If you want to start making money with a website in Nigeria there are scores of business opportunities you can pursue doing this, I will be sharing the best 8 in this blog post.

Many Nigerians will readily tell you it is difficult to make money online in a legitimate way and that is mostly because most of them don’t have a clue on what to do and how to go about making money online from home in Nigeria.

Top 8 Types of Websites that Make Money in Nigeria

Now back to the topic “the top 8 types of websites that make money online in Nigeria” and how to identify so that if you decide to set one up you will know what to expect before setting out.

If you want to start making money online today in Nigeria with a website then you will likely fall into one of these 8 categories.

#1 News/Entertainment Websites

These are websites that are designed to share the news with a general audience. News can be classified as; politics, trends, lifestyle, gossip, sports, entertainment and business/financial. These websites make money mostly through advertisement and they usually require a very large number of page-views to make money.

From my experience, any news or entertainment website with less than 100,000 page-views per day will struggle to make money online so as a result, you need to have huge web traffic to succeed with this type of website. Examples of news/entertainment websites are; legit.ng, ynaija, Sahara reporters, Linda Ikeji’s blog, daily post and nairaland.com

#2 Niche Websites

These are websites that specialize in one topic alone.

The website makes money mostly through affiliate marketing or selling ebooks, targeted services and/or courses to its target audience. The main challenge with Niche websites is that they require a lot of research, hard work and patience.

If you start a niche website today it would take you between 6 months and 4 years (depending on the niche) to start generating enough web traffic and not to talk about making money.

So an inpatient and a lazy person will not likely succeed with niche websites. But once you start generating enough targeted web traffic then you will start seeing some money but as I said earlier it takes time. Examples of niche websites are; www.extremestrikers.com and www.businessplanwriters.co.uk

#3 E-commerce Website

The eCommerce website makes money by selling consumer products to online customers using advanced e-payment systems.

It is a web portal (a system that enables users to login with a username and password) and transacts business directly from their online accounts. The major disadvantage of eCommerce websites is that they are very expensive to set-up and require a lot of back end technical skills to manage it.

The people behind these are not cheap to hire plus the issue of managing inventory, logistics and supply chain and many more technical details. It is not a small operation to successfully manage. These types of websites are best suited for large scale investors because the profit margin compared to the operating cost is very low. Example of this type of website is www.jumia.com

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#4 Media Sharing Website

These are websites that share movies, music videos and audios and other downloadable media files that users can access either for free or for a subscription fee.

There are two ways media sharing websites make money which is; adverts and subscription fees. For adverts, they either use AdSense or other contextual advertisements or charge companies to advertise directly on their websites. Sometimes some of these media sharing websites also require paid membership and charge subscription fees. Examples of media sharing websites are; www.notjustok.com, www.iroko.tv and Netflix.

#5 Freelance Blogs

A freelance blog is a regular blog but usually operated by a freelance professional.

Most of the articles published are designed to promote the blogger’s freelance work, and the audience is made up of mainly aspiring and other professional freelancers in the same niche or his/her potential clients.

The articles are usually written in how to formats or they could be tutorials on different topics related to the freelancer’s field. This could also mean the blogger is sharing his work experience or offering other meaningful tips to his readers. A good example of a freelance blog is writersincharge.com which is operated by a Nigerian freelance writer, Bamidele.

#6 Digital Products Marketplace Websites

A digital products marketplace website is also an online web portal that makes money by offering digital products for sale to a large number of people who want to learn something like a skill or acquire specific knowledge that will help them achieve their goals.

There are designed to sell digital products like courses and ebooks but most of these products are produced by members of these websites. The members usually are experts in whatever they want to teach and sign up to become coaches, teachers or trainers.

Examples of these websites include; lynda.com, teachable.com, udemy.com and clickbank.com to name a few. Please do not mistake a digital products website with a media sharing website – the former deals with teaching and learning while the latter is mostly for entertainment. Also, the revenue models are different. With the former, you buy a course or ebook with the latter you subscribe to watch or download movies, music videos etc.

#7 Content Marketing Website

These are very similar to freelance blogs but with a slight difference. In the case of content marketing websites, the audience is mostly customers who are looking for useful information to guide them in making a buying decision.

Let me use a real estate content marketing website as an example. Let’s assume you are a real estate agent with vast experience in brokering real estate deals, then you may set-up a website where you publish articles that teach people about ways to make money from their real estate properties or how to avoid getting scammed in real estate deals or useful laws affecting real estate ownership in a country or tips on how to buy lucrative real estate with little capital.

What you are doing is educating people looking for houses to buy or invest in and with the information you provide, these people come to trust you and may eventually patronize you. Some good examples of content marketing websites are; www.jimsmarketingblog.com and Hubspot.

#8 Marketplace Websites

As the name implies, it is a website designed to bring buyers and sellers together to transact business with the website owners operating as the middlemen.

The buyers can either pay for goods directly through the website and have their funds protected by escrow payment as is the case with Aliexpress, Alibaba and Upwork or the buyers and sellers meet offline and transact business as with the case of craigslist or Jiji.ng.

In the first instance, the marketplace websites enable people from different countries to do formal business such as; buying machines, hiring a professional web developer etc over a secure payment system managed by the marketplace owners. Whereas in the second example the marketplace website simply connects two people in the same country or city to do informal business such as; buying and selling a second-hand car.