Proven ways to make money online with your smartphone in Africa

Photo by K15 Photos on Unsplash

Today, I will share seven ways I have proven that you can use to make money online in Africa, some of these ways I have tested myself and seen them work, and others I have seen friends use them.

Declaimer!
None of what I am going to share here is a quick way to make money, you need to put in time and effort to do your research and then put more work to materialize it.

1. Selling other people’s goods (Is called affiliate marketing), you can sell other people’s goods by using your smartphone. These goods can be anything from shoes, home appliances, and electronics all you have to do is find a supplier of whatever you think can be sold online, take pictures of the products either add a small margin to the price or ask for a commission on every sale from your supplier or both
2. Selling or Rent Real Estate properties, the first time I was looking for a place to rent I discovered that I could find the same property listed by more than one agent on their Instagram account (as we call them Dalalis here in Tanzania) I came to realize that these people were sharing these property details in their network, and they had an interesting way of distributing commission once a sale was made, well that is a topic for another day what I want to tell you here is that despite the seemingly large number of agents online the market for Real Estate Agency is still big and growing to imagine the number of buildings by built-in Africa right now and then a number of new people entering “the looking for a place market” every day, the industry is still bare and looking for improvements and innovations.
3. Selling of your own goods or services, do you have goods or skills that you think people are willing to buy, you can start by looking where people that might be willing to buy your skills are and advertise your good or skills to them, these days’ advertisement has good lower and efficient due to the use of the internet and social media, one example of services you can sell if you did well in secondary and high school science subjects is to be an online tutor for science subjects you can start offering online tuition classes for students for those subject or you if you have some art skills like playing music you can start offering music classes online, basically, you can sell almost anything online these days you just need to do research on how others are doing and see how you should do it using the resources you have.
4. Offer social media services, this is one of the things I did during my college days, I would train and do social media management for small businesses and a small fee, you can start by learning how to do digital marketing online and start by practicing by offering the service for free until you get some testimonials and then with that testimonial you can be able to get new clients.
5. Get into freelancing, freelancing is booming in Africa now people are selling skills online the best way to start with freelancing is by acquiring a skill that you can easily sell online one of the most in-demand skills is copywriting, you can also learn graphics design, product design, digital marketing as I mentioned before, the good thing about freelancing is that it is boundaryless once you have the skills you can work anywhere online.
6. Start blogging or vlogging, Set up a delivery network, people are now buying a lot online, you can set up a delivery network by coordinating with motorists (commonly in Tanzania known as Bodaboda’s) also you can brand yourself as a delivery agent to business and offices and get a commission once you pay the delivery guy every time a delivery is made.
7. Be an influencer, being an influencer is actually being an authority figure on a subject that people on social media flow and listen to, for you to be an influencer you need to choose a topic you want to be an expert on and start learning while sharing your finding on the topic online that way you will get a good audience and companies will start paying to pass their messages through your to your audience.

Finally, As I said before, none of this is something that you will see results big results the next day you start doing, you need to put in more effort and work for things to start paying off. Are you earning online? How was the first time you made your sales online? How would you advise someone to look to get into an online business?