, catch yourself and get focused back on the business item at hand.

3. Limit Hypothesizing
A lot of smart people waste a lot of time hypothesizing an answer to something when they should just stop and go get the facts. Too much time can be spent guessing or speaking with feelings versus speaking with data and facts. It is perfectly acceptable to admit “I don’t know the answer” as long as you follow it up with “but I will find out and get back to you”.

4. Keep Your Workspace Clean and Organized
Keep your desk and computer clean and organized. I don’t have a permanent workspace or office (and never have in my young business career), so I treat every location I go into as a temporary workspace. At the end of the day, I pack everything up I need, put it in my briefcase and leave.

5. Use a “To-Do” list
Yes, one and only one list. I personally like to use Google calendar to keep my To-Do list but I know a lot of people who are proponents of taking it off the computer and away from e-mail so they aren’t tied so closely together. I might do that eventually.

Here are some other real important points around To-Do lists:

• Do not use your email inbox as a To Do list. Your email is a business tool used to communicate with others.
• Always make your To-Do list short enough that you can complete it the next day. Don’t have 20 things that you will never realistically be able to accomplish. I like to have 2 or 3 big things that I need to accomplish.
• Complete your “To Do” list for the next day before you close up shop for the night.
• Review your list and work to move things off it and always place new things on it.
• If you have your list in Outlook or Google Calendar, print it out and work off that paper.
• I read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People a couple of years ago and he had a great concept of placing your time in quadrants. He noted that highly effective people prioritized their time around important items and urged the notion that not everything is urgent all the time. So, I prioritize actions around these categories and try to spend most of my time in Quadrant 2 (Important Stuff but Not Urgent). There are enough unforeseen problems that pop-up and consume your attention each day. It is always okay to ask others when they want something back from you to gauge the importance and urgency.

6. Check Voicemail and E-mail Twice a Day
Check your voicemail and e-mail twice a day. Don’t check them first thing in the morning. I recommend checking it at 11 AM and 4 PM.

This means that you absolutely have to remove any new e-mail notifications from your computer so you’re not getting a notification whenever you receive your e-mail. I even turn off Outlook’s automatic Send/Receive so that I can get stuff in e-mail without checking out everything that was sent to me.

Best of Luck with these Time Management Tips
These time management tips are intended to be helpful. They work for me on most occasions. No one is perfect all the time and it takes great discipline to police yourself if you want to achieve higher levels of productivity and effectiveness.

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working less will help your business grow

Over the years, we’ve worked with very many people and many, many small businesses. I it’s always interesting to see how a small business is run and how the owner approaches it. I was thinking about this today, and I realised there are two types of small business owners: hard workers, and smart workers.

Comparing these two is very eye-opening. Take two businesses in the same industry with the same amount of experience and you will get drastically different results depending on the owner’s approach to business. I am going to just say it: – some people work too much, which hurts the growth of their business.

I know a smart guy who only works a few hours a day on his business compared to the 12-15 hour days that other owners work each day (and a few hours each weekend). Based on my real rough estimates, I believe that his business also made about 5x as much as the other owners (in the same industry). Imagine that – you work a quarter of the time and your business makes five times as much money. Or to look at it another way, you are 20 times more productive with the time spent managing the business.

Both types of owners probably make a very comfortable income but even if I made the same amount of money, I would take the business that requires a quarter of my time. I could use that time to do whatever I wanted or I could use it to grow my business or start new businesses.

What is the Difference?
Smart business owners are incredibly gifted at creating a process oriented business. It’s a very educational experience every time we work with them or visit their offices. Everything such an owner does has to be broken down into repeatable systems and processes. If it can’t, he’s not interested in it. He could easily take on new business if he wanted, but the work would be ad hoc, and would not scale well. If it isn’t something that he can scale, he won’t do it. It might cost him 2 or 3 customers a month, but if he is spending his time creating systems to bring in 10 other customers on his terms, which one do you think is a better deal?

The other type of owner is very detail oriented. He believes very strongly in personal service and is involved in every step along the way, from marketing, to sales, to operations. Instead of delegating work to other employees, he does everything himself. Instead of creating a product that he can sell over and over again, he customizes everything for his clients.

Remember, this owner is very successful and he would be correct if he said he’s been successful for a long time doing it in his style, so I don’t want to say that hard work isn’t the right way to grow. But if he had just relinquished some control and created systems and processes so that other people could execute them, I bet his business would be a lot bigger than it is now. If he decided to put in just 1/2 the time each day that he is used to, he would be been forced to create systems that other people can execute.

When Hard Work is Required
When you are starting your own business, you need to spend a lot of time in the business, growing it. If you don’t do it, no one will. But instead of doing everything yourself, you need to start creating systems and processes so that other people can start operating the business. If you sell some sort of product, don’t be the salesperson, customer service, and operations manager.

Start out by creating systems to outsource some of the work and then continue to move away from each part of the business. Otherwise, you will be working too much and you will end up hurting the growth potential of your own business.

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Jazzified – this a new blog dedicated to talking about Jazz music. It provides an interesting and eye-opening peep into the local jazz seen from the eyes of a dedicated fan. If you’re a jazz fan, you should visit and follow this blog.

Eat Out – is a beautifully made and executed website that showcases restaurants in Nairobi and Kenya. If you want to find a place to…eat out, then this is the site for you. The site is not only elegantly designed but it has been managed well and has virtually taken over its niche.

KenyaMoja – a nice website built in the image of popurls. If you find yourself with too many local websites to keep up with, then KenyaMoja is the place to go to – it lists news and opinion pieces from all the major Kenyan news sources and blogs. Would make for a good home page, if you ask me.

Like Chapaa Presents is a weekly showcase of interesting sites in Kenya.Similar Posts:

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Mark Cuban is an American entrepreneur. He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA basketball team, owner of Landmark Theatres, and Chairman of HDNet, an HDTV cable network in America.

He is also an extremely rich man and a very successful business man.

So you know what? When mark was 24 he was jobless, lived in a house that was probably condemned for destruction with 5 other friends and dreamed of running his own business one day but had no idea what or when to start or even if he could actually do it. That actually sounds like someone ‘normal’, like you and I right?

Mark Cuban has a VERY interesting series of articles he titled “Success and Motivation” that give you his story of what it was like starting his first business. Please have a look at it, you will be motivated to succeed.

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So 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:

• Download DukaPress
• Find a suitable web host. Or sign up with Pamoja Shops
• Install DukaPress
• Load the sample data
• Configure your shop, upload your own products, and start selling!

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.

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Recently I was reading a book that was talking about the need humans have to be able to control things. While there were several experiments cited, one of the experiments was done in a nursing home where they had some younger people visit and spend time with two groups of residents. The first group could specify when their visitor would come and see them and how long they would stay. The second group could not specify when their visitors would come nor how long they would stay.

What the researchers found is that the group that had control over their visitors were happier, healthier, and were prescribed less medication than the group that could not control the visitors. 6 months after the study concluded a very sad after effect was noticed. A higher than normal percentage of the group in control of the visits passed away or became much sicker. What the researchers concluded (but hadn’t anticipated) was that being in control not only makes you happier and healthier but losing this control is much more damaging than never having the control in the first place.

Entrepreneurs Need to Control
One of the common characteristics of most entrepreneurs is their independence and need to control. When you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Some of the most oft-cited reasons for wanting to be an entrepreneur are:

1. Be Your Own Boss
2. Ability to Work From Home
3. Set Your Own Schedule

In each of these cases, an individual is control of their work environment and their day-to-day activities. They intuitively know that gaining control makes them happier than not being in control.

The Reality of Owning Your Own Business
The realities of being a business owner don’t always match with the idyllic lifestyle of the entrepreneur who is their own boss and sets their own schedule.

You’re often in a deadline business. You can never rest on your laurels. There are always deadlines to meet. Customers that leave you. Customers that pay you slowly (A few that don’t pay you at all). Projects that get canceled. Amazingly, you are always on the hot seat – even when things happen beyond your control. Client expectations are often unreasonable. Competition is stiff.

How to Get Control Back
A clever entrepreneur is business owner who has built systems and processes into their company so that they aren’t critical to the day-to-day operations of their business. They don’t “hope”. They take control by creating systems that eliminates most of the uncertainty of a business.

• Instead of hoping that existing clients give good referrals or people just happen to find you online or in the yellow pages, they create a predictable marketing system that delivers new prospects whenever they want to grow the business.
• Instead of relying on client defined projects, they create products and services that they sell. They aren’t subject to unreasonable client demands because they already have the product.
• Instead of worrying about cash flow and slow paying customers, they set up a billing process that means they get paid for the products that they provide.
• Instead of trying to count on unreliable vendors, they define the production process.

These are a just a few examples of how you can gain control of your business. By not having to work for every single prospect and every single dollar that you’re owed, you can spend your time building your business or doing whatever you want. And once you gain control over your business, and hence, your life, you will become happier. It’s just human nature.

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The Like Chapaa team has been hard at work trying to change the shape of the e-commerce landscape in Kenya. We have a dream to to make it possible for even the least tech-savvy people in Kenya to do e-commerce quickly and easily. Has our labor got any fruits?

DukaPress. Coming soon. Sooner than you think.

Interested? Be sure not to miss any updates by subscribing to Like Chapaa today, or signing up to receive free email updates so that you are notified as soon as we officially launch.

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When setting up a website, it will be more profitable for you on the whole if you prioritize getting good content down before you go into the nitty-gritty of what the site should look like. Most people spend too much time worrying about how the site looks and fail to give the same attention to the content of the website.

Advertisement experts recognize the value of quality content. It is best to get your message out to people in a clear way so that they can understand. In the ad world, ads are constructed around a central concept. This concept must be translatabled into language your customers can understand before you even begin to elaborate on it. Unfortunately, many people spend too much time on fancy designs and features when they move into online marketing tactics. This is reflected when customers visit websites seeking more information about a good or service of interest and find the sites useless.

Since this is such a basic principle of advertising, it is difficult to know why companies have not integrated the formula of great content/good design onto their websites immediately after creating them. The best designed website in the world will fall flat if its content is nonexistent or poorly written. Especially when pitted against an ad with simply “good” copywriting.

So, why invest more time and effort into your content before you have constructed your entire website? People are sophisticated. By throwing up a smokescreen of flashy design and empty content you are ultimately discrediting yourself and your product, as your customers will be able to see through the show to the lack of content within. When people are making decisions about items important to their lives, they like to feel as though websites have informed rather than entertained them.

Also, writing is a solid foundation for anything online. Your main mode of interaction with your website-browsing customer is the content he or she is reading online. Think about it: would you rather buy from a website with beautiful graphics that offers no real information? Or would you rather buy from a website with rather plain design but clear and thorough information about its wares? In this situation, it almost seems as though the ill-designed website practices modesty while the well-designed website compensates for something (Kizuri cha jiuza, kibaya chajitembeza). Whether this is true or not, a customer’s perception that he or she is on firm footing when making a decision is paramount.

If you are not comfortable writing your own content, it can be easily accomplished anyway. Writers are there for hiring, whether you want to add one permanently to your staff or hire freelancers from project to project. It is usually best to hire a writer to work with your art people, or to use the same freelancers on a consistent basis. You must find a writer who understands the voice you want to have in your copy and who is able to put ideas in a way that explains them exactly how you would like. This is not always quick or easy to find. It is worth the expense and search, however, to have someone who is aware of your organization’s current and future goals and who is familiar with your staff.

Content is King.

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This books explores the ‘secret code’ to achieving success in business. The author, a serial entrepreneur having started over 40 businesses, states that there is indeed actually a formula to success, its just that we do not know about it.

In his own words, “As a serial entrepreneur who has personally launched over 40 businesses, and as a consultant and coach to hundreds of business leaders, I’ve come to realize that the ‘growth code’ is out there, in plain view for anyone who knows where to look. There is indeed a code, a pattern, a DNA if you will, to achieving predictable success. The difficulty is that because most business leaders work in a limited number of business environments during their career, they don’t have the opportunity to see the pattern recur often enough to successfully decode it.”

Download the book: Achieving Predictable Success

What do you think?

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I want to be the “Digital Landlord”. I want to own website real estate that I can “rent” to small businesses.

This isn’t about owning domain names since that would not work. People would just buy different domain names – they aren’t that important for local businesses.

No, this is about owning the building, or the website in this case, that is set up such that it is like a goldmine for people, renters. Renters would be willing to pay landlords money if the property is on a prime piece of real estate that practically guarantees a certain level of business, right?

It is Better to Rent than Sell

One of the first rules of real estate is never sell properties (or something like that). What it means is that you don’t usually want to sell a great piece of real estate if you can make money hand-over-fist from it.

We’re marketers with web development skills. We could build websites and sell them to our clients, but what’s the value in that? We would rather make mostly passive income by renting out an extremely high value service month after month.

Websites are worth the amount of time that the designer puts into the website plus a premium based on the designer’s/company’s reputation and ability.

But let’s change the perception on that product from a website to a marketing system. If it can generate Kshs 30,000 consistently, the business owners aren’t going to pay for the amount of effort it takes to create, they’re going to pay for that high value that it generates for them. I don’t know too many business owners who wouldn’t pay you Kshs 5,000 to generate Kshs 30,000 in new revenue.

Let’s say that you can do this just 2 or 3 times a month consistently. Don’t you think the business owner would be more than willing to pay you Kshs 5,000 a month for a LONG TIME than Kshs 25,000 just once?

Build a Ton of Buildings
If this works one time, why not do it over and over again? I can build a bunch of different buildings, or “client generating systems”. And I rent out a part of those buildings to a ton of different clients.

Let’s put some numbers on it:

• I can rent out my system to 100 different clients in the same industry across the country at Kshs 5,000 per month (I won’t get too greedy)
• That’s Ksh 500,000 per month for just one “building”
• Once that works, I can build 20 different “buildings”.

What’s better than being a digital landlord? And I’m sure you can figure out the math for the monthly income….

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Following yesterday’s post, Outsource Everything, I got a few emails from people who wanted to outsource but were unsure whether anyone could get the job done as well as it needed to be. That’s an understandable reaction and it was something that I fought when we tried to outsource some of our work. Sometimes it feels like it’s more work writing up a description of what needs to be done rather than just doing it yourself.

So I put together a list of 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Care if Your Outsourcers Can’t Do the Work as well as You Can:

1. So what? – My first response is so what if they can’t do the work as well as you. I guarantee you that they won’t be able to do things as well as you can because they can’t read your mind. The problem is that most people expect the work to be perfect right away. It doesn’t have to be. If someone else can do 80% of the work and you just have to go back and clean up the last 20%, you still saved a lot of time. Unless you find someone you really trust (and that takes a lot of experience), you should do some type of quality control over what’s done. Don’t just think you can hand it off and forget it.
2. You’d be surprised how well they can do the work – This isn’t always true but it happens more often than you would think. Often times I send off instructions and just know that I will get some horrible deliverable and there will be a million questions along the way. Then I’m pleasantly surprised to see that they exceed my expectations.
3. Some things you’ll never be able to get rid of - There have been some tasks that I wanted to hand off to someone else to do because I didn’t like doing them but then I realized there was no way to do this. These aren’t tasks that you should be outsourcing because they aren’t something that you can provide step-by-step instructions to. These are things that you have to think about and there is no way that someone else will be able to know what you’re thinking. Just outsource everything else, bite the bullet, and do this one yourself.
4. Don’t hire them to do everything you do – Make sure you have specific tasks for them. Don’t provide them high-level needs and expect that they will think of everything. If you can’t write it down in steps, it’s not something that you should hire them to do.
5. Find things that are monotonous – A lot of your activities might have a “thinking” component and a monotonous component. Don’t be afraid of doing the “thinking” parts and handing off the monotonous components. We do this a lot when we outsource web design. We determine what the overall design and feel of the site is and then outsource the actually coding with clear instruction on what needs to be done.

The key is to remember that you’re not hiring someone to solve world peace. You’re just hiring them to do some monotonous tasks for you. It’s not going to be everything you do but you’ll start finding more and more tasks that you can write instructions to and that you can hand off. And don’t be afraid to break it down so you provide most of the brainpower and they do the rest.

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I hate to call our business a virtual one, but that really is what it is. We don’t have a bricks-and-mortar office location (unless the post office counts) besides our home offices. Some clients might consider it unprofessional but by running our business remotely, we are able to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost. We have created systems to allow us to operate our virtual business with the same effectiveness if we had an office full of people.
The Advantages of Operating in a Virtual Business

• The biggest advantage of running a business is the significant cost savings. Without having to pay tens of thousands per month in rent, we have more flexibility in our cash flow and a much lower overhead costs.
• We can run the business remotely. We are not tied to a particular location. We can quite literally work from anywhere in the world.
• No one has to be in the same location. For instance, I study in the US and only come home occasionally but the business still runs smooth! We talk often and e-mail several times a day, but we aren’t forced to be in the same location. We can also hire employees and sub-contractors from different locations.
• You can live wherever you want. This is similar to the last one but it’s a bit different. When I come back home I do not want to live in Nairobi. If our office was based there, this would not even be an option.

Running our Virtual Business
Creating a virtual business was a necessity based on how we started – part time. If we weren’t working on the business full-time, there was no way that we could have justified creating a bricks-and-mortar office for a business in which we almost never meet our clients. Once we went full-time, there was no need to change what worked. Here are some of the simple steps we took by necessity and now, by choice, to run our “virtual busines”.

1. Don’t Look like a Virtual Business – A business without an office, doesn’t always inspire the most confidence in potential clients, so make sure that you have all the outward appearance of a professional business. This is pretty easy and usually just means having office phone lines, publicly displayed physical offices (which my actually be your dad’s), normal office hours, etc.
2. Always Choose Online Software – By necessity, we have always gone with online applications as opposed to desktop applications so that we could access the same information from multiple locations. For example, we are a huge fan of Google Apps over any of the other applications. We are also thinking of going with the online version of Quickbooks over their standard desktop applications. One of the other advantages is that it provides more dependability. Even if a computer crashes, we have nothing to worry about since it’s just a web site away.
3. Make Sure Your Tools Work Remotely – Similar to the last point but one of the first things that we did when setting up our business was to get a VoIP business line. It’s not that big of a deal now but it was pretty new then. We wanted something that we could operate from anywhere and that was configurable and accessible from the web. We also use tools like eFax so that we can both receive faxes and we have an online version, which is much easier for us to operate with. We also have e-mail accessilbe phones so that we aren’t tied to our computers (which need to be laptops, of course!)
4. Keep Soft Copies of Everything – Again, by necessity, we have been forced to keep things online instead of printing them out and dealing with them by hand. Instead of filing cabinets, we try to keep everything on an online back-up site.

The Future of Our Remote Business
Someday, we may get a formal office location, and that’s only because it will be more cost advantageous when we bring some of our outsourced work in house. However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t still run a virtual business. Since I’m so lazy, there is no way I will be able to make it into an office everyday or have less than 2 vacations a month. Therefore, we will still need to run everything remotely.

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This post is a quick answer to all those among you, dear readers, who write in asking, “how do I make money online?”

We provide an ebook below that gives a brief description of 21 legitimate ways to make money online. I know that most of you have probably heard about all these methods but I hope that this article inspires you to do something with your knowledge.

What is the purpose of acquiring knowledge? Knowledge is only useful if one can use it to his/her advantage. It is important to read widely to get as much knowledge as possible. It is more important to do something with the knowledge that you gain. Set your goals high, make a plan and just do it. Don’t think or otherwise procrastinate, just do it. You’ll be surprised at what you can achieve.

What if you fail? So what? Everyone fails. Do you know of any smart or successful people that you admire? What you do not know is how many times they have failed in the past. If you have never failed at something before, it probably means that you have never really tried to do anything before. Besides, once you get successful no one will even remember your past mistakes and failures.

So, grab the ebook and get started. Do something, don’t just sit there!

Download: 21 Ways To Make Money Online

The ebook is somewhat dated (old) and does not go into much detail. Please leave a comment below if you require any more information – I’ll be happy to help with any explanations or advice.

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I have a story for you: a few years ago, one of my best friends quit his job. He used to work at one of the best performing companies in the Nairobi stock exchange. He quit so that he could set up his own advertising agency.

Guess what? His parents and his whole family, really, were up in arms over his decision. They could not believe why anyone would leave such a high paying job. His uncles even took time visiting him to ‘advise’ him to go back to his old job. To this day, one of his uncles always calls him with contacts of managers at large companies – he asks my friend to send his CV to the managers so that he can ‘make something out of his life’.

What you probably won’t believe is that my friend’s business is doing quite well. He has about twelve employees now, and has been profitable since his first month. Yet his family still refers to his work as ‘jua kali nonsense’. He should go get a ‘real’ job like everyone else, they say.

Really?

Recently in Thika, I heard of a bizarre incident. My friend’s dad was interviewing job applicants. The quality of the applicants was impressive – almost everyone had an impressive CV full of various qualifications and accomplishments. Some of the applicants were university graduates with degrees and everyone seemed like they really wanted the job. Surprisingly, as it turns out, the job in question was that of digging trenches. Can you believe it?

On one hand we have impressively qualified people looking for a job, any job. On the other hand we have the brave few who have enough courage to try and start their own businesses. Who would you rather be?

Let’s face it, we do not have an entrepreneurial culture in this country. How can people who try and start their own businesses be looked down upon by their families and societies while what they are doing is precisely what is needed to address our high unemployment rates? We need more people starting businesses yet these people’s mothers and fathers won’t let them. They’d much rather have their loved one’s join the over saturated job hunting market.

We need change! We need people like you and me to start businesses today. We need society to stop stopping us. We need to embrace the entrepreneurial culture in this country!

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I’ve, really, not had any problems with the YU mobile network ever since I made the switch from Safaricom. But things are starting to get…weird.

Kwanza, what happened to the clarity I used to love? Talking on my YU line used to be a joy. The last two days have been close to torture. How long shall I continue to pay someone to torture me?

Pili, and more importantly: a few of my friends have complained that they loaded airtime on YU and it simply…vanished. I did not pay much attention to this as I did not think YU would let something like that happen. I mean, if customers cannot trust that the money they put on their phone will remain theirs until they use it then YU has no business. Well, this morning I ‘lost’ Ksh 50 when I loaded my phone. Lost! To make matters worse, the customer service was unhelpful and bordering on rude…and they hang up the phone as I was talking.

Dear YU, I do not know what’s going on with you people. You used to be really good. But now….well, you’re bordering on being thieves.

YU have to realise that their business is that of providing ‘infrastructure’. People rely on their service for important things (like work). Whenever a phone company like YU has issues, the lives of its subscribers are inconvenienced in multiple and painful ways. For this reason, people will only use those phone service companies which they feel they can trust.

It seems that one can no longer trust YU. How sad – when at some point they were one of the better phone companies out there….

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So, we’re hiring! We want to expand the web design and development team and we hope that all of you beautiful and talented people would like to work with us.

Definition and Nature of the Work
Web designers are responsible for creating the look and feel of World Wide Web pages for a client’s Web site. This involves developing a graphic design that effectively communicates the ideas being promoted by the Web site. A web designer may take part in the initial planning of a Web site, meeting with the client to discuss ideas for the layout and organization of the site, the types of colors or images to use (photos, illustrations, videos, etc.), and other matters concerning overall graphic design. Sometimes a web producer has already developed a basic concept for the web page. In this case it is the web designer’s task to create a design that matches the producer’s ideas.

Because web designers work with a client or web producer to develop and refine ideas, they must have strong verbal and visual communications skills. Designers should be able to listen closely to the client and create pages that reflect what the client is looking for. They also need to be flexible because they may be called upon to change their designs. Since Web sites are constantly updated to remain current, a designer has to be able to work well under the pressure of tight deadlines and changing demands.

What We Are Looking For
We are looking to hire people who know their jobs. People who know that a website, above all, is a marketing tool. Specifically, we require that you be proficient (or willing to learn) in the following:

• PHP
• CSS & HTML
• The art of using Photoshop or similar software
• Javascript

We develop primarily on the Wordpress platform and so knowledge of how to work with Wordpress (or any other CMS) is an added bonus.

Please send a brief cover letter, your CV/resume and samples of your work when you apply. You may apply by sending an email to hello[at]nickelpro.com

Thank you for your time. Please remember that you don’t have to be in Kenya to get the job!

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From my experience on Like Chapaa, lots and lots of people would like to be freelancers. Probably even you, yes?

While it is true that many try and succeed, it is also true that many try but fail. This could be due to many reasons and, probably, one of those reasons is that many people simply do not know what, exactly, to do when starting out. Are you a freelancer trying to set up and you do not know what to do?

This e-book will help you to build the foundation of a prominent and successful freelancing career. Taking you from the first steps in building your name through to a deeper understanding of how your thinking can affect the results you achieve, How To Be A Freelancing Genius Pt 1 will assist you through the most important stages of your growth. All this for for free!

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Getting an online job is hard. Very hard. This is because the competition is stiff. This post is an extract of an email in which I explain how to best prepare yourself so that you can actually get an online job.

First off, please do everyone a favour and only apply for jobs that you are actually qualified to do. Do not bid for a web design project when all you know is how to use Microsoft’s Frontpage. Keep in mind that you are competing with experts in their fields. You must also be an expert, or at the very least very good at what you want to do. Whoever is going to pay you is interested in your expertise and experience.

Even if you know your stuff backwards and forwards, getting the first few gigs online will be extremely hard. This may be due to many reasons but I think it helps if you understand what potential employers are looking for:

1. They need to hire someone who is skilled at what he does
2. They need assurance that you are trustworthy and reliable
3. They need the best price

The first two are the hardest to achieve. In our experience, people looking for online jobs really need to create a portfolio-like document where they will attempt to address issues #1 and #2 above. A portfolio is a job-hunting tool that you develop which gives employers a complete picture of who you are – your experience, your education, your accomplishments, your skill sets – and what you have the potential to become – much more than just a cover letter and CV/resume can provide. You can use your portfolio to showcase a point, to illustrate the depth of your skills and experience, and to show off previous work and accomplishments.

In you portfolio, you need to talk about yourself as regards the job that you are applying for and market yourself as having the skills and experience to do the job to a high standard of quality. Specifically, you need to include:

• A list of similar jobs that you have done in the past. This is important in that the potential employer can see that you can actually do the work and that you have the experience and wisdom of having done it before.

  What do you do when you do not have a list of past jobs done? You may be asking this if you are absolutely new to the whole idea of freelancing. Hmm, well, no one said you have to give a list of jobs that you did for other people, did they? If you are a writer, why not write a few articles in your spare time and put them in your portfolio as “samples of work done”? Same thing goes for web designers, artists, etc.

• A list of testimonials. This is a list of people who you have worked with in the past and who can vouch for you and say that you rock! How do you get testimonials? Well, always try to ask for them after every single gig. Not many people will refuse to give you.

  How can you get testimonials if you are new to freelancing? This is tough. Your best bet is to do some jobs for free for people on condition that they give you testimonials. Do not make the mistake of writing fake testimonials.

Cover Letter
You have your nice portfolio, which is like your CV/resume and you are all set, eh? Well, not quite. Never forget to send out a suitable and meaningful cover letter with each job application.

When applying for an online job, most people just write a one or two line application that generally reads, “see my attached portfolio”. This is wrong! A cover letter should always accompany the portfolio. It should be used to introduce yourself and why you are emailing. It is also a unique opportunity to showcase your unique personality or traits that could not be put in the portfolio. Always write a good cover letter.

That’s all you need, really. Put up a good portfolio and tailor it to suit each and every job that you apply for. And write a nice cover letter for each gig you apply for. Sooner or later you will get a job. Once you get the first one, you’ll find it easier to get more. Before you know it, you’ll be rich like her.

The Importance of A Website
You do not need a website to get an online job.

However, most of your competition does not have websites. Why not stand out? It will certainly make things easier on you. I always take people more seriously if they have a site. Why not put up your portfolio on the site? It can open many more doors for you…

Incidentally, Nickel Pro does offer a simple website package perfect for this use.

The thing about online job sites
Most online job sites have a “rating” feature where all the freelancers are rated according to how the job providers like them/their work. When you are starting out, you will find that some of your competition have hundreds of 10/10 ratings. Such people will easily win bids instead of you because you are not rated, being new. This makes life for newcomers very hard indeed. How do you overcome this? I do not know. Sheer diligence should work. Just keep trying, as long as you do everything right then you must succeed, at some point. Everything that you sow, you must reap!

Good luck.

PS. If you wish, you may hire us to help out in this. We’re experts!

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Well, well, well…things are definitely changing around here. I believe Kenya has its first internet sensation and truly viral video.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably already heard about Makmende. Had you heard of him before last week? It all started when Just a Band released one of the most innovative Kenyan music videos ever made. What followed after is…well, Makmende took over everywhere on Twitter and Facebook. According to this, makmende.com got over 120,000/- hits in just over 60 hours thanks to brilliant SEO and online marketing by Blue Monde.

What does this mean? It means that Just A Band’s video has been watched and discussed by tens of thousands of people on Twitter and Facebook and Makmende is the buzzword at the moment. Kudos to everyone who was involved in this.

Why don’t you do something similar for your business, your products?

Watch the video, Makmende Amerudi!

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can read all about Makmende here.

The title to this post was lifted off Twitter.

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I spent the weekend with a lively group of people and we talked a lot about the state of e-commerce in Kenya (more on this in a later article). Things seem to be really really picking up – for example, Nickel Pro has built more online shops this year than the whole of 2009 (and we’re only in March). However, as fast as things seem they are moving, great huge stumbling blocks remain. There is still no reliable, convenient way to process online payments in Kenya.

One thing that we discussed at length was the state of old media (particularly newspaper companies) in Kenya. In more developed countries, newspaper industries are dying because of the Internet. Many of these companies have good and useful websites but no one has found out how to efficiently make money off news sites. This means that the newspaper companies are facing a declines in sales because less people are buying the physical newspapers – preferring to read news online yet the online news is not monetized efficiently. What a predicament, eh? The news business is in trouble!

What about Kenya, though? Well, I think that this situation will take time to be apparent in Kenya. The impact of the Internet on newspaper sales is probably minimal. But for how long? Newspaper companies should be wary – especially with the fast uptake of of the mobile web in Kenya. It won’t be long before people, en masse, start consuming news primarily through their mobile devices and PCs.

Can we do anything to speed this up?

What if you poached the leading writers from all our major newspapers? You know, akina Mutahi Ngunyi, Sunny Bindra, Chris Hart…even Oyunga Pala. Take twenty of the best and most well known writers in the country – writers with fans who never miss reading them. Pay them handsomely to work exclusively for you and set up a website that is well designed and works very well on the computer and on mobile devises. Now, everyone who wants to read their favorite writer has to come to you. Hopefully, the newspapers will not find replacements quickly enough.

The question is…..will you succeed in shaking up the industry? Will the new business make you lots of money? How will the public take it? What do you think of this idea?

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E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,

(Source: Wikipedia)

Email Marketing is often ranked second only to search marketing when it comes to online marketing. If you are doing online marketing in any capacity then you need to incorporate email marketing.

This is all well and good but, sadly, in my experience I have not come across many Kenyan businesses that understand how to do email marketing the right way. Indeed many “email marketers” in Kenya are nothing more than spammers. Just last week I had a gentleman ask me, “How do you get emails of people working in large corporates?” The plan was to get those emails and then “market to them”. This is nothing but spamming.

To spam is to send unsolicited messages. They key concept of email marketing is to get permission to send emails to your audience. Spamming is wrong and illegal in some countries.

So, how do you do email marketing properly? I like to think of it as a three-step continuous process:

1. It all begins by finding suitable email marketing software. This is software that you can use to manage your subscribers’ list(s) and which enables you to send emails on a large scale. You cannot use akina Gmail to send to more than a certain number of people at the same time. I recommend MailChimp. Websoft looks like a nice Kenyan alternative.
2. Devise a strategy through which you will get people to give you their permission to send them emails. The most common and current way of doing this is to offer people something for free – but to get it, they need to give you their email address. Numerous internet marketers give away something like a free ebook, white paper, or report.
3. Develop compelling, interesting and/or useful content and send it out to your subscribers. Make sure you do this very well: if need be hire a professional to do the email layout for you. Do not forget to include a call to action in your email.

As long as you keep on sending out wonderfully interesting/useful emails and keep on increasing your email subscribers, you will get results. It will not be long before you see your sales increase. Email marketing is powerful.

An emerging Kenyan variation to the above is sending your emails to the massively popular Kenyan Groups on Yahoo or Google such as Young Professionals. These groups communicate primarily by email and often include thousands of members. It is an easy way to reach a large number of people. However, some of these groups do charge for advertisements.

Whatever you do, do not spam. I keep on getting emails from sijui akina Mlalahoi or Baraza la Taifa and I have no idea how I got onto their lists. I don’t have to tell you what I think of such groups and the people behind them.

That’s it, you are ready to go and start email marketing. If you need any help, you can hire Like Chapaa to handle things for you.

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So, I read this over at Alootechie and felt that I had to share it with you, dear readers.

Apparently, Divesh Mishra, an Indian taxi driver was worried that his business was going down. This was in January 2008 when the Indian travel industry was experiencing a downturn. Divesh knew he had to do something to keep his business going.

“I wanted to advertise about my services but could not do that as I did not have much funds,” Mishra said. “This was the time when I met a friend from Singapore. He was one of my customers and I discussed my problems with him. He then suggested me to upload a video on YouTube. Though I knew about internet, I had never heard about YouTube before.” (Source)

The rest, as they say, is history. Divesh’s video has been viewed 24,000+ times and he reportedly gets hundreds of emails a week – from foreigners asking about his services for when they visit India. According to Mishra it was amazing to get such response and this made him understand the power of internet. “It was a wise decision as I eventually understood that I could not have reached those consumers if I had advertised on some other media. Internet helped me to reach out to foreign customers,” he said.

Embracing the internet changes lives, and businesses. What about you, though? What are you doing to tap onto the opportunities provided by the internet?

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I’m sure you’ve all heard about the noble cause of the Kenyan government to make Kenya an offshore outsourcing destination. Companies like Kencall are, currently, the face of these noble and valuable efforts. I have been thinking about Kenya as an outsourcing hub and I still wonder, can we really make it a reality? Yes, companies like Kencall do very well but will Kenya ever be as big as countries like India when it comes to offshore outsourcing? I think not.

Last week, I was talking to some people who are interested in starting an egg (mayai) business. They want to sell eggs on a large scale. Do you know it is cheaper to import eggs from Egypt than it is to produce them locally? And that’s just one product – pick any industry in this country and you will quickly realise that producing goods locally if often several times more expensive than it is to just import them. What does this mean for us, as a country wishing to grow our producing and manufacturing industries?

You would think that imported products are cheaper, but those that are locally manufactured are of a better quality, yes? Well, this may be true in some cases but more often than not, it is not. A trip to Nairobi’s industrial area would leave you shocked at just how much of what we consume locally is outsourced – from packaging material to the whole manufacturing process. The people who outsource would like to use Kenyan alternatives but it does not make business sense to do so. Why pay more for something of a lesser quality?

What about services? We’re good at that, at least, eh? Well, not really. Undoubtedly, we have a very educated and extremely skilled workforce. But, it is still cheaper to get things done in India, or elsewhere. Case in point: Kenyan ‘technology’ firms (software producers, web design, web development, etc etc) often require to hire additional programmers, designers, etc to handle small tasks. The local labour force is very well equipped to handle these tasks. However, the local labour force is also nearly five times more expensive than offshore (often Indian) options. Who would you choose to go with?

Now, this post is not meant to bash Kenya and Kenyans. I’m a Kenyan too.

I’m just simply wondering: how can we compete with India as an outsourcing destination when we ourselves outsource to India? As a people and as a nation we have to ask ourselves: what are we doing wrong? Why is it cheaper to import sofa sets from China (and taking shipping costs into account) than it is to make the sofa set locally? Why is Kenyan stuff so expensive? Can we ever compete with economies like India or China? I do not know the answers to these questions. Do you?

What I do know is that the following are some of the things we need to address:

• The infrastructure in Kenya is good, but hardly good enough. We still have frequent power losses and water shortages, not to mention many other things
• The cost of doing business in Kenya has to be brought down
• Our mentality as a people needs to change. The average Kenyan businessman is greedy – he would much rather do one job for a profit of 50,000/- than 10 jobs for a profit of 25,000 each

What do you think?

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