7 reasons why most Nigerian bloggers hardly make money online

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Posted by Felix Okoli on March 08, 2010 at 06:56:52:

If you are one of those who have already started blogging in Nigeria with a view to make money from it, then I'd advise you to spend a moment to read through this post on where I give my reasons why most Nigerian bloggers do not make money online.
Of course, blogging is becoming serious profession the world over in the US, UK and China. More and more people are getting used to blogging as was way of expressing themselves and connecting to people throughout the world. Professional bloggers blog because they see it as a profession and make money from it.
If you really want to make money online from blogging in Nigeria, then I'd advise you to read this reasons I've listed below on Why Nigerians bloggers hardly make money from blogging:

Non Monetizing:

If you are a blogger, then you would know that you can't make money from your blog just by writing unless you commercialize it a bit. A blog will generally help your readers read through your tips and thoughts around a particular topic but how do you make money from such traffic?
Here is how you can do that:
- Pay Per Click ads: You can monetize your blog by selling advert spaces to PPC programs like Google adsense, Adbrite or Bidvertiser. It is called PPC in the sense that when your visitors click on it, you earn a commission immediately.
- Referrals: You can add referral links on your blog to direct traffic to your affiliate sites after you might have blogged about the product or service. Here you only make money from it when you make a sale
Own Product: If you have your own product or service which you can offer to your readers for a fee, you can also make money by this means. You readers must have known you and know how reliable you are such that when you offer your own product, they would grab it and pay you for it. Most Nigerian blogs don't have a product of theirs to sell to readers and so may be missing out on this. You can sell products like ebooks, web hosting service, domain registration, product or website reviews, e.t.c.

Poor SEO skills:

This mainly involves writing skills that can help with the seo of your website. If you have poor SEO(Search Engine Optimization) skills when you are writing a blog post, then you are not likely to draw search engine attention and this can limit your ability to make money from your blog. A good SEO writing skill requires that you write good quality content surrounding your choice keywords and using keywords strategically and consistently. You also need to provide good quality posts that are good both to your human readers and search engine robots.

Short Term blogging plan:

Another reason is that most of the bloggers do not have a long term plan for blogging. Most are just too eager to start making money from blogging from day one such that after 4 months or so, they get frustrated and quit blogging. If you want to make money from blogging in Nigeria, you need to have a 6month to 1 year plan before you can actually start making reasonable income from it. If you are first starting out to blog, don't expect to make money from it in the first 2 weeks unless you are paying for search engine traffic like adwords of you have popular websites linking directly to your site

Unpopular Niche:

Blogging can be sweet when you just rant about your daily thoughts and views on the internet, but will that make you any kobo? It will definitely not unless your post is based on popular niches. When I say niche I mean topics, keywords that people are highly searching for on Google for e.g. Yaradua, Nigerian music or Forex trading. If you are just blogging about rice and beans without putting the interest of your potential readers in mind, you would hardly be making money online from your blog.

Low Search Engine Traffic:

If popular search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing do not rank you high or place you on the first page of search results, then you probably won't be able to make any money online from your blogs as you will have low search engine traffic coming to your site. This is not good as search engines are like the major contributor of web traffic in cyberspace. Some of the reasons why most Nigerian blogs have low search engine traffic can be as a result of the following:
- They do not appear on first page of search results
- They are in unpopular niches
- No popular website linking to the blog
- Poor SEO set up
So if you want to improve the level of search engine traffic coming to your blog, you need to:
- Focus on popular topics
- Improve SEO for your blog
- Get direct links to your site
- Invest in Google adwords to bring traffic to your site

Narrow Target Audience:

Perhaps, one of the reasons why most Nigerian bloggers hardly make money from their blog is because they think small and only target only a small geographical audience. That's ok if you are just starting but a time comes when you need to expand. If you want to blog about a topic, don't just think about readers coming from your locality like Wuse, Ikeja, Surulere or Lagos. Think also about topis that will be of interest to people across and if possible beyond Africa. You can sloe reblog on a local topic such that it would now include a wider area and audience for instance, if you wrote on a topic - "Problems of setting up a hotel business in Lagos", you can reblog another one that will include a different location like Capetown or UK.

"Increasing your target audience increases your earning potential from blogging."

Inconsistency of blog updates:

Most Nigerian bloggers do not really envisage that they need to be keeping their blogs updated in order to be considered relevant by readers and search engines as well.
If you keep a blog updated frequently, then you are likely to get more traffic from your readers and more likely to be ranked higher by search engines and this can equally help get you new blog readers. If you post on your blog in a day and then the next post comes up after 2 months, you would hardly make money from such a set up as your blog would have become outdated by then given the high competition by emerging blogs already in the Nigerian industry. Consistency in updating your blog weekly or daily will help improve the quality and respect of your blog on search engines and will increase your income exponentially.
So there you have it, my pack of 7 reasons why most Nigerian bloggers do not make money online from blogging.

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