How to start a business blog in Kenya: a site for entrepreneurs

Ever wanted to know how to start a blog in Kenya that shares business and entrepreneurship tips? If you are a Kenyan entrepreneur, successful business owner, business coach or consultant chances are there are a lot of things you know that the young people of Kenya, chama  (investment group) members and the owners of small, micro and medium enterprises in Kenya can learn from you and use to grow their own businesses.

It doesn’t matter if your business is making millions or billions of Kenya Shillings in profits every year.

What matters is the kind of expertise you have that when shared can benefit more people – making the Kenyan economy even better.

More and more young people in Kenya are embracing entrepreneurship – doing their best to solve the problems of their fellow citizens.

You can show them how to do this profitably, by sharing your business lessons with them.

Continuing with the how to start a blog in Kenya series, let’s look at…

Why start a business blog in Kenya?

For many reasons really. Some of these reasons include:

Start a blog to share tips with those who want to start their own businesses or those with young businesses

To help those who have started their own businesses sell more of their products and services, you can share, on your newly created blog, marketing and sales tactics (strategies) that have worked for you.

You can share why you narrowed down on these tactics & strategies and not others.

You can share how you stumbled upon these strategies, how you executed them, the challenges you faced when implementing your business plan, the tweaks you made and the results you got from all your effort and hard work.

Many people who venture into businesses, even the social entrepreneurs in Kenya struggle with sales.

And patience – growing slowly if you will.

And sticking to one business idea instead of trying to do many things at once – juggling business idea after business idea that end up failing a few short months after they’ve come to birth.

Many business owners also struggle with carving out a niche for their products in the highly competitive markets in Kenya and around the world where consumers have lots of options to choose from.

Share your strategies.

Show others how you go about getting people interested in what you offer, how you go about warming up leads, how you build relationship with them, how you present your offers, what guarantees you make, what benefits you sell to them.

Show others how you ensure consumers know you take your responsibilities as a business owner seriously.

Show them how you close sales and what you do next to ensure the people that buy from you become loyal and repeat customers, buying more from you and recommending you to their circle of friends.

Show them what you do when a client is disgruntled and they either want their money back or need a replacement of whatever it is they bought from you.

Start your blog and show others how you’ve built your brand. How you’ve set goals and beat your own deadlines.

Show others, in your articles, how you’ve been able to overcome all the challenges you’ve faced and continued to grow.

Show others how God your Creator has been instrumental in both your personal life and business growth.

Show others how the relationships you maintain have helped you grow as a person and business owner.

Share stories of role models, leaders, CEOs, founders and other business owners that have inspired you to keep working hard to cater to the needs and wants of your clients.

Share leadership and management tips – some you’ve learned the hard way and the ones you’ve learned the easy way – if there ever is such a thing in your worldview.

Share the lessons you have learnt about recruiting, hiring personnel, outsourcing, sniffing for talent, staffing, payroll and taxation tips.

When you write and publish articles on these areas, soon your blog will become a great resource for many people. Your blog will become a place people stop by to get ideas to grow their businesses.

Your blog will become a place people get value for every internet bundle they pay for – and end up spending reading your posts.

Your blog will not be for everyone interested in business. Some will read your posts and then do nothing thereafter with the great advice they get from you.

But some will take your words, find ways to use them to grow their ventures and take massive action.

In a way this (you sharing business tips on your blog) aligns with the reminder to always be your brother’s keeper. To share now, when you can. And not wait. For no one knows the mysteries of tomorrow.

While sharing your successes, failures and struggles, you can also publish articles sharing the success stories of other Kenyan entrepreneurs and business owners as well.

Start a blog to recommend books, ebooks, courses, coaching, lawyers, advocates, software, products, various services and consulting that has been beneficial to you in starting and growing your business

On your search for the best talent, advice, labour, hardware, software, apps, tips and even machinery to use in running your business operations, you’ve come across many great things and people that other Kenyans new to the business world haven’t come across.

You can write posts sharing, with your readers, all these great resources you have come across online and offline.

Tell them about the great people you have come across in networking events, seminars, conferences and summits you have been to.

Tell them about investors you’ve come across.

Tell them about the great advice you’ve received from the staff of the institutions you bank with.

Tell them about some of the great tips your attorney has shared with you.

Tell them about the great feedback you have received from your customers that have helped you reinvent yourself and continue building a strong business brand.

Tell them about great books and ebooks you’ve read.

Tell them about online courses and classes you’ve taken and how they’ve benefitted you.

Tell them about the apps you use to deal with repeated tasks, schedule appointment, improve communication between you and the employees and between your team and the customers.

Some will appreciate you writing articles of this nature. And you won’t run out of ideas for new articles to publish on your blog.

Who are you targeting with your business blog?

Given the different types of businesses people start in Kenya, it’s good to be clear about your blog’s ideal reader – the person your posts will serve best.

It’s good to know them. To know where they are starting from.

To know the things they are struggling with.

To know what they are trying to accomplish.

And then giving them content that speaks to their needs.

You can therefore decide to:

Start a business blog that targets everybody interested in starting and running their own business

The people reading your blog will be coming from different industries and niches – and they’ll have different motivations for coming to your blog.

Employees will visit your blog to learn more about what founders want.

Managers may visit your blog to learn more about how to delegate efficiently.

Founders may come to your blog to read the stories of other founders, to read your story or to read the kind of feedback some of your posts elicits in the comments section.

Suppliers may come to your blog to learn how to deal with vendors – to learn about the dos and don’ts of working with retail businesses, with shops and mall space dedicated to them and those that have internet-only presence like some online shops, classifieds websites and auction marketplaces.

Start a business blog targeted at those starting their ventures

In a blog like this, you can share your own story starting out.

You can write posts about the struggles you had to face and the lessons you’ve learnt.

You can share how you dealt with issues of capital, bank loans, packaging and selling of your products and services, sales, book keeping, registering a company website / blog, limited liability company registration with Kenya’s registrar of companies, tax issues and employee benefits issues…

Start a blog targeting those who have started and have established businesses

Established businesses often have some challenges that are different from the ones faced by new businesses.

You can start a blog that publishes articles to help these businesses overcome their challenges.

Publish articles to help these businesses simplify their processes – in the interest of their owners and the customers they serve.

If you go this route, you’ll publish articles showing these businesses how to grow with less bloat.

You’ll also publish articles to help these businesses stay true to the promises they make to their customers.

Articles that champion wise spending – and strategies that help them grow their brands and expand without their profits taking a hit in a way that would lead to sudden demise.

You’ll also publish articles to help these businesses remain innovative in everything they do without rolling their eyes to the already good strategies and processes they have in place.

You’ll also publish articles to help these businesses hire the right people – articles that will show these business owners what to do to get more out of the contributions of their employees while treating them cordially and respectfully.

In a blog like this, you’ll also be free to share stories from other companies that highlight their successes and some stories that act as cautionary tales to business owners who want to move too fast (or too slow):

• in growing their businesses
• in aligning themselves with current trends and what their competitors are doing
• in selling more of their products to their customers
• in capturing new markets
• in reinventing themselves.

Start a blog targeting people who run online businesses

If you are knowledgeable – and have success with internet service businesses – by running your own SEO agency, digital marketing agency, content marketing agency, or a virtual staffing and outsourcing business, write posts that tell your story and publish them on your blog.

You can also highlight the stories of other business owners who have built profitable businesses in this space.

If you have launched and run a profitable app or SaaS business (software as a service), share your story.

Share your tips, tactics, strategies and the challenges you have overcome (and how you executed your plan) to build a profitable business in this area.

If you are good at building content businesses  (online media companies) either by creating profitable authority sites or niche blogs that you have monetized with ads like AdSense, affiliate programs like Amazon or your own products, services, membership site section, share your tips on your blog.

People interested in businesses like these will thank you for sharing your story, answering their questions and for highlighting the success of others doing similar things.

The same goes for people who have started other types of internet businesses. Start a blog – and share your story. Show others how you overcame the challenges that cropped up in front of you to build a successful business in your space.

Start a blog targeting foreigners who want to invest their money in Kenya by starting businesses in the country

If you are an expatriate running a business in Kenya, others could benefit from your knowledge on how you got started – and how you’ve kept going.

How you’ve dealt with visa (work permit) issues.

The occasional bureaucracy and the crippling feeling that almost made you give up on working on your business and turning it into a profitable business that serve the Kenyan people.

You can also publish articles highlighting the struggles businesses in your niche or industry are facing on a daily basis.

Set up your own blog and share your story.

Share your failures and successes.

Share your tips to closing sales and keeping your business growing.

Share your story about how you went about registering your business in Kenya or other countries, how you raised the initial capital and how you work, together with your staff (and others who have a stake in your business like suppliers – even the national and county governments), to build a business that is profitable, socially responsible, ethical in its dealings and innovative in its space.

Choose the topics you want to write about from the ideas I’ve shared above and then decide whether to also include

Business news. How? By writing commentaries from what you read in Kenya’s daily newspapers and other business and investment journals and news outlets from around the world.

Interviews of other entrepreneurs, government officials, people you meet while networking, business authors, Kenyan leaders of various capacities and all the clients doing business with you.

Business regulations in Kenya. Bring to the attention of your readers new laws that have been passed by the national assembly and county assemblies. Laws that have been amended. Laws that have been repealed…and even opinion pieces whenever necessary – for example the effects these laws have had on your business.

Content related to what other business blogs in Kenya are writing about. Visit other blogs in this space and study them. See what you can learn from them – and use your new inspiration for new articles to publish on your own blog.

Register a domain name, get web hosting for your blog and publish content

When you are ready to carve out a space for yourself on the internet where you share your ideas, stories and tips, register a domain name for your blog, pay for web hosting and then start publishing and promoting your content.

Niabusiness.com can help you with domain registration and hosting, if you want to. Learn more here.

With the help of Niabusiness.com you’ll have more time to spend creating content to publish on your site instead of spending hours upon hours tinkering with WordPress, plugins, themes and any other services you decide to use on your blog.

If you want to choose a web hosting company on your own and setup your blog by yourself check the post things to consider before paying your money to any of the best web hosting companies in Kenya.

In Conclusion

Your blog can include all the above mentioned ideas if you are up to publishing a lot of articles every week.

Just make sure that your plan going forward includes only ideas that align with the reasons you want to start a blog in the first place.

If you are pressed for time, you can just start writing and publishing a series of posts on one topic you know about, then cast your nets wider, to cover more topics, as time goes by.

Running a business blog of your own will benefit your readers a lot.

On the flip-side, you’ll also benefit from the interactions that take place between you and your blog visitors.

You’ll also learn some interesting things when you look at your analytics to see the search terms people type in search engines before arriving on your blog.

The search terms section of your WordPress powered blog will also be a great trove for ideas for new post, products and services.

You’ll also learn a lot from the emails people leave you via your blog’s contact form or in response to newsletters you send your email subscribers.

To start your blog, know what you want to write about, register a domain name, get web hosting, setup your blog and start publishing articles to it.

If you have a question, tip or story you’d like to share with me and other readers, leave a comment below.