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Is Bulk SMS Business In Nigeria Crashing?

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

Bulk SMS entered the Nigerian market with a big bang. It became the newest make money online song and I wrote about it in my post  Bulk SMS Reseller In Nigeria. As competition in the market for bulk sms intensified, I was greatly amused and I wrote another article pointing out that using price as basis for competition is not a healthy thing. You can read the article, Bulk SMS Reseller Price War. As at today, it seems the story has changed. It seems the Bulk SMS market in Nigeria is collapsing. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Bulk Sms Reselling

Bulk Sms

I am not a Bulk SMS reseller. But I’m a heavy user of bulk SMS. I subscribed to one of the most reliable bulk SMS reseller and I have been enjoying their service until recently when I noticed that my sent messages were not getting delivered. I thought it was just a hitch in their system, so I went online and chatted with one of their representative.

Well, I was treated to a very good customer service and I thought that the situation will be rectified. Unfortunately, a week after, the same situation is still persisting. Over 60 percent of the messages I sent doesn’t get delivered and that was really embarrassing.

I was actually thinking of switching to another reseller because I was loosing money. Every time a message sent is not delivered, I loose the money spent on sending the message while at the same time I suffer the embarrassment of intended recipient of such message calling that they never got the message. That is not good for an entrepreneur like me. So I made up my mind to switch to another reseller. But the question on my mind was, which of the myriad of bulk sms reseller parading themselves as the best solution provider in the market should I subscribe to?

Should I join the bandwagon and become  a bulk sms reseller myself? After giving it a thought, I decided that I’m not ready for sms reseller business. I already have my hand full for now. I believe in giving my best in whatever I lay my hands on. Since I don’t have the time to commit to the business of reselling sms, then there is no point going into it for now. My good name is my greatest asset. So the option left is to subscribe to another bulk sms reseller.

Well, while searching for the best provider to subscribe to, I discovered that I’m not the only one complaining about undelivered messages. Some of my friends are complaining also. And funny enough, we subscribed to different bulk sms resellers. So that showed me that it wasn’t only my provider that was having hitches with their services, many more in the bulk sms business are experiencing the same.

Now, someone suggested that GSM operators in Nigeria are responsible for the undelivered messages! How true is that? Whenever, I send messages from my phone using the GSM operators (I have 3lines, MTN, Glo and Etisalat) the messages get delivered. However, when I send bulk SMS to the same operators some get delivered, while some don’t get delivered. A friend suggested that the GSM operators are sabotaging the business of bulk sms reseller. That sound ridiculous to me. But could it be true? There are too many questions and little comforting answers.

What has been your experience as a user of  Bulk SMS in the past one month? Do you have answer to the questions raised above? Kindly say in a comment. You might save a business by doing so. Thanks for reading. Cheers.

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Posted in Entrepreneur, Nigerian, small business | 64 Comments »

Making Money While Making The World A Better Place

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Every entrepreneur is out to make money, but deep down inside, every entrepreneur wants to leave an indelible mark in history as one that made the world a better place. How do you realize the goal of affecting the world by giving to charity while pursuing the goal of acquiring wealth. This is a dilemma to too many entrepreneurs.

If you talk to an entrepreneur and mention charity you would expect them to hiss like a snake and curl up into a ball, or is that just the entrepreneurs I talk to? Either way people rarely expect business and charity to mix well, one is about making money and the other is about giving it away.

 

GiveaCar

Give A Car To Charity

But sometimes you can find the perfect angle. A way to make money while also making the world a better place. That may sound impractical, but a little bit of creativity makes it feasible.

Giveacar is a company that specializes in letting you donate your car to charity. Most people with an old car they don’t want any more tend to just get rid of it at any old price just to be rid of it. Giveacar takes the responsibility off the customer’s hands by finding the best price for the car and giving the proceeds to the charity of their choice.

The preferred charity is a matter of your choice. Irrespective of the charity you choose, an additional benefit is that you can have the peace of mind that you are contributing to a cleaner environment by allowing Giveacar to handle the proper recycling of your old car or van. It is on record that every year on average, just over 2 million cars and vans reach the end of their useful lives, and the average new car requires the energy equivalent of 1540 gallons of petrol to manufacture.

This is why Giveacar will either sell your car on to a dealership that will fix it up and get it back on the road for as long as possible, or have it drained of any hazardous fluids and stripped for parts and materials in a safe and environmentally friendly manner.

Whether you choose a charity for the environment, the poor, the blind or the sick, you make the world a greener place by putting your car to use somewhere instead of adding it to the heap at the junk yard.

It’s hard to argue with a company that makes money by supporting hundreds of charities across the UK through taking old cars and recycling them to save the environment. In the film Wall Street, Michael Douglas made that speech about how greed was good.

It’s businesses like Giveacar that show us that greed is not good, it just shows lack of creativity. There is a joy that you derive when you lend a helping hand to the needy. Giveacar can help you do just that. You can get more information by visiting their website at Giveacar. Cheers.

I sure look forward to when a successful entrepreneur will implement this concept in my country. It is actually possible to make money while making the world a better place. You only need a bit of creativity to merge the two goals together.

Note: This post is not a paid review, it was born out of my chat with Daniel of Giveacar who visited this site. This piece is my idea of spreading the knowledge that entrepreneur is not just about making money, what you actually do with what you have determines how successful you really are! Feel free to drop your thought in a comment.

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Posted in Entrepreneur, Financial Intelligence, small business | 13 Comments »

What Benefit Does Dot NG Domains Have?

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Is there any particular advantage I will derive by registering a domain name that contains  dot NG? I’m just  curious. I’ve noticed that quite a good number of Nigerian hosting companies are wooing their customers to buy the NG tld domain names.  Here are some of the arguments they put forth for the promotion of dot NG among Nigerian webmasters:

  1. Using dot NG will enable organizations and individual to use domain names that are otherwise not available. For example, while it might be impossible (or uneconomical, due to high pricing) to purchase short and memorable names that had already been taken up by the early birds, it is now possible to have same using .ng.com or .org.ng as the case may be.  For example, you can’t get www.love.com, but you can easily purchase www.love.com.ng
  2. The use of NG will easily identify a domain as belonging to a Nigerian business or entrepreneur.
  3. Search engines may rank dot NG domains higher for subjects relating to Nigeria.

While those arguments sounds logical, only the first argument really  holds ground. Even though this website is registered as .com, yet it is well identified as a Nigerian website because the content focuses on Nigerian Entrepreneurs and issues pertaining to Nigerians. Also, search engines will list Wikipedia first before any other website if it has sufficient content to cover an issue even if the issue is 100% Nigerian.

In order words, while it is desirable to have a short and memorable domain name, I don’t buy the idea that registering my website as .ng is of any advantage to ranking in SERP. In order words, calling your website www.nigeria.com.ng does not guarantee you traffic from Nigerian web users.

If you write or provide information that Nigerian web users need, they will come seeking for your site. It doesn’t matter if it was named www.nigeria.co.uk.

Also, many web users are “lazy” and “hasty” they often ignore the prefix that follows the dot. So they end up typing .com at the end of any url they put in their browser.  So registering www.love.com.ng may not be an effective method of sharing from the traffic of www.love.com.

The only reason why I will subscribe to using dot NG is because it is Nigerian and I’m Proudly Nigerian.  I won’t assume that buying a domain name that contains dot NG will increase my traffic. Well, that is my candid opinion. I’m waiting to hear your argument in favor or against the use of dot NG. Cheers.

Posted in Entrepreneur | 23 Comments »

New Minimum Wage For Nigerian Workers

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Should Government Workers Celebrate The New Minimum Wage?

Government workers in Nigeria are getting excited about the newly approved minimum wage of 18,000naira. Does this really call for jubilation? I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but I personally feel that what Nigerian workers need is not a new statutory minimum wage. They will be better off if the government focus her attention on arresting the factors responsible for eroding the purchasing power of the workers income. If the present attitude of our leaders in maintaining the social infrastructures continues, the newly approved statutory minimum wage will have less than the purchasing power of the old 7,500naira minimum wage.

It is not the volume, but the value!

I personally feel that everyone would have been better off, if government has concentrated on improving the supply of electricity and repairing the roads. Those two factors alone cost an average worker thousands of naira per month. so much fund is wasted from each workers income as they struggle to provide energy using petrol generator.  The cost of transportation is also high because commercial vehicle owners pay heavily for maintenance of their vechicle due to bad roads and poor road networks.

Will The State Government Pay?

The state governments are already crying foul over the federal government action. They claim they can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to us, knowing fully well that some are owing their workers more than one month salary (at the old minimum wage rate). How on earth do we think such states will be able to pay their workers the new minimum wage which is more than 100percent increase on the old rate.

Will The Private Sector Pay The New Minimum Wage?

The private sector will now have to contend with disgruntled workers who will be expecting automatic increase in their salary because of the pronouncement of the Federal government. Unfortunately, many workers in private organisation will be dissappointed. Such automatic increase in salary is not realistic. Presently, a lot of private firm are having challenges with running their operations on diesel driven generator, because there is a hike in the price of diesel. Unlike before when a litre of disel sold for 110naira, now it goes for as much as 140naira per liter. That is a sudden increase in overhead expenditure.

Just two months into the new year and there are already many challenges for the Nigerian Entrepreneur to combat with. Unfortunately, our leaders are too pre-occupy with the April election to bother about the state of the economy. They are not helping matters in any way as their reckless spending is putting pressure on the economy. The warning from the Central Bank of Nigeria on the need for the executive to cut down on recurrent spending seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Nigerian entrepreneurs need to re-strategize in order to cope with the unforeseen result of these government policies. Every wise entrepreneur need to watch his/her overhead expenditure this year. It is obvious that there are challenges ahead. What is your opinion about the new minimum wage?

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Posted in Nigerian, small business | 23 Comments »

Happy New Year 2011!

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

Welcome to year 2011. May your dreams come true. May you experience outstanding success in all your endeavors as you put your trust in God’s ability and not lean on your human understanding.

Happy New Year 2011

Happy New Year 2011

I’m looking up to Jesus the author and finisher of my faith. He says ALL SHALL BE WELL this year!

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Posted in Blogging, Ramblings | 11 Comments »

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