How to Make Money Online in Nigeria

Following the post I earlier wrote about the redirection of this blog, this is my first post and it’s about how Nigerians can make money online.

Remember I said I’d be documenting my own journey here and follow majorly two post formats: “how to” and “how I,” this is the first and it is titled “how to make money online.”

Let’s go!

How to Make Money Online in Nigeria

This post highlights legit things you can do online to make money online.

1. Freelancing

Freelancing is simply the method of earning money rendering services to people. The service can be writing, graphics design, web development, editing, web design, video editing, animation, voice over and so on. The list is endless. The catch is that if you have a skill that can be digitally delivered (through mail, download or instant messaging), you are safe.

The process, although may not be dead easy, is simple. Get yourself online, put your work samples out there, find client, agree on certain conditions, deliver and have your money. You see that it’s simple, right? The only thing is getting through each of the steps of the process.

Click here to read more about Freelancing.

2. Information Marketing

Information marketing is a method of making money online by selling information. You put together a useful piece of information and then sell it. It’s that simple.

The information can be packaged in various formats such as books (paperback or electronic), video or audio or even pictures. The main thing is to gather the information in one place and then sell it.

Click here to read more about Information Marketing.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a very popular and viable way of making money online. This method involves getting people to buy someone else’s product and getting a commission for it.

If there’s a product you use and works well, you can make money from it by simply recommending it to people and when they take action (which may include signing up, registering, subscribing or buying a product or service), you get paid by the owner of that product.

Click here to read more about Affiliate Marketing

4. Blogging

Blogging is the mother of them all. Mother because all the rest can be achieved by blogging. I’m 60% sure that you’ve heard about and even read about it time and time again. You’ve heard about the potentials and many millionaires that have been made by just blogging, especially Linda Ikeji.

The way to make money blogging is to create a blog (I can help you with that), create useful content and get people to read the content and monetizing the blog.

There’s more to say about blogging.

Click here to read about Blogging.

5. Vlogging

Vlogging is a contraction of Video and Blogging, which formed videoblogging. You create videos and then get people to watch the videos. When you have gathered enough committed audience to your videos, you start looking for sponsorships and products to promote. This works best if you can provide tutorials on to do or use some basic things or make comedy videos.

Click here to read more about Vlogging

Other Methods

Although the above list is not the most comprehensive on the internet, I guarantee you they are the most effective ways and feasible to Nigerians. That said, I’ll list and write briefly on other methods available to us Nigerians.

Follow me dey go…

Selling photos — I can bet my laptop you have never considered this one. You can actually make money online selling photos YOU TAKE yourself. Many websites will pay you for your amazing works of photography. Some of those sites are alamy and Shutterstock. Check them out and see how they work.

Flip websites — Forget about the fancy term, flipping websites simply means selling websites. If you can build a website to a certain level whether in terms of traffic or revenue, you can put it up for sale on forums, put up an ad or on flipping websites.

The most popular flipping websites are Empire Flippers and Flippa. They both have different rules for selling on their platforms, please check them out.

Selling video courses/tutorials — This one actually makes sense. If you have a sound knowledge of a topic, you can make videos detailing the nitty-gritties of a topic and put it up for sale.

Udemy is a very popular place for selling video courses. You can as well sell via your own blog.

Filling surveys — People actually make money online filling surveys, trying apps or beta-testing a product, but I must be frank with you, it doesn’t make sense.

You actually can sign up on many of those sites and start earning immediately, but guess how much you’d be making: as meagre as $0.1. Now for how long will you have to keep filling those surveys (which are inconsistent, by the way) until you can amass $100 which is the minimum you can gather before you can withdraw?

If you don’t mind, Inbox Dollars, Swagbucks and MintVine are very popular.

The ones imma try?

Blogging and freelancing. One at a time, others can wait.

I have a blog already, which is still new though and is yet to be gathering reasonable momentum. No retreat anyway. I’m committed to growing the blog and hope it generates much traffic going forward.

Freelancing

Hmmm! This is the one I’m giving utmost attention.

I’ve been reading about freelancing for more than two years and never got to the point of actually implementing all of the lessons (many of which I have for some reasons unlearned).

The time is now and I’m not relenting.

The most important thing right now is actually building my portfolio and that’s it.

Stay tuned for more updates on the things that work and what I’m up to.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share this post with others.

Redirection: Blogging Naija Has a New Direction

Make Money

Hi there!

I've got a good news for you -- Blogging Naija is taking a new turn!

Before I give you the gist, let me first appreciate you! Thanks for being part of the blog since the day the first post was published. I sincerely appreciate you for that.

You are the best.

And if this is your first visit, don't bother about what the blog was. The future, from here onwards, will interest you and will have you checking back and sticking around. So yeah, legoo.

Now the gist...

From now onwards, Blogging Naija will not be the blog where you learn about tech today, health tomorrow; it will now be where you come to learn about ways to make money.

Legit money!

And this is how I plan to go about it:

I'll research effective, ethical and legit ways to make money online right here in Nigeria. Actually, I know so many ways, only just taking a serious leap this time around.

I'll explore the ones I'm comfortable with and document my journey -- both the good and ugly.

If necessary, I'll give a progress report including how much money I have made doing what and how.

There are three reasons for that:

To help you in your own money-making venture
To keep myself accountable
And most importantly, to make money!

So expect posts in two major formats -- "how to" and "how I."

I pray to God that He grants us the FORCE!

And that's it for now.

If you have questions or suggestions, leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page or email me.

Until the next post, stay awesome. Stay safe!

;) ;)

How to Unlock and Remove Locked Widget in Blogger

Blogger, Blogspot

Widget is the heart of a Blogger blog. It helps in the customization of a Blogger blog and helps, in a great deal, to add more functionality to a blog. But for some reasons, many of these widgets are locked, making it impossible to tweak or remove them.
Many bloggers had always wanted one of such locked widget disabled or completely removed from their blog, but couldn’t and eventually gave up. Well, if you’ve ever wanted to disable or remove a widget from your blog, but have been unable to do so, I’m here with the solution to your nightmare. The interesting part of this is that it is very, very simple and can be done in a matter of minutes. If a minute had been 120seconds and not 60, I could have said you can undertake the task in a few seconds, but well…

The only approach to this is a simple tweaking of some lines of HTML. That’s scary I know, because you do have little to no knowledge of HTML. Huh! Well, you’re only going to do two things:

Press Control + F to find; and
Change “True” to “False”

A relief? Yeah, we aren’t doing beyond that.

Recommended Reading: How to Create A Free Blog on Blogger With Your Phone

Alright, step 1.
Go to your Blogger dashboard and click on “Layout”. Check for the name of the widget you want to remove and note it. To be fool-proof, place your cursor on “Edit” before the widget to initiate an editing action, which then pops up in a new small window, now go to address bar and click on it, once the URL is highlighted, copy the Widget’s unique ID. The reason for this is because sometimes in the themes, it is unique the Widget ID that is displayed. Now copy that ID as in the below screenshot.

Step 2
Go to theme editing section by clicking on “Theme” on the left. Now, beneath the preview of the desktop version of your blog, click on “Edit HTML.” On the HTML editing page, first backup your blog – I wrote about how to do that in this post. After backing up your website, click inside the text editor housing your blog’s block of code and press “Control + F”. Paste the unique Widget ID you earlier copied in the search box or better still the name of that Widget, if you still remember.

Found it? Good!

Now observe closely the code of that widget from left (where it started) towards the right until you find the attribute “Locked”.

Have you found it? OK.

Right in front of that Locked tag, you’ll find function “true.” Now, change that true to “False” and save template. I used the widget named “Search This Blog”, but with the Widget ID named “BlogSearch1”. In the screenshot below, I highlighted the code in red, you’ll notice the locked function in the red box. For a locked widget, it will be attributed as “true” now change it to “false” to be able to edit it or delete it completely to get rid of it completely.

Yeah! Yeah! You just made the stubborn widget editable, removable and everything-able.
You can now go back to the Layout tab and do whatever you want with the widget.
You just performed an HTML magic! Hoorah!

Also on the blog:

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How to Schedule Post to Publish Later on Blogger

Blogger, Blogspot

Blogger is a very versatile blogging platform rich in features. It has a lot of features both common and uncommon to other blogging platforms. It can perform some functions other platforms can perform and also functions lacking in other platforms.

One of the uncommon features (unique to Blogger) is that you can host your blog for free on the Blogger platform whether you have a domain or not, without Blogger cheating you by posting ads on your blog. If you host your blog for free on many other platforms, they'll rip you off by monetizing your blog with their own ads and you have no control over that. Blogger doesn't do that.

One of the features of Blogger I'll write about today is how to schedule posts to publish automatically on a later date.

There are a lot of advantages to using this feature. One of them is that if you're a busy person, you can schedule one or more posts to automatically publish on a later date without you having to be online.

Another advantage of scheduling post is that it can help maintain frequency and consistency. If you've made it a duty to post on your blog every Monday, for instance, you can schedule two or more weeks' posts without having to come online yourself.

Recommended Post: How to Create A Free Blog Using Your Phone

So here's how to do it. It's simpler than ABC.

Legoo…

Login to your blog dashboard and create a “New post”.

Fill every necessary information such as the post title, images, post body, customize link, tags and so on.

To schedule the post for future posting, once you're done with everything else, go to post settings at the right side of the text area.

Click on “Schedule”. You'll be presented with two options as shown below.

Click on “Set date and time”.

Enter the date you want your post to be published and click “Done” when you're done inputting your desired date. It looks something like below:

Then hit “Publish” to complete the procedure.

That's it! Your post will be automatically published on that date. You don't have to do anything else; not even come online.

It's easy, you see!

Web Hosting Packages and Their Features

Blogging, Web Host

After domain name, the second most important thing in getting a website up and running with full functionality is hosting. It can be likened to the piece of land on which a house is going to be built.

Need someone to help you with setting up your blog? I'll help you for FREE. Send me a mail.

Without further ado, let's talk about some of the popular hosting packages you should know about and their features – what you get when you use any of them.

Shared Hosting

This is by far the most popularly used hosting package among beginner bloggers and there's a (or many) reason(s) for that. One is that it is cheap, and another is that it has the features a website will mostly need to run hitch-free.

Recommended Post: Easy Way to Download YouTube Videos to Your Phone or Computer

As the name implies, a server is shared among a number of sites. That is, websites 1, 2, 3 up to as much as a hundred share the same server and costs.

The upside — It is cheap and affordable (for the same reason stated above), but has everything a blog needs to run (with varieties based on company's policy).

The downside — Because a single server is shared, a hike in traffic in one site affects the other sites on that same server by taking much of the limitedly available bandwidth.

This type of hosting is good for portfolio websites (a graphics designer, for instance, can use it to host the websites used to showcase past works and projects) and new blogs that are just getting started and doesn't have more than a few hundred page views a day.

VPS Hosting

VPS, the short form for Virtual Private Server, is similar to shared hosting in that many websites share the same server. The difference is that, while they share same server, each website has it's own allocated resources, meaning that whatever happens to one site doesn't affect another.

The upside — An increase in traffic in one site doesn't have any effect on the others. Once a particular website exhausts it's allotted resources for a month, that's the end for that month, except it buys more.

The downside — It is pricier than Shared Hosting.

A regular blog or company's website will function well, without issues, with this type of hosting. It is preferred (and recommended) to shared hosting.

Dedicated Hosting

The name alone says everything about it. With dedicated hosting, your website will be hosted on a dedicated server, just for you.

The upside — An entire server is dedicated to a single user (blog or website).

The downside — It is costly. Also, there may be a need for you to handle some technicalities, such as back-end.

I'll help you change .blogspot to .com or any custom domain of your choice for FREE.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This type of hosting service is made for WordPress. But the catch is “managed,” meaning your host helps with some of the “managements.”

The upside — The hosting provider handles virtually every technical details ranging from security to software updates to site backup. It is the best hosting for WordPress websites. But...

The downside — It is costly compared to shared hosting and VPS hosting.

Recommended Post: How to Set The Number of Posts to Display On Blogger Homepage

Now that you know the different hosting types there is, why not go ahead and make a choice. Create your blog today!

Don't forget to share this post. Use the share buttons below.

How to Set The Number of Posts to Display On Blogger Homepage

Blog post, Blogger

Do you know you can set the number of posts of your choice to display on your blog's homepage? That is, if you want your blog visitors/readers to see, for example, ten posts on your homepage whenever they visit, you can set the number of posts to display that number of posts.

That's what I'll be showing you in this post. I have many posts teaching you how to tweak your blog to your taste. They're available by clicking here.

One of the reasons you may want to change the number of posts to display is to reduce homepage loading speed by setting it to smaller number of posts, since it'll load only a few images. Another is to enable visitors see many posts on your homepage, by increasing it to a large number.

It's up to you!

One interesting thing is that you can perform this process using either a phone or laptop.

Another interesting thing is all kinds of browsers work except Operamini. You know I've always bitched about the fact that Opera on mobile is a limited browser and the developers intentionally made it so in order to help with less data consumption.

With that said, lets dive right in.

Recommended Post: How to Change the Theme of Your Blogger Blog

Legoo...

You have two (2) good methods available to you to do this and we'll explore both, with screenshots.

Method 1

This is by far the quickest method of the two.

Login to your Blogger dashboard.

Go to Settings and click on Posts, comments and sharing

Once you're there you'll see an option to the right section that reads “show at most” to change the number of posts. A screenshot with an arrow pointing to the option is shown below.

When you're done, click on Save settings at the top right corner to save your settings.

Method 2

This method is easy, too, but not as quick as the first method. The advantage is that you can make other adjustments using this method.

Login to you're Blogger Dashboard

Go to Layout

Once you're there, click on Edit at the base of Blog Posts gadget. It's marked red in the below screenshot.

After clicking on Edit, a new box pops up for you to enter your desired number of posts.

There you have it. Easy.

Please don't forget to share this post to your social network by using the social media icons below.

Thanks for reading!

How to Write A Blog Post

Blog post, Writing

The title of this post sounds kind of funny, right? It may sound funny, but it's not funny. Far from it.

It is a serious post that need serious attention, because many bloggers do not know how to write a blog post. It's not a crime. Except we refuse to learn, not knowing how to do something is not a crime.

If you struggle with writing a blog post or usually lose your way in the middle of it, I'm elated to inform you that it's going to stop today, because in this post, I'm going to share with you tips on how to write an excellent blog post hassle-free.

If you're ready, legooo…

Conceive an Idea

This is the first step to writing a blog post. You have to firstly have whatever it is you want to write about in mind. How you're going to get it is another topic, but whichever method you devise, just make sure to conceive an idea, first.

Then...

Make an Outline

Make an outline listing the important parts of your post. An outline will give you direction; it reminds of what to include.

Recommended Post: How to Create A Free Blog on Blogger With Your Phone

The outline of this particular post looks something like this:

Title
Intro
Bullet points

Conceive an idea
Make an outline
Etc…

Conclusion

Research & Read

Research and read about your brainstormed ideas. In order to amass a sound knowledge of what you want to write about, you have to research your topic, analyse the datas, inspect the sources and take as many notes as possible. That way you write with authority and your piece will exude authenticity and by that, your readers would trust your judgment and opinion on any topic.

Write Towards A Goal

Why are you writing that post? What's the reason behind the post? These are some of the questions you have to answer.

Is it to sell a product? To generate leads or attract subscribers? To share knowledge or just to give your opinion?

Click here to get a .com.ng domain from Qservers for just #1,000

This is where many bloggers get it wrong. Some write just for the sake of updating their blog and that explains why they end up copying other peoples post or going out of the niche of their blog.

To answer that question myself, the goal of this post is to teach you how to write a blog post. Simple and straightforward.

Writing towards a goal simplifies your writing in that you already know what you want to achieve with the post and so you'd go right there; rather than looking for an exit or getting lost in the middle of it.

Check For Errors

This is very important, but many Nigerian bloggers overlook it. You have to go through your post to detect any grammatical error and inconsistencies.

A blog post with fewer errors as possible boosts credibility. It tells your readers that you take your writing seriously and that they should listen to what you're saying.

Write For Humans NOT Machines

Yes, you read that right. Write your posts for humans, not for Google, not for Bing or any other search engines. Human first, human always.

I understand that you want your blog to rank atop the search results on Google, but I want you to remember something: it is humans that search on Google not machines. Instead of stuffing one post with a gazillion keywords, write as many posts around the topic as possible and evenly distribute your keyword among them and interlink them. That way you serve your readers and at the same time serve search engines.

That's it. That's how to write a blog post your readers would like and keep them coming back for more.

Don't forget to share this post with other bloggers so as to make every blog post worth our time.

Cheers!

How to Change the Theme of Your Blogger Blog

Blogger, Template, Theme

In today's post, I will show you how to get a free theme, install the theme and modify it to your taste regardless of if you're tech savvy or not.

Before we proceed, I'll like to tell you a few things:

1. You need sufficient data, because you'll be browsing a webpage with a lot of images. And you know that pictures consume more data.

2. Another thing is you need to have your phone and laptop ready in order to view your blog on both devices in order to see how your blog displays on both. As a matter of fact, mobile display supersedes desktop display because people read blogs on mobile than on a laptop or desktop and there are obvious reasons to that. It may even interest you to know that mobile usage is expected to increase in the future, exponentially. Another reason mobile view is important is that Google gives precedence to it.

3. You don't need to have any technical expertise in order to do this, because 1) it is very, very easy to do. Easier than ABC even. 2) I will show you how to do it with screenshots of both mobile and desktop versions. I will not just tell you or explain to you.

4. Test different browsers to see how your blog displays on them . By so doing, you'll know how readers using various browsers will see your blog. Google Chrome (unarguably the best browser) and Mozilla Firefox (second best browser) display almost the same way (font rendering is the difference). Opera/Opera mini, I am sorry to say, is the worst but the most popular among Nigerians.

5. The procedure can be undertaken using both phone and computer. I provided screenshots using both in the post.

With those five things in mind, we are safe to proceed.

Leggo…

Long on to Google and type “free blogger templates” in the search bar and click on any of the results.

On the page, search for your desired template, test each of them and then click on “Free download”.

Tip: On some of the sites, you can search for templates using categories, tags, functionality or colour. An example from newbloggerthemes.com is shown in the image below.

After downloading, unzip the downloaded template and extract each of the files and place them in a separate parent folder.

Now sign in to your Blogger account

On your dashboard, click on “Themes”.

Attention: You can choose from one of the templates available on your dashboard or use the one you downloaded.

The available templates, as on your dashboard, are shown below:

To use the template you downloaded, continue with the following steps.

At the top right corner, click on Backup/restore. You may want to back up your blog in case of a mistake during the upload process. Click on “Download theme” to do that.

After backing up your blog, click on “Choose file” as shown below:

Now go to the folder you have all your new template files saved and look for the one with “<>” symbol if you're using phone or “xml” extension if you're on desktop. See image below for illustration:

After clicking on the file, click on “Upload.

Viola your theme has been changed.

You can see how it displays live on both mobile and desktop in your dashboard as shown below:

For mobile display, you have the option to choose how your blog displays—you can enable mobile view by choosing one of the available templates or disable it, the choice is totally yours.

Finally, check your blog to see how it displays on both desktop and mobile.

Have questions? You have three good options:
1) leave a comment, 2) use the contact form on the Contact page or 3) send me a direct mail.

Enjoy!

How to Create A Free Blog on Blogger With Your Phone

Blogger, Free blog

Also visit Naija Pivot for more posts like this one.

In this post, I am going to show you how you can set up a free blog on Google's Blogger within 2 minutes using your mobile phone. It's that easy.

Before we begin, hereunder is a list of the tools you need:

A Phone
Internet Connection
A Browser — Chrome is best. Firefox will work. Don't use Operamini, unless you're using it on a computer, which is the same process.
Gmail Account

Now here's how to do it:

Step 1. Go to www.blogger.com on your browser
Step 2. Click on Create Your Blog
Step 3. Sign in with your gmail address
Step 4. Enter title of your blog and URL (web address)
Step 5. Choose a theme and click on Create a blog
Step 6. Start publishing posts

Leggo…

Open Google Chrome and type www.blogger.com in the address bar. On the Blogger page, click on CREATE YOUR BLOG, as shown in the image below.

On the next page, sign in with your Google account. Your gmail address (youraddress@gmail.com), that is. If you don't have a Gmail account, log on to www.gmail.com to create one. It's quick and easy.

After signing in with your gmail, you'll be directed to the Blogger page, with a pane as shown below

In the provided spaces, enter your desired blog title and URL. For instance, if your blog will be about Nigerian Senators, in the title you can input A Blog About Nigerian Lawmakers and your URL could be nigeriansenators.blogspot.com.

After that, choose your preferred theme and hit Create blog!

Viola! Your blog is live. Visit the URL to view your blog.

Note: You can change your blog title and theme later. Don't worry too much about those. You can as well change the .blogspot to .com or any custom domain of your choice. I'll write a follow up post regarding that later or message me if you need help with that, hit me up via (farbloskay [at] gmail [dot] com) - no spaces, change [at] to @ and [dot] to .

Find your domain name on Namecheap today

Publishing a post

Publishing a post on your blog is even easier. In 4 easy steps, you're done.

1. Sign in to your Blogger account

2. Click on New post, as shown below

3. Enter title in the title tab and type your post. When you're done, click on publish to publish it directly, or click save to save it as draft.

4. Test each of the icons on the post page to see their functions - you can't go wrong with anything there.

If you have any question, send me a mail. It's here.

Enjoy your blog!

Please do visit https://www.naijapivot.com to read more posts like this one.

And don't forget to share this post. You can use the share buttons bellow.

BLOGGING NAIJA

Real Ways to Make Money Online in Nigeria