See ➨ 20 legit ways on how to make money online in Kenya & get paid via Mpesa, Airtel, PayPal, Skrill or even Bank Transfer. We give you a well-researched data that is proven to work plus alerts on those we have figured out to be a total waste of time to save you the hustle. Just follow our list to the end and let us know what you think in the comments below. Also if you have any personal issue or enquiry, just contact us and someone will be glad to assist you.

Online jobs are a great way to part-time from your day job, or even make a living working full-time. The choice of a monetization way varies from one individual to the other. So in no order;
Here are 20 sure ways to make money online in Kenya:

1. Online Sports Betting

Online sports’ betting is very popular in Kenya and so the in thing for . The success of sites like SportPesa and the massive new betting companies entering the market proves there is good cash-flow in it. It entails predicting the outcome of a sporting event like a soccer match and each time you make a correct prediction, you earn money which you can withdraw instantly via Mpesa, Airtel, PayPal, Skrill, or your bank account among other options.

For instance, if you predict that a team will win a match at the probability of (odds) of 1.30 and you stake Ksh 1000 on that outcome, you will earn (Ksh1000 x 1.30) = Ksh 1300; a profit of Ksh 300 if the match ends as you predicted. You can bet on many outcomes like a draw, total number of goals, etc. However if the outcome does not end as predicted you lose your money and go home with noting making online sports betting very risky.

However there are quite a number of people who get good returns from sports betting. There are people who have won millions by playing the Jackpots, etc. And also people who have lost fortunes. As such NEVER depend on sports betting as the main way to make money online and invest only what you are willing to lose. Once in a while you will be lucky enough to get a high return on your investment.

Apart from SportPesa, below are some of the best sports betting sites that give you a head start with their welcome bonuses when you make your first deposits:

Sportybet Kenya After registration, you get up to Ksh 200 free.
– They will double all your first deposits of up to Sh.15,000 when you sign up through .
BetWinner Kenya – BetWinner Kenya will 100% bonus on your first deposits up to Sh.15,000 when you Sign up through this special invite link among other offers.

The above mentioned sites are not the only ones you can use to earn money online through betting. Here is the list of 20+ best betting sites in Kenya you can try out.

2. Academic Writing

Academic writing involves completing college/university students’ written take-away assignments for profit. Basically you are paid to do someone’s homework for a small fee. One thing you have to know is that no type of academic work is simple; these essays are way different from what you encountered in the Kenyan education system.

Most academic writing jobs require you to observe a well-proof language and follow the strict instructions given. The essays vary from somewhat simple high-school tasks to very complex 10000 words+ PHD dissertations. Below are some academic writing sites you can check out (mostly with foreign students/colleges):

It is always advisable to try academic writing in your career path. For instance, if you are an accountant you should more of accounting related academic jobs. The earning potential rises exponentially with time as most students tend to retain a few circles of writers they find that do a great job. Just go through the sites above and find which one works for you.

3. Premium Content Writing

Premium content writing is one of the most common online jobs that everyone can try out as there are lots of blogs out there that regularly need content. Unlike academic writing, there is no low season, and there are normally jobs all seasons ranging for blogs, sites, newsletters, e-books, mailing lists, et cetera.

Below are some sites you can always get paid to write premium articles:

iWriter
WritersDomain
Demand Media
Textbroker
Scripted

4. Revenue Sharing Sites

A revenue site gives allows you to publish (write posts or share video) on their website and get to keep some of the revenues generated from your pages; usually you keep a larger percentage. This is definitely not one of the best ways to make money online in Kenya for many reasons but on top of it is that it takes time to earn sensibly.

Nonetheless if you are just starting out as an online content writer, revenue sharing sites may be great to improve your SEO and writing skills, or post your rejected articles if you were writing for premium. Below is a list of some revenue sharing sites you can try out:

Infobarrel A great revenue-sharing site with the revenue share ranging from 75% to 90%.
Best Reviewer Write top lists (such as top 10 best tech blogs) and you get to keep 100% of what you earn.
Squidoo
Squidoo is a revenue sharing website that allows you to write articles about anything. These articles are referred to as lenses. When your lenses get good traffic, you earn a percentage of the revenue generated. Joining is free.
Hubpages
Hubpages is similar to Squidoo. You write for them, and make money on the revenue from your articles known as hubs. Joining is free.
SheToldMe
SheToldMe.com operates like Hubpages and Squidoo. But the revenue share at the time of this article was was better. However, there is a joining fee.
Simpy
Simpy.com is social media bookmarking website that has taken off in the IM world and is gaining popularity and building a good reputation online.
Triond
Triond.com is a venture that gives one the opportunity to make some money by sharing articles.
ArticleMuse
They are best known as a worldwide news directory. However, it has been dormant for some while now though a very good revenue stream.
Howhub
Howhub.com targets certain valuable keywords plus their effective discussions make it the go-to engaging platform.
Flixya
Flixya allows you to share your videos from YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, Metacafe and among other video sharing websites. Their revenue sharing program is a 50-50 ratio. You get to earn 50% of total revenue created by your videos. More Ads will get displayed as the videoS you upload receive more traffic.

5. Transcription

Transcription is a very common way of making money online, pays well if you can put in the hours plus anyone can join even without experience. As long as you have a PC and a ear phones you are good to go. Transcription involves converting audio into text; you just listen to recorded audios that can be a speech, interview, voicemail, meeting … et cetera, and then typing into a text file like Word Pad, Microsoft word or any similar software. You are paid depending on the length of the audio file. Most online transcription jobs average between $25 and $50 as payment per audio hour. You will be taken through a few training courses to learn how to do it the required way. Like any other serious online job, this too may sound easy but you have to be a hard worker to achieve great success working online as a transcriber. As you continue to do a good job, your ratings go up and you start getting more jobs with higher pay.

Below are some websites you can join in order to earn money online doing transcription jobs:

TranscribeMe
Rev
Castingwords
Speechpad
Scribie
Quicktate

6. Online Freelancing

Online freelancing sites provide you with a platform source for jobs online. Unlike writing jobs, this is a jungle full of all manner of jobs from web designing, graphic designing, voice overs, writing, proof-reading, social media management, software development, programming, translation, … just about anything you can think of possibly doing on the in the internet for money. If you have any skill or talent, you can make money online working as a freelancer instead of just waiting to be employed by a brick and mortar business.

Fiverr started out as a micro-tasks site where freelancers could do small online jobs known as gigs for only $5 hence the name Fiverr. Nowadays the site has grown with various options now offered and you can do jobs worth thousands of dollars.
Freelancer is a good place to make money online as a freelancer. There are lots of jobs but the downside is that there are too many freelancers competing. However if you have a good rating you can be sure to get jobs. Their pay is great and if you can get over 2-3 jobs a month, you’ll be doing just fine.
Upwork – This is another great freelancing site formed by the merger of former online freelance platforms Odesk and Elance.
99designs Another great site for graphic designers especially as most of the jobs there are graphical like logo designs, banners, … etc.

Those are not the only freelancing sites you can make money online with in Kenya, there are hundreds more out there but few have sufficient work for everyone. You can see a list of other best freelancing sites you can try out.

7. Securities Exchange

Security exchange, stock market trade, or simply buying and selling shares is one good example of your money working for you. It involves buying equity in public listed companies at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE). An example, have you ever wanted to be a shareholder of a blue chip company, a large organization like Safaricom Ltd, Equity Bank Kenya, … you name it but didn’t know how. Well anyone in Kenya can buy shares of public listed companies at the NSE. The minimum number of shares one can hold is 100. Suppose you want to own 1000 Equity Bank KE Ltd shares, and the shares go for 20 KES each, you would need (1000 shares X 20 KES) = Ksh 20,000 to own 1000 Equity Bank shares.

It is important to note that you cannot trade less than 100 shares e.g you can’t buy let say 90 shares, or 70, 50, 99 … anything less than 100.

For you to make money in Kenya trading stocks, you need to open a CDS account with a stock broker or an investment bank. The stock broker or investment bank doesn’t own your CDS account but you give them the rights to buy and sell your paper assets on order. The CDS account is under the Central Depository and Settlement Corporation Limited (CDSCL) and it is the custodian of your CDS account. When you place an order with your stock broker, the stock broker notifies the CDSCL of the order to trade for your account. Your stock broker then proceeds to the NSE and buys you shares at the best price and keeps a percentage (usually very small, around 2%) when you sell your shares.

So how does one make money? You can make money by selling high. For example, suppose your Equity Bank Ke Ltd shares above appreciate to Ksh 28 in 2 months time, you can call your investment bank/stock broker and tell them to sell the shares for you at Ksh 28 or a better price. Your broker then places your order to sell 1000 shares belonging to Equity Bank at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE). When the shares sell, again the CDSCL deposits your money to your CDS account ensuring your stock broker does not touch your money.

What will you receive? You will get (1000 shares X Ksh 28) = Ksh 28,000 less the brokerage fees which for our case would be (Ksh 28,000 X 98/100) = Ksh 27,440. You would have made a profit of 7,440 KES. If you would have invested larger sums, the profit margins would be bigger.

You can also hold your stocks over long periods and earn from the dividends when companies announce profits. This topic is too wide for this page and we cannot exhaust it here.

Unlike sports betting, if values of shares you bought depreciate lower than the buying price you can never lose all you money. But the once common thing with both is the fact that paper assets do attract high risks. In Kenya, you can trade stock online if you have opened a CDS account with:

Suntra Investment Bank
Stanbic Bank

8. Forex Trading

Forex simply stands for Foreign Exchange. Forex entails trading in currency pairs and making money from positive trade margins. For example EUR/USD, KES/USD, and much more. For instance, if you buy USD (US Dollar) 100 against KES (Kenya Shilling) at the price of 1USD = 100 KES, you would have (100 X 100) = Ksh 10,000. Suppose the KES appreciates its value and the exchange rate changes to 1USD = 97 KES, if you exchange the shilling back to US Dollar, it will be (10,000 / 97) = 103.09, a profit of $3.09.

The example above just shows you how forex works. And from our trade above, if you were trading online the profit would be larger as online forex trading tools offer more leverage in terms of pips and other technical stuff beyond the scope of this article.

In Kenya, forex has started to be accepted as an investment avenue and you can even trade with Mpesa. As with most paper assets, the high volatility of the market makes it very risky if you don’t have the right information.

Many online forex trading sites give you a free demo account to learn forex and later when you feel ready to start trading with real money you can open a live/real trading account.

9. Bitcoins

The craze for virtual currencies is the in thing around the world currently. Bitcoins can make you good money over short periods and in Kenya you can even buy and sell them via Mpesa. Personally, I still don’t engage in it since the volatility here is very high and especially since the market is not regulated. I still wouldn’t risk huge sums of money though I know of people who make a killing on virtual currencies. All in all, I must acknowledge that this is can be the future if you’ve got it well figured out, and you can benefit from being the early bird. The word of caution would be to invest only what you are willing to lose.

10. Flip Products

Flipping products is one sure way of earning money online in Kenya. Flipping is a culture of buying products that are no longer in use or undervalued, improving their value and reselling them at a much higher price. In fact we flip products in our everyday life like when we exchange our old clothes and shoes for buckets from the Mali-mali guys where we live. Or even when you buy young domestic animals, feeding them and reselling them at a better price. The trick is to buy, improve, hold and resell at a better price. It takes a bit of patience and experience to flip products online.

Below are some websites you can use to make money online flipping products:

OLX is a popular online marketplace in Kenya for selling just about anything from your used clothes, farm produce, refurbished electronics, brand new products, you name it! Some college guys have specialized in repairing used computers and reselling them at OLX for a reasonable price where they earn a living from online.
Flippa is a marketplace for selling websites, domains, and Apps. You can buy websites, Apps or domains you think are under-valued, adding their value and reselling. For instance, the domain (HTML.com) was resold in less than 2 weeks for $50,000. Another website (name hidden) was bought at an initial asking price of $8,000 and later resold in 10 months for around $70,000. If you can spot a gem on this site, you need to move with speed to acquire it and increase its value then resell it at a better price. For the small time investors, there are lots of sites and apps you can buy for as little as $50 and resell at even $200. The difference less your acquisition costs is your profit and that is how you make money online with Flippa.

Below you can download an eBook with insights on building sites and fast improving their values and selling them at a profit:

Exchange – is another place you can join to flip websites mainly eCommerce sites.
WebsiteBroker – same as Flippa.
Sedo is mostly for selling and buying domains.

11. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the most rewarding method of making money online. It entails promoting a good/service from a third party and you get paid per action. The action could be a sale, downloads, sign up, mail list subscription, …. When you successfully refer a user to the affiliate site, you get paid commission in terms of percentages or flat rates. There is no limit for what you can earn as what you make largely depends on your marketing effectiveness and program terms. Some programs pay as much as $1000 per action while others pay you as low as $1. For better conversions, it is good to promote products related to your niche.

Below are some of the largest affiliate networks you can join to look for products to promote on your site:

Amazon Associates – Amazon has a fantastic affiliate program.
Commission Junction (CJ by Conversant)
Clickbank
Shareasale
Lead Network

12. Email Marketing

There are lots of reasons why Email marketing is becoming less effective. It is because people are more or less getting concerned about their privacy after mega scandals like Cambridge Analytica, emails now get less open rates, it takes time to profit from a mailing list, better technology such as chats are just rendering mail lists useless, and many more. Nonetheless, it is still an effective way of making money online directly through affiliate marketing or indirectly by driving traffic to your landing pages.

Email marketing involves having a list of people along with the emails of people who are interested in your brand, blog, site etc. Now, you don’t have to manually collect all these emails because we have many email marketing service providers. These providers will make it easy for you to collect these emails through a sign up form which you can share on social media and online.

You can also use your mailing list just to keep in touch with the people interested in reading new stuff on your blog.

Below some email marketing solutions for collecting emails and managing your mail lists:

Aweber
Mail Chimp
Mail Poet
Getresponse
Imnica mail
iContact

If you are not such a good collector you can opt to buy email lists (a list of email addresses you can add to your list).

13. Start a Website

And then here is the logic, are you tired of working for other people? Writing for other sites, doing others homework … just seaming employed by others. Haven’t you realized that if you write 10 articles (and maybe only 3-4 get accepted), in a year you would have written (54weeks X 10artciles) = 540 articles where only around 60 – 120 would be accepted. What do you do with the articles that never get accepted, you probably discard it to your trash folder or recycle bin.

Here is a truth about making money online, the one true way that will help you achieve great success is if you have a website. A website gives you passive income meaning you make money even when you are asleep when people visit your site (whether or not they buy your services or products). Look at this website for instance; you can see the advertisements we have all over. We get paid monthly just to display them here on our site and if someone buys anything from the ads, we still earn money as commission. One such program you can join to display ads on your sites is Google AdSense Program. You can see here a step by step guide on how to make money with Google AdSense. But sometimes Google does not accept young or small sites as they still have to gauge their reputation. However there are lots of other top ad networks you can join like Popcash, Bidvertiser, Ad-Maven, … to make money selling ad space on your site.

Speaking of commissions, affiliate marketing we have seen is one of the best ways to make money online. It’s even easier if you have a website to covert visitors to customers. And lots of other ways you can money with a website online beyond affiliate marketing and advertising, some we take a snap look into later.

Now are you still thinking of discarding your unaccepted articles to the recycle bin? Publish them on your sites and make money from them, earn even while sleeping. 500 articles would bring you lots of passive income if you do it right, more than what you would be paid for writing. The act of posting articles for others to read on your own web log (blog) is a very common practice today. That’s why you hear someone say, “I’m a blogger”. If you love homes, you can create a website/blog where you just write things about homes and soon advertisers will come to you with lots of offers. They range from realtors, to infinity. Imagine a realtor paying you Ksh 100,000 for you to include their newly launched estate in your list of “10 best secure estates to live in Nairobi”. This way you too can be known as a Real estate blogger. If you love food like me, you can post about your food recipes or something related to food. With blogging, you need to write about your passion or something you are an expert at. If you love phones blog about phones alone and don’t try to write about things you know little or nothing about. Sounds great? Cool!

There probably so much to discuss about this topic that is beyond the scope of this article. If you have further questions, just send an email to us via our contact page and someone will sure get back to you. *We get lots of emails daily so it’s nice to keep yours short and straight forward so that we understand it and be in a better position to respond.

If you are ready to start blogging on your website and make money, here is a guide that will help you build your website even without knowing how to code. Yes, that’s possible with modern a Content Mangagement System (CMS) like WordPress.

However should you be scared or don’t want to through that hustle of learning long tutorials, we can help you design and launch your site in less than 10 days. Plus a bonus, we will show you how to post articles on it. Just send an email request to us through our contact page, and we will help you out for free if we are not fully committed.

14. Sell Services

Are you an expert in your field of practice? Be it a lawyer, doctor … you name it; if you have a website, the better. There you can sell your services as a consultant and give directions to your visitors to your local brick and mortar business. If you are a doctor operating a private clinic, you can send your visitors to your clinic where you run your health consultancy. Then they can pay you, for the services. You can also make money online by selling services directly on the site. Examples of digital services sold online include; subscriptions, domain registration services, SSL certificates, et cetera.

15. Sell Products

The same way you would sell services which are intangibles is the same way you would sell a physical product. Earlier we had seen how on can sell an item on classified sites like OLX Kenya. You can also sell your goods at Amazon, Ebay, Jumia Kenya, KiliMall Kenya, and not forgeting your website.

To make money by selling directly on your website, you would need eCommerce functionalities such as payment processing, cart handling, checkout management, product pages, etc. This info is beyond the scope of this page. However if you are hard-pressed to sell on your site or create an eCommerce site, you can contact us and someone will be glad to help you out.

16. Drop Shipping

Drop shipping involves buying goods from a cheap online wholesale retailer and reselling them to consumers at a higher price. With drop shipping you will never have to actually handle the goods physically.

The most common method of drop shipping involves the drop shipper collecting a list of items sold cheaply on a site like Amazon.com (e.g. a toy sold at $5), the drop shipper then proceeds to post the same list of items on eBay (let’s say for $7). Once a buyer buys the toy on eBay for $7, the seller will then proceed to purchase the items from the seller on Amazon for $5, and give out the buyers Address as the shipping location for delivery. The difference of $2 is the profit you make as a drop shipper.

When you have many products, dropshipping can be very hectic especially when it comes to inventory management as sometimes you can mark a product as stocked yet from the drop shipping site they are sold out or out of stock. With time this will impact you negatively, giving you a bad reputation and in the end losing sales. The only drop shipping site with real time inventory management is Shopify. They are sync with Oberlo, a platform that manages your entire inventory including stocks, orders, shipping, payment, etc. All you have to do is set up your website, add products by clicking on them, and leave the rest to Oberlo. When you get orders, you just forward your order for shipping to the customer without physically touching it.

Below are some sites that will help you build and eCommerce dropshipping site:

Shopify – build an ecommerce website with no technical knowledge and drop ship products from around the world with Shopify’s Orberlo. The best drop shipping site in the world.
3dCart
Amazon
eBay

17. Digital Products

What are digital products? In simple terms, they are products that can online be accessed via a digital platform. Such products include but not limited to software, games, music, eBooks, … and many others you can think of.

How do you make money with digital products? Well, there are lots of ways to make money online in Kenya with digital products. Most of the time you get paid if it’s an affiliate program for each download, purchase, paid subscription, …. For example, a gaming developer can pay you $0.5 for each download of their newly launched game. So if you send visitors to their site where your total downloads amount to let’s say, 300. That given month, you would expect to earn (300 X 0.5) = $150. Other digital products you can try out include softwares like anti-virus etc. Here what works depends on your creativity and there is no limit for what you can achieve.

18. Online Consultation

We already took a look at how to make money online with consultancies. So for avoidance of repetition, we will avoid dwelling much here. What you make with consultancy will mostly depend on the quality of services you offers, referral by happy customers through word of mouth, good reviews and ratings. It is important to exercise lots of caution with these kinds of services as poor delivery of services may damage your reputation. Ensure that you have an excellent customer service to help make your customers happy and satisfied.

19. P2P Lending

Every day there is someone out in need of money for an idea or startup. If you are that person who likes helping others then P2P lending is one niche for you to make some extra money online. When you lend people money, you get it back at an interest. In Kenya you can try Kiva Platform.

20. Online Micro Tasks

These types of online jobs consist of taking small tasks and getting paid after accumulating some amount. The jobs usually take less than 5 minutes of your time daily and anyone can join since there is no experience of any kind needed here; this is one area that most online scams thrive in but below are some legit places to make money online doing micro tasks.

Kilimall Kenya allows you to download their App and make money each day (as Kili Bobs) when you open the App.
Humanatic – Get paid to review calls.
Take online surveys on sites like Voices Africa and earn money.

Watch Out for the Scams

Online scams in Kenya are almost apart of us today. You have seen those messages or links on social media or circulating on WhatsApp groups promising that you will earn some money or that you have won a gift? Well, most of such messages are normally your typical online scam. Most are fraudsters looking to mine data like your date of birth, email address, phone number, or even your banking details. Below are some obvious things to look out for to spot an online scam:

Programs that tell notify your of winnings or prizes to competitions you have never signed up to.
Programs that promise you lots of lazy returns (Get-rich quick programs)
Programs asking you to pay for registration and not a service or product.
Sites that are still new with no testimonials or social media presence and well detailed about us, contact, and privacy policy pages.
Sites with no legal connection like copy write content.
Unsecure sites or emails without encryptions (any online site that the url does not start with https:// but instead begin with http://, notice the s as the difference. It stands for secure).

The list is long but those are the most common ones to watch out for. It is almost difficult to fully-proof ourselves from cyber-crimes even giant sites like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon … et cetera get breached a times. To help keep yourself safe or mitigate the damages should the online sites you join like Twitter get hacked, you could practice the following:

You can hide your real date of birth on social media; for instance if you were born on 01/01/1985, then you can record your date of birth as 01/01/1920. However if you are purchasing anything online, for security reasons you must enter your real date of birth as in your government document. This helps with security and verification issues.
When buying products or services online, you can by-pass using your bank card directly by choosing to always complete your payment via online payment gateways like PayPal, Skrill, or a checkout gateway like 2Checkout. Most online sites normally take care of this so most of the times you are usually secure to buy online.
Create strong passwords that are not obvious like the name of your pet, your own names, favorite team, date of birth etc. A strong password would normally have a length of 6-15 characters with at least one capital letter, special character, and number.

There is a long list with regards to online security that is clearly beyond the scope of this page. And that would be the end, let us know what you think in the comments below. If you found this page useful, you could help others read it by sharing it. Or if you have a burning issue you could contact us for further assistance. Thank you for visiting this page.

How to Earn Money Online in Kenya