Generate huge revenue from registrations in your cyber café.

One of the main avenue for generating serious money in your cyber café is through registrations. There are so many types and forms of registrations during the course of any year that you should be on top on things to make your share of money from customers.

There is the WAEC, JAMB, NECO, NABTEB, etc registrations and there are applications for job registrations that you and your staff can take advantage of to make huge money.

First, you will need to get familiar with the various types of registrations. That is, 

11.   the web address,

22.    what is needed to complete each and every types of registration or application,

33.   the websites peculiarity. Whether it is slow or fast loading

44.   the times that the website could be easily accessed etc.

     

      In short you and your staff must be knowledgeable about the websites so that customers do not leave and go elsewhere.

Secondly, to beat other cafes in this venture, try to find a way to create awareness of any particular registration or job application that has started. One way to do this is to create a cheap flyer or banner and hang it outside of your café . This will bring a flood of customers or job seekers coming to the café. If you don’t want to hang a banner outside, you can put a notice in your cyber café informing customers of any current registrations or job application going on. So customers who see it can spread the news by word of mouth. 

To really get on top of things, print out a kind of template of the registration or application page. So that customers get to see the various requirements for any application. This eases a lot of the work involved in these registrations. This is very important, because some customers will forget certain requirements and will have to go back home to get them. Also when scanning of documents are required for any registration or application, inform the customers which are the most essential documents to be uploaded.

When charging for your services, don’t be cheap. However, you must provide very good service. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that people will go for cheap services no matter how bad the service is. Therefore treat customers well and provide excellent service and you will rake huge amounts in registrations and applications in your cyber café.

How to make your internet café profitable always.

Patronage of internet cafés has dropped drastically recently. This is mainly due to the fact that customers can now conveniently do their browsing in the comfort of their homes. With the drop in the price of smart phones brought about by the entry into the market of Chinese, Indian and other low priced smart phones in the market.

One of the main revenue driving activity of the internet café is the use of facebook. Now most people can use their smart phones to access and use facebook without going to the café.,

Another reason for low internet café patronage is the affordability of printers. People can now buy small HP, 3 in one printers for use at home, eliminating the need to visit an internet café.

So with all these factors working against the café owner, what other ways can the owner turn to in order to remain profitable.

Provide other services you will normally not find in a café. There are many of these services that can make your café even more profitable than just provision of internet access. Some of these are; 

a)      Sell scratch cards. There are many exam scratch cards that are for sale now. If you can find a cheap source for buying these cards you could make a lot of money selling them to students who need them. There are WAEC, NECO, JAMB, NABTEB etc cards. If you can sustain these card selling aspect of the business, your café will very soon be known to be a reliable place for purchase of exam scratch cards.

b)      Become an agent for some other companies. For example, you could be an agent for mobile money companies like PAGATECH LTD, EKO BANK PLC, GTBANK PLC etc. being an agent allows you to provide subscription services like DSTV, STARTIMES TV, GOTV etc.

c)       You can also sell scratch cards for companies that are colaborating with the various Electricity Provision Companies in Nigeria. 

d)      Provide instant passport photograph. This is one type of business that is very easy to operate. All you need do is buy the passport machine, learn how to use it and you are good to go. One of the more popular instant passport  machines is the HITI machine. Which goes for about N30,000.00 .

e)      Provide bulk sms service. This is one service that most cafes do not offer. So when you exel at this service, your café will be the go  to place for bulk sms. The bulk sms service is useful for mass informing a lot of people when there is a coming wedding or birthday celebration. Also political parties could use it to run cheap multiple campaigns to the electorate.

f)       One service that is mostly overlooked for an internet café business is the sale of stationeries. When running a cyber café, you will have people coming to ask for things like envelopes, files, rims of A4 paper etc. if you can manage your stock of these items, your café could become a primary place purchase of these stationeries.

  

These are some of the services you could provide to make your internet café more profitable in these trying times for cyber cafes. One other benefit that your café gets for providing these services is the flow of traffic into your café. With this flow, more people get to know your café and you will find that the

How to use a back up ISP for your internet café business.

The need to have your cyber café running continuously during your business hours cannot be overemphasized. It makes customers keep coming back for business and recommending your café to others. Some cafes only run when there is public power supply. Others are off because their ISP has one problem or the other.

What if you are subscribed to two Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When one is down you switch to the other. This gives your business an edge, because when other café businesses are down, yours is working. Take for example, majority of cafes in your area of operation are on a particular ISP and the ISP goes off for several hours. Imagine the patronage you will get when people discover that only your café is working during those hours.

I want to show you how I manage my MTNHYNET and ETISALAT EASYBLAZE subscriptions. I always go for the highest bandwidth available because this gives me an edge over other cafes who try to economize on bandwidth payments. Customers like speed and fast downloads.

These two services are fast. I subscribe to the 1MBits 7am to 7pm plan. And then switch over to Etisalat by 7pm on their 6GB PLAN . The Etisalat Easyblaze is based on the HSPA technology and has a top speed of 42 Mbps. However, you will not achieve that speed due to various factors like

a) Signal strength.

b) The device you are connecting with.

c) Environmental conditions.

d) And the internet site you are trying to access.

This MTNHYNET subscription of 1Mbits is not affected by the usual slow internet speed you experience during peak periods. You get the full 1Mbits speed at all times, provided the signal strength is very good in your area. I use the MTNHYNET Outdoor Modem to achieve very good signal strength.

Due to this combination of MTNHYNET and the use of Etisalat Easyblaze plan employing their router I am able to save N10,000.00 every month on bandwidth fees compared to using MTNHYNET 1 Mbits all day plan. Here are screen shots of the MTNHYNET PLANS. 



HOURLY PLANS 

  

ALL DAY PLANS. 

 

 NIGHTS AND WEEKEND PLANS

WEEKDAY PLAN










And here is the Etisalat plan.