You’re going to need to create a business website to make money in Nigeria. So in this article, I’m going to be showing you how to create a business website in Nigeria.
There are so many ways people make money online in Nigeria.
Some people use apps, and others do crypto, but by far the most scalable way of making money in Nigeria on the internet is using a website.
What is a Website?
A website is a page on the internet that serves the purpose of providing information, entertainment, or the like.
It shows up on search engines like Google, Bing, and much more.
Why Do You Need To Create a Business Website in Nigeria?
A website can be your ticket to financial freedom and guess what? it’s so easy to create one. There are so many ways to make money in Nigeria with a website.
Some of these include:
- Google Adsense Revenue
- Affiliate Marketing
- E-commerce
- Sponsored content
- Sell Digital Products
- Sell Physical Products
- Sell a course
- Create a Membership Site
- Sell your services and much more. (Read here to learn why blogging is a really profitable side hustle to start).
With all that said and done, Let’s discuss how to create a business website in Nigeria to make money online.
How To Create a Business Website In Nigeria
1. Understand Why You’re Creating The Website In The First Place
The structure and the design of your website will hugely depend on what you intend to use it for.
For example, if you intend to make money with e-commerce on your website, you’d need to install the Woocommerce plugin, whereas if you just want to make money with ads, that won’t be necessary.
So ask yourself the question, why?
Don’t stress over this, you can always switch up the purpose of your website as you evolve. This step is really crucial if you want to create a business website in Nigeria.
2. Register Your domain name and Web Hosting
What is a domain name?
A domain name is the address of your website, and you’ve definitely seen one of these.
The type that says “mysmallbusiness. com“.
Asides from the .com extension to a domain name, you can also choose to have a .net, io, Edu, and the like depending on the primary function of your website.
I strongly recommend having a .com or a .net domain name if you’re trying to build an international brand or business.
Otherwise, having a .com.ng website is perfect if your business targets Nigerians solely.
So how do you choose your domain name?
For every website I create, I follow these guidelines to make sure I choose the perfect domain name.
- Make it short and sweet
A domain name that has more than 2 words isn’t a good choice. You want the domain name to be really short and memorable, one that anyone could easily spell out.
It needs to be short so you could easily say it anywhere and refer people over to your website.
For example, if you own a restaurant in Nigeria, you should avoid domain names like “Deliciouscuisinerestaurant.com”, as this domain name is highly illegible and looks unkempt.
Whereas, domain names like Nigeriancuisine.com is almost perfect. This is easy to remember, sweet to memorize, and much more.
- Avoid typographical errors in your domain name.
So say you wanted the “NigerianCuisine.com” domain name, try not to make spelling errors like “Nigeriancosine.com”.
Say you refer someone to your website, and they try typing “Nigeriancuisine.com” into Google, your website, unfortunately, won’t pop up because that’s not your domain and hence you’ll be losing a lot of traffic to your website.
- Avoid numbers and hyphens
Leading back to the spelling issues, this could cause your website to be misspelled and you lose traffic to your website.
It also makes your domain name less attractive, remember you want your domain name to be short and sweet.
- Avoid going too niche
A niche is a segment of a large market.
For example, a large market might be “finance and the niche market would be “how to save money”.
As regards your domain name, avoid going too niche, imagine having a website called rubberband.io”, what happens if you decide to expand your company to accommodate much more than rubber bands?
You’d literally need to create another website and start once again from scratch, so make sure you are choosing domain names that can accommodate growth.
- Make it SEO-friendly
So I’ll assume, you’re a complete newbie to websites and all that goes into them. S.E.O stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the practice of optimizing your domain name with keywords that actually get searches on Google.
Now let’s re-use the Nigeriancusine.com example, people actually search for the word ” Nigerian cuisine” and because you have that keyword in your domain name, you’re more likely to rank and get free traffic from google.
While your domain name is the address of your website, your Web hosting is like the storehouse of your website.
Think of it like this, can you have an address without a house… probably not. Your domain name is quite useless if you don’t have web hosting.
You need to choose the best quality hosting possible, bad hosting will mean your website loading quite slowly and people clicking off without buying from you.
I recommend you use Namecheap for your Webhosting.
It’s extremely affordable and unlike other Webhosting service providers, Namecheap offers
- Awesome 24/7 customer service
- A free SSL Certificate
- A beginner-friendly dashboard and much more
It’s highly recommended for ease of things that you register your domain name and web hosting on the same platform.
This will remove the stress of having to redirect the different servers to WordPress.
How To Register Your Domain name and Web hosting
I only have to pay $4.48/month to host my website and $9/year for my domain name.
Follow this step-by-step checklist to learn the exact service and plans to run my website at a really low cost.
- Click here to Go over to Namecheap (The service provider I use to run my website).
- Check if your domain name is available or already taken
- Add your domain name to your shopping cart if available
- On the header on Namecheap, Click on “HOSTING” then select “SHARED HOSTING”. Then you will be landed on a page that looks similar to this.
- Add the “STELLAR PLAN” which costs $4.48 per month to your cart by clicking the “GET STARTED button.
- Connect your domain name to your web hosting package.
Since you already have your domain name and web hosting in the same cart on Namecheap. The process will be very easy. I’ve already highlighted all the selections you need to make to proceed to the next step.
So use this image when registering.
- Once that’s done, click on the “ADD TO CART” button to proceed to the next step.
- You can now proceed to pay $14.24 for your website domain name and web hosting.
Once you are ready, you just need to confirm the payment. After this payment, you will only have to pay $4.48 per month to keep your website running.
Namecheap offers a newcomer bonus most times so be on the watch for that.
To follow along with the tutorial, head over to Namecheap to create your own website.
3. Plan your website pages.
Your website needs pages, not so much on this, but there are certain pages that are compulsory to have for any website. Some of these pages include:
Your Home page:
This is the Major page of your website.
It’s what gets shown to visitors when you type your domain name into google.
When designing your website, you need to make sure your Homepage is extremely professional and highlights the purpose of your business.
Here are a couple of things to add to your homepage section, still referencing the Nigerian Cuisine example.
- Your Business Headline e. g ” Wow Your Taste buds With Awesome Nigerian Cuisines Recipes.”
- A Subheadline e.g “Experience deliciousness at its peak”.
- What Does your business offer e.g Add a catalog to showcase the different menus your customers can try out? Make sure they can buy straight from your website.
- Other elements you could consider adding include your recent blog posts, your reviews, and the list goes on and on.
An About us page:
Just as the name entails, this page is solely dedicated to you and your business.
People need to have background information about a company or business to decide whether or not they want to have anything to do with them.
Your about us page is a great place for you to tell a story that resonates with your target audience and gets them to be invested in your brand.
Add in photos of your team or workers as well as testimonials from other customers to show and prove that you’re truly a real business and not just some scammers on the internet.
A privacy policy page and A disclaimer page:
If you want to fulfill all the legal requirements of creating a website in Nigeria and beyond, you need to have this page.
It shows that you do not breach the privacy of your readers in the many ways there are to do so. Don’t fret, you don’t need a lawyer for this.
Simply using a Free privacy policy or disclaimer generator is more than enough.
Sitemap:
A sitemap is simply what it sounds like. It’s the map of your entire site.
It shows search engine crawlers where and where not to index your website. It’s extremely important for S.E.O Purposes.
Contact us page:
So if your web designer did his homework and created an awesomely compelling website with amazing copy, it shouldn’t take any stress to have people going crazy about knowing more about your business.
That’s where this page comes in. On here, you’d need to add details like
- Your Phone Number
- An Email Form
- Your Book-a-call link
Your blog pages:
No need to buttress too much on this, but if you’re considering driving traffic to your Nigerian website, you’re going to need to start blogging.
Blogging is simply putting out regular content, relevant to your business in hopes that your ideal customers and clients online, read them and choose to buy from you.
To start blogging, there’s so much you need to do.
There’s the research part, the optimization part, and so on. I’d leave that out for next time.
4. Start Designing your Website
Now you have your website hosting, domain name, and website page plan in hand, you need to start building.
Don’t get scared, this process is impossible to DIY.
In fact, It’s one of the most interesting parts of this process. On your Namecheap Cpanel, you are going to need to install WordPress which will be your content management system.
After installation, you will be able to log in to your WordPress dashboard. Once you’re there, watch this tutorial to design your professional website.
5. Optimize your website for S.E.O
What if I told you, you could get crazy traffic directly to your website from Google?
S.E.O is the magic code you need to make this work.
I’ve talked briefly about S.E.O already, but I need you to understand the power and potential in it. With S.E.O, you can potentially get thousands of eyeballs to your website and start making money in Nigeria.
There are so many practices to keep in check when trying to rank your website on google using S.E.O. Below are some of the most important of these practices:
- Get Your Website Indexed By Google: Do this by Submitting your Sitemap to the Google search console and optimizing other factors.
- Research potential Keywords you want to rank for on google. For example, Nigerian cuisine.
- Add these keywords to the Header, title, URL, Alt Text, and HTML tags of every page on your website.
- Optimize your page loading speed: The faster your website loads, the higher it’s going to rank on google. This is because Google prioritizes user experience.
- Make sure your Website is Mobile-Responsive: More than 70% of searches on google happens using mobile phones and if you’re able to make your website cater to these searches, you’d be drastically increasing your website traffic.
- Use Alt Text: Also known as Alternative text, these are texts that show up when an image refuses to load up due to poor internet connection and other factors. It also reads out to blind users that can’t see images.
The only way you will be able to make money from your website is when you have traffic. No traffic equally translates to no revenue.
SEO is undoubtedly the best way to drive traffic to any business website.
Ranking your website on Google will mean you potentially have access to thousands of monthly website visitors for free.
SEO is free and no business owner should sleep on this traffic source.
Conclusion
Now you have your website up and running, it’s time to start putting out fresh content for your blog and thinking of more ways to generate revenue from it.
You are going to need to learn how to generate leads from your websites using digital marketing.
I guess without website optimization, it is very hard to keep users. Thank you for sharing