I have a running joke.

Every Nigerian is either a business owner or they have a family member, friend, or colleague that is a business owner.
Literally 2 in every 5 Nigerian owns a business. (This is from the school of statistics of my experience as a Nigerian living in Nigeria)

On every street, every corner in Nigeria, you will see at least 5 businesses.
They could be provision stores, somebody selling utensils, a fashion designer, a carpenter, food vendor etc.

There was a day I decided to conduct a test.

I walked from the beginning of my street to the end and I was counting the number of provision stores on my street alone. They were up to 12.

This was without counting the fashion designers, carpenters etc.

This teaches you something: there are many businesses in Nigeria but most of them have a problem: they limit their businesses by themselves.

For example, looking at all the businesses on my street, they had one common problem; they were competing for the same customers.

All of them were fighting for the same 100 customers on my street.
That is very limiting. And this is one of the reasons why taking your business online is very important in this age and time.


I mean, why restrict your business to 100 people when you can be selling to 1000?

Why are you limiting your business to your street, when you can be selling to your local government, to your state, your country, in fact, to the entire world!


So, who is this article for?

- Those that already have a physical business and want to take their business online.
- Those that sell from their room to friends, family or classmates and want to increase their customer base.
- Those that sell only on one social media app and want to increase their online presence.


5 Steps To Take Your Business Online.

Here are 5 practical steps to follow, in order to take your business online.

1. Prepare your business for online sales
2. Get your branding materials ready
3. Choose where to sell
4. Create your business website
5. Create content
6. Start marketing.


Get your business ready

So, the first thing is that your business should be ready to come online.
This includes taking stock and actually having the products you want to sell ready. Or if it’s a service you offer, you will need to get your materials or resources ready.

For example, if you are a food vendor, do you have gas and your cooking equipment to cater for a sizable number of people? If you want to start a laundry business, do you have your washing machine, iron etc at hand? You definitely can’t be waiting till your first online order comes before ordering the materials you need.

Since you will be coming online, do you have a delivery service ready at hand? What about your packaging materials? The man goal is to be prepared.


2. Get all your branding materials ready.

The next thing to do when you decide to start selling online is to get your brand identity materials ready.

Brand identity might sound like a big word but I’ll explain it. It’s basically all the visual things that represent your brand.

It includes your business name, logo, tagline, brand colour, brand font etc.

Business Name:
Your business name is the first point of contact that people have with your business. Naming a business seems easy until you discover it’s not.
A lot of business people name their businesses based off vibes.

For example, when you hear of a business called Cream Castle, you’ll most likely assume that they do pastries, cakes and maybe ice cream, you will then find out that they are a Village kitchen selling amala and jollof rice. There’s already a mismatch based off of the name.

You want a business name that:
- Is easy to pronounce
- Easy to remember
- Is unique
- Doesn’t have many businesses on social media bearing the same name.
- That you can register with CAC.


Logo: [/b]This is either the word mark or visual mark that represents your business.

You can get a professional graphic designer to create a logo for you, or you can do it yourself with simple tools like Canva, Logo Design etc.

- [b]Brand colour: You have to choose the colours that will represent your brand.
These colours will guide your designs, your entire branding and so much more.

When you think of telecommunications and you see Yellow, you think of MTN. Green, you think of Glo.

Your designer can help you choose your brand colour or you can read about the psychology of colours. For example, if you own a wedding dress brand, white and gold will most likely communicate your business.

Colours have meanings. For example, Green as a colour means growth or nature, so it would make sense for a natural drinks brand to use Green as their brand colour etc.

- Tagline: This is like your slogan. Everyone has a slogan. MTN is everywhere you go, Glo is rule your world.
Your tagline is a short text that communicates what your brand stands for. So for example, if you do deliveries your tagline could be “Your goods delivered with speed”



3.Choose where to sell.
Where you sell is extremely important because you need to go to where your customers are and sell to them there.

Since you’re already thinking about selling online, you have to choose what platform you want to sell on.

If you’re selling on social media (which you definitely should by the way) which ones are you choosing? There’s Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat etc.

There’s also selling through a business website or selling on an online marketplace like Jiji, Konga, Jumia etc.

What will determine where you sell is where your customers are, where they hangout or where they spend a lot of their time. I must add though that you can sell everywhere. You don't have to limit your online business to just one platform. This might sound like a lot of work, but some apps like Bumpa help you create a business website and still manage sales across any online platform you sell.

4. Create Content
If you want to start selling online, one thing you must not play with is content. Content here means both visual and written content.

If you sell on social media or on a website or even a marketplace, you need to take good looking pictures of your products. This will increase your chances of getting customers.

Additionally, if you have a social media account posting interesting and helpful content will go a long way in attracting new customers to your channel. This includes video reviews of your product, how your product works, Instagram reels, short videos, memes or generally helpful content. Like they say Content is King.

5. Start Marketing.
Marketing is the lifeblood of sales. Like I said at the beginning of this article, if you can sell to 10 people, you can sell to a 100. When you sell to 100, you have the capacity to sell to 1000.

This increase in customers doesn't just come out of thin air and it usually happens through intentional efforts of marketing and I’ll share a few tips.


Word of mouth: Tell your immediate circle: friends, classmates, coworkers, church members that this is what you do and share your website link, your social media handle or links to products in an online marketplace to your friends.

Offer quality service or run referral programs: Having great products and good customer service is the cheapest type of marketing that there is. Good products will bring customers to buy again and attract new ones.
A referral programme is one where you give some type of reward to customers that bring other customers.


Run ads: Ads don’t have to be expensive and they show your product to people that don’t even know across the world. You can pay an influencer to do an ad for you or you can run Instagram ads, Facebook ads, Google ads or YouTube ads. Running ads like Instagram ads are only possible if you have a website though and you can get that from this business app: Bumpa.

Conclusion
Selling online is not that hard and it’s easier when you have the right tools to run your business.
It also gets better if you join a community of business owners that already sell online.

Starting a business is not that hard. I mean, that’s probably the reason why we have over 40 million businesses in Nigeria according to a report by PWC.
However, less than 50% of this number actually start this business the right way, which is by actually naming and registering their business with the Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria.

What Are The Benefits of Registering Your Business With The CAC?[/color]

1. Legitimacy:
Registering your business with the Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria makes the law recognise you as a legal entity and it will also boost your customers confidence in your business.

2. Business Name:
When you register your business name with the CAC, it means that no one else can use your business name anywhere in this country for another business. It means you can sue if this ever happens.

3. Bank Account:
You can open a corporate bank account for your business if you’re registered with the CAC. This makes you professional, instead of being Haven Cakes Ltd. but customers pay into Halima Abudu’s personal bank account.

4. Loans, Grants & Investment:
It's 100% easier for a registered business to apply for and receive loans and grants and even investors. In fact, in most cases, you cant apply for most grants or loans without being properly registered.

5. Special Benefits:
If you have a registered business, getting travel approval for business purposes such as visa applications is easier. Also, your business is qualified to receive NYSC corpers to work at your company amongst many other benefits.

These are few out of the many other benefits that exist when you register your business with the CAC.

The interesting thing is, you don’t have to visit any CAC office physically to register your business with the CAC. The entire process can be done online and you don’t even need the services of a legal practitioner, chartered accountant, or chartered secretary to get it done.

At [url]Bumpa[/url], we’re all about helping your business thrive, so we have brought you a simple guide on how to register your business with the CAC all by yourself.


5 Steps to Register Your Business with the CAC[/font][color=#006600]

The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) recently upgraded its registration portal and now they have a 24 hour online, self-service feature that allows registration to be seamless and easy for the average Nigerian business owner.
Now, business owners can start and complete the entire process of registering their businesses online.
Here’s how to register your business with the CAC in five simple steps:

1. Choose and reserve a business name

First you need to choose a business name.
Your business name is the first point of contact people will have with your business.
It is what will go on all your brand designs, marketing materials like business cards, shopping bags, official documents and even on your business website.

After choosing a name for your business, submit the proposed name to the CAC website to check if it’s available.
If no one else has registered a business using the name you’ve chosen and submitted, the CAC will approve and reserve it for you for 60 days.
The reservation of a business name usually costs N500 (Five Hundred Naira Only).

Now, I need to mention that a business name can be rejected for certain reasons.
- If there’s another business registered with the CAC that uses the name you submitted, it will be rejected.
- If the name you submitted is confusing or offensive, it will be rejected,
- A proposed business name can be rejected if it includes words restricted by law because they can be mistaken for governmental bodies such as ‘National’, ‘Federal’, ‘Government’, ‘Regional’, ‘State’, or ‘Holding’ without due permission.

Receiving a rejection doesn’t mean you have to end your journey of registering your business with the CAC.
You can always make another reservation.
Another tip is that when you are making your submission on the CAC portal, you can submit two names for your business so that if one name is taken, you can always use the other.

2. Fill out the Pre-Registration Form

The next step is to fill out the pre-registration form. This form is called CAC/BN/1.
You must fill out the form with all the required details and submit it back to the CAC along with other required documents.

The necessary information you need to provide are:
- Approved name of the business
- General nature of the business
- Address of the business
- Address of branches of the business, if any
- Date of commencement of the business
- Name, occupation, address, and other important details of the proprietor of the business
- Signature of the proprietor of the business

3. Pay the CAC filing fees

After filling out the CAC/BN/1 form, you are to pay the necessary CAC filing fees.
The official amount required as a filing fee for the registration of a business name is N10,000 (Ten Thousand Naira Only). This payment is to be done online.

4. Submit the filled-out form

Once the CAC approves your payment, you can then submit the form online. You are to submit or upload the completed pre-registration form together with two coloured passport-sized photographs.

Other documents to be uploaded include:
- Availability printout (same as the Approval Note)
- Statutory form (CAC/BN/1)
- Proficiency certificate, where applicable
- Any valid means of identification: National ID Card, Driver’s License, Voter’s Card, or International Passport
Payment receipt

5. Collect the Original Certificate of Registration from the CAC

Once you have uploaded all the required documents, the CAC will review all the information you have provided.
If all your documents are correct, then the registration of your business name would be approved.

After this, you can collect the Original Certificate of Registration of your business name and the Certified True Copy (CTC) of the Application for the Registration of the business name.

Everything You Need To Know About Registering Your Business With The CAC. [font=Lucida Sans Unicode]

Is it free to register your business with the CAC?

The short answer is that it is not free.
However, the Federal Government has provided some support through the MSME Survival Fund and up 250,000 small businesses will get free business name registration with the CAC.

If you want to be one of the businesses that receives this support, the free CAC business name registration has begun through the company registration portal.
You can visit the CAC website for more information on this.

How long will it take to register your business name with the CAC?

The registration of business names usually takes 1-2 weeks but the CAC has announced that they are committed to completing the process within 48 hours or no later than a week.

Is it difficult to upload pictures, signatures or documents on the CAC portal?

It is easy but sometimes people can have issues with uploading things on the portal. If you have issues uploading any document or file on the CAC portal, the issue might be because you’re not uploading the documents or photos in the correct format.

The format for pictures and signatures is JPEG/PNG while the format for documents is PDF.
Also, you can’t upload files bigger than 5Mb in size.

Can you make corrections if you make mistakes with a reserved business name?

If you make a mistake with your reserved name, you can either wait for the name approval to expire after 60 days or you can proceed with that reserved name and apply for a change of name after registration.

It usually costs N10,000 (Ten Thousand Naira Only) to change an approved business name.

What should you do if you’ve paid the filing fee but it has not reflected on the portal?

First of all, you need to be sure the payment is not reflecting on the portal.
Log into the portal and click on ‘Check Payment Status’.

If the payment is still not reflected on the portal, please contact support@remita.net or your bank.

Can you register a partnership with the CAC?

Yes, you definitely can.
A partnership business is required to have a minimum of two members and a maximum of twenty members.
You will have to provide details of your business partner such as photographs, address, phone number, and so on.

Business partners can come up with a Partnership Agreement or Deeds of Partnership with details on the terms of the Partnership.

After the submission of all the necessary details, documents, and payment of applicable fees, the Certificate of Registration will then be ready. This process usually takes a couple of weeks to be completed.


Conclusion
As you can now see, registering your business is not that hard. It can be convenient and quite easy to register your business with the CAC.
If you’ve been procrastinating on taking this important step in your entrepreneurial journey, and you’re ready to get it done now, just follow the steps we provided and thank us at Bumpa later.