Can you make thousands of dollars by running an online business in Africa? The real-life experience of Olusola David and Daniel, ordinary people from Africa, proves that it’s possible.
You reluctantly open your eyes at 4 a.m. The sun is still waiting to start rising. You hear the city waking up gradually. Its noise from the ajar window is getting louder and louder. You know that you don’t have much time to linger. Every minute you waste may result in getting stuck in a terrible traffic jam and failing to be at work on time. You hustle to eat up your breakfast and put on your clothes.
While you half-asleep are coming out of your house, you see the street which is already crawling with people. In front of you, cars and citizens are kicking up orange dust while passing by. Cars’ beeps and humans’ voices are merging into one loud and annoying sound, which is almost unbearable for those who have recently come to try out African life. But you’ve got used to it, you’ve been living here since you were born. On your right, your neighbors, a man over 50 and his wife, are turning the space in front of their house into a shop. They, like many others, are allowed to have their small business to make ends meet without the necessity to register it. On your left, there is a bus station. The one that you need to get to.
The sun is rising. You breathe in dusty air and start making your way through the dense crowd of people towards the bus station. On your way there, you have to keep your eye on the people in the crowd. There is surely somebody who is eager to catch your off guard and steal from you. Crime is common here. You get to the bus station just as your bus arrives. You get on the bus. It’s old, smelly and stuffed to the gills with people. It heads for the downtown, where an office of the company you work for is located. The temperature is going up, you start sweating – it’s going to be hot today. And you have to spend at least an hour in this bus. However, it could be much longer if you’d missed the bus.
When you’re just 15 minutes away from your destination, the vehicle stops to let the others pass. The view from the bus window catches your eye. The view of a district which is totally different from yours. There are comfortable fenced-off houses and supermarkets. People live different life here. “They are lucky, they have real life, have money. More money than just to make a living. They can enjoy their life. I’m doomed to spend the most of my life commuting in this bus and working in my office, which I hate.”, you think to yourself. And so do the rest of the people in the bus.
Can you escape?
That’s how a typical day of Olusola David, an ordinary African guy from Nigeria may have looked like if he’d decided to follow a piece of advice that his parents had given him. After he got his first degree, they wanted him to go on and “do normal 9-5pm work”. Despite his parents’ resistance, Olusola decided to swim against the tide. Unlike many others, he believed in the opportunities which online business opens up and looked for the ways to make money online. After a while, he came across a marketer who introduced him to the concept of affiliate marketing.
This type of online business implies some company to pay you money for bringing in clients. You carry that out by using some marketing strategy on the Internet. You don’t have to buy goods and then try to sell them or provide some service. Just find buyers and get your share from the purchases. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?
Right, it does. Apart from that, it works as long as you approach the issue and look into it carefully. Unfortunately, having a few of experience and knowledge, Olusola David jumped at the first opportunity to earn some money online. He was blinded by the promised prospects to make a fortune in the blink of an eye by joining that affiliate program he’d stumbled on. Naturally, he faced the severe reality soon enough. Money didn’t pour in.
Many people would have given up after such a let-down. However, in spite of the fact that his first online business steps turned out to be a failure, it didn’t make Olusola change his mind and quit his attempts in ecommerce. He knew what he wanted and knew how to get it. He started learning from other online entrepreneurs, which paid off quite soon.
The first thing necessary in affiliate marketing which he made a point of was having his own blog. That was the start of his future success. Olusola continued learning and developing the blog. As the result, now he’s making 9000$ per month with his AliDropship affiliate program. Not to mention the fact that he has other affiliate programs and his own online store related to pets’ niche. Olusola’s friends, who didn’t understand him initially, are trying to follow his example now by starting their own online venture.
Another great example of the person who could have been in that bus if he hadn’t found out about the benefits he might get from dropshipping is Daniel from Uganda, the owner of several dropshipping sites. Similarly starting his online business with affiliate on Amazon, later on he learned about dropphipping business model.
He learned that dropshipping is a type of retail business that doesn’t require much money and efforts to start and run it. You don’t need to invest money in buying products in advance and storing them. You just present the products on your website, and when clients place an order on your site, you redirect it to your supplier who produces or stocks these goods. This supplier does the rest of the work for you, which includes packing and shipping the products right to the customers.
This business model seemed to be less time-consuming than affiliate marketing and promised to be much more profitable. Daniel has managed to expand his venture to 12 dropshipping sites which bring him $80k-180k per month. He even hired some people to manage his orders.
Indeed, starting an online business solves the major difficulties which people living in Africa face – the necessity of investing money in inventory and register your business in the country you live, risks regarding to a high criminal level, etc.
The crazy pace of life in an overpopulated city somewhere in Africa may make people think, that they are not the owners of their life, who are trapped in a big bus which carries them to their final destination. Many of them put up with that thought and take their seat in the bus. Meanwhile, people like Olusola David and Daniel refuse to accept it so easily and search for the ways to break out of the daily routine. And as you could see, they do it successfully. At the same time, they prove that starting an online business is a remedy to change the things that seemed to be inevitable yesterday.
