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Introduction to Galleria Small Business Guide - Cont'd
One of the major challenges of doing business online as a Nigerian is the 419 stigma. You are adjudged guilty until proven innocent, that is, if you are given the chance. This affects every aspect of the business, from domain name registration, web hosting, payment processing, partnerships etc. Some sites have a policy of not doing business with Nigeria. Some have Nigerian IP addresses blocked from their system.
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The reality is that we don't need them to be successful. Nigeria has a population of more that 140M (2006 estimates) and counting, and there is enough cash in the economy and e-business awareness to make money online without bowing down to Paypal, Yahoo and other characters that believe that nothing good can come out of Nigeria. The Nigerian economy is large enough to create internet millionaires and billionaires without funds from abroad. Nigerian IT gurus can team together to develop a Nigerian online payment system, if that is not in the works already
Things are changing gradually, with Visa and MasterCard coming to Nigeria, and Nigeria being delisted from the FATF blacklist. A day will come when Paypal will beg to come to Nigeria the way Google was grilled before they were allowed to operate in China.
For now, I would suggest that anyone starting an online business should focus on Nigeria as your target market. Develop a product or service that will be of use to Nigerians and promote your business. You will make it. Try to compete in foreign markets with the 419 stigma puts you in a situation of negotiating from a position of weakness. The Nigerian e-business terrain is virgin, and there are so many frontiers to easily conquer, rather than expending time, energy and resources in saturated US, EU and Asian markets.
Lack of Link Exchange Awareness of other Webmasters
One of the challenges of doing online business in Nigeria is lack of link exchange awareness of many Nigerian webmasters. Very few Nigerian sites exchange links with ach other. They float solo in cyberspace, and if you do a Google search for them, they don't show up in the first two pages of the search engine results pages (SERPS). Some do have the awareness, but for whatever reasons, decide to go it alone, or exchange links with foreign sites.
The import of this may not sink home until you start running your site and come across the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The internet is a network of computers. That is the hardware. What makes the internet world wide web are web sites linking each other. To move form one site to another, you have to click on a link (hyperlink). The biggest and most popular sites in the world (apart from news sites) are those with the largest number of links. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. These are search engines, followed by directories. When people go online, they are looking for information. They don’t have the web address of the websites they want to visit, and they cannot "cram" all the website addresses they need, so they go to a search engine of directory to find their way.
Just imagine the internet without Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine or directory. You will not be able to go anywhere. Search engines reward sites that link to others, and are linked to. Their name comes out tops in the search engine results.
Now, why is this a challenge? You send a mail to a fellow webmaster asking for a link exchange, and you don't get a response. Sure, you can exchange links with webmasters abroad, but if your site is about Nigeria, the most beneficial links are those from Nigerian websites that will bring you Nigerian traffic as well as score higher based on relevancy factor in the search engine algorithms. More on this in the SEO topic.
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