Correction from last article. Nairaland was started in 2005!

Thanks to Seun Osewa for making the facts clearer from our last blog post! Nairaland was started in 2005 and not 2001 as we earlier wrote (seems like its been around for a decade).

That means Nairaland grew even at a faster rate that we thought. Getting to 500,000 members in just 5 years in the Nigerian webspace is truly remarkable!

Startup Lessons: 3 Ways Nairaland Got So Big!

Nairaland has been around for a long time.. So have so many other early Nigerian websites, but Nairaland has outlived them to become successful.

Here are 3 (THREE) reasons I think Nairaland lived and grew successful over the years.

1. FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGE

Nairaland started around 2001... A year or even 2 before I got my first web presence. Nairaland is one of the earliest web properties in Nigeria.

There are early Nigerian sites that haven't changed a bit since they first started and they have successfully made themselves forgotten.. look at Motherland Nigeria. I am not saying MotherlandNigeria.com is a failure. As a matter of fact, it was a pioneering and great site back in the day. But I don't think it has changed in it's 11 years of existence. I'm just saying....

I'm saying, Nairaland utilized it's early advantage and grew very large over time (since 2001). This huge over time growth means lots of posts on the forum, many threads, many topics, many users (readers and posters) and many pages of the forum indexed in many search engines overtime for a wide variety of search keywords/keyphrases and ranked high in search results due to long articles (threads), freshness of content and external links.

As a result of above, Nairaland gets a lot of traffic from search engines alone and new user are brought to the site, many end up registering to participate in the discussion..

It all goes back to the first mover advantage... now Half a million registered users.

2. VIRAL & WORD OR MOUTH.

People talk about Nairaland a lot, in real life, they talk about stories they have read on Nairaland and discussions or polls they have participated in to their friends and so on, thereby spreading news of Nairaland through word of mouth...

Viral, this happens when people forward or share links to Nairaland threads/pages on other sites, through email, on facebook or as tweets.. This causes a wave of commenting, sharing, resharing and retweeting. The story on Nairaland and the user participation make it go viraland grow bigger with fresh users discovering the site all the time.

3. USER ENGAGEMENT

The gists, the gossip and discussions make Nairaland engaging. A poll I once came across on Nairaland comparing the site and Facebook in user engagement, Nairaland beat Facebook hands down in Nairalanders perspective.


So there you have it... The 3 (THREE) secrets that made Nairaland once the most trafficked Nigerian website. You can still use the same secrets right now and build a 500000 user or even million user online empire in Nigeria.

Study these 3 points well and build them into your web service or application...

Nairaland Reaches A Milestone: Half A Million Users

Nairaland has been Nigeria's most visited website for a long time (though it has been losing ground recently to job search sites and news sites like jobberman.com and 234next.com plus some newspaper sites).

Recently, Nairaland hit more than 500,000 registered users. This is a huge milestone considering Nairaland allows people to view it's content without registering. If the content was restricted to registered users only, then I believe they userbase will grow bigger and almost double.

This is good news for Nigerian startups, it shows the userbase is there, you only need to smartly find a way to capture it. You can learn from Nairaland's strategies which we would be looking at on this blog. Make sure you subscribe to get the next post on how you can get 500,000 users for your Nigerian site.

Nigerian Forum

In our first feature we will review Nigeria's no 1 online forum, though it is not a start up, but with a good makeover it will be one of Nigeria's hottest web destinations.

Nairaland.com

Members - About 250,000 members

Type - Nigerian forum


Nairaland is a very busy forum for nigerians to discuss all sorts of topics (including gossip) its been online for a while and is also a good spot for promoting anything targeting Nigerians.

It has subforums for entertainment, politics, business and many more.

Possible Makeover - The forum can be transformed into a social network discussion, features like better profile pages, picture and video sharing can be added to improve the user experience.



If you have a Internet startup in Nigeria or one targeting Nigerians, drop us a comment and we will give it a visit to consider it for review.