After having thought for months and months about a business idea
we approached many web designers and web developers in Kenya to help us build
our Safari blog. Our sole purpose of having the blog was to earn revenue from
adsense. Safari is a lucrative business in Kenya and the numbers of searches
related to Safari keywords are astonishing. We wanted to be able to get a share
of the pie through our blog.
We had all the research done, the first few posts written in
Microsoft Word and were waiting for a website in order to post the content and
apply for Adsense. Approaching many web designers we got many quotes, however
one agency stood out by sending us a questionnaire rather than a quote. From
the questionnaire it was clear that rather than throwing a website at our face,
the agency actually wanted to understand what we needed and deliver a tailor
made solution. We filled the questionnaire and immediately got great feedback.
During the process of design from the time we filled the
questionnaire to the final touches on the website we were involved in the whole
process. We were advised every now and then on how to go about our business.
For example: we had planned to apply for google adsense immediately after
registering the domain and purchasing hosting. Iweb advised us against it. We
were told that if you apply for adsense on a fresh account, it is highly likely
to get rejected. We should first post content, perform some basic SEO and then
get some organic traffic before applying for adsense.
We had high expectations from the blog and initially had thought
of becoming millionaires overnight. Iweb were instrumental in guiding us and
asking us to lower our expectations. They gave us realistic projections for
income from adsense in the coming months. It was so low in the start that we
wanted to drop off the project. We were however kept motivated and we decided
to finish the project.
It took us a month to get up at least 10 articles, we then did on
page SEO, reached out to a few related blogs and requested for some backlinks.
Initially we got 2 backlinks. We then applied for adsense and approved. We were
over the moon at this point. We then kept posting content. At this point Iweb
was mostly out of the picture as we had been trained on how to update the
website. Our adsense revenue was a few cents in the first few months. However
as we kept posting content, our articles kept being indexed and organic traffic
started flowing. We went from $10 a month to $13 to about $20 and gradually
increased to $100 a month by the end of the year. It took us about 1 year to
break even on initial costs such as web design, hosting and domain name. We
were creating our own content and hence the cost there was the time that we
input. If we did a minimum wage job for a month, we would probably make more than
we did in our first year. However the second year was completely different, as
our user base grew, our quality of articles improved with experience, we write
for high cpc keywords, our earnings skyrocketed.
Iweb projections were extremely helpful for the first year, as anyone
who was just starting out in blogging for money might have quit easily.
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