How To Make Money Online in Uganda (2023)

Are you looking for ways to make money online in Uganda?

If yes, then look no further!

You’ve heard of many ways of earning money online such as money-making apps, watching ads, and network referrals among others which are scammy and most of the time don’t work.

Many guides on making money online in Uganda are also written by people who have not actually made any money online.

But THIS post is different.

Why?

Because I am the one writing it, speaking from experience as someone who has ACTUALLY made money online (with proof) from the ventures mentioned in this post.

By virtue of being in Uganda, not every money-making tip you see online will work for you. You will hardly get paid considering that some of the money-making schemes are a scam and some popular payment systems like Paypal hardly work in our country.

After reading this post, you will be able to start your own online business in Uganda which will earn you income passively. You’ll simply require little to no investment to get started.

I have tried out various online side hustles and most of the online businesses mentioned in this article (proof of earnings shared) and this is the way I have been able to earn income online as a Ugandan.

Disclaimer: This article does not provide get-rich-quick methods. If you are looking for ways to get rich quickly, I am afraid this article is not suited for you. Just like any other physical business, making money online in Uganda needs patience, endurance, and hard work.

That said, this is a well-detailed post showing the Top 20 Online Business Ideas (tried and tested) to help you make money online in Uganda.

Let’s get started!

1. Blogging

A blog is an informational website that contains info on a given topic available for users on the internet.

Traditionally, blogs were personal spaces where people could publish their thoughts. As the digital space advances in Uganda, blogs have become a commercial trend.

Content is still being published but is now focused on offering readers commercial, informational and transactional value.

Starting a Blog in Uganda Requires You To;

• Decide on a niche (the focus of your blog). You can easily start by finding your personal interests. Topics that interest you so you can keep motivated for a long while. It can be writing, gossip, teaching, farming, and just any other thing.

• Register for a domain name. Such as workaguide.com. Purchase your domain name from hosting providers like Cloudflare (For the cheapest wholesale prices on the market), and Namecheap (affordable and cheap)

• Choose a Hosting provider. Hosting is where your website files will be kept and served to users on the internet. For beginners, I recommend Namecheap and Hostinger which are all fast and affordable hosting providers to house your blog as you start. They are cheap and cost-friendly.

• Drive traffic to your blog. Content is king. Write and post articles regularly. Use free blogging tools to edit and proofread content, and post on social media among others. Content will help you drive traffic to your blog. The more traffic, the more money you can make. Make sure to offer value by solving readers’ problems.

Some of the most notable blogs in Uganda include; Ugtechmag, Workaguide, Dignited, Techjaja, and Techrafiki among others which are making their owners income online.

Nevertheless, creating a blog (blogging) exposes you to potential business opportunities such as sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate marketing, and advertisements (Google AdSense) which are all great ways to make money online in Uganda as will be discussed below.

Below is a screenshot of my AdSense earnings from showing ads on this blog.

I simply placed ads on my site and the earnings keep on coming even when I am sleeping (auto-pilot).

But here’s the catch.

That is how much I’ve made from AdSense with my blog so far but there is no limit to what you can earn. You can earn double, triple, or much higher than I’ve earned with the right strategy and hard work.

2. Freelancing

Whether you are a writer, developer, influencer, marketer, or voice-over artist, freelancing is an excellent venture for an online business.

In fact, in 2022, I made money from various ventures and my first million was made through freelancing via Upwork.

When I withdrew the first $461 (approximately 1,600,000 UGX) I had earned, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the bank alert on my phone. I realized that it is really possible to earn income online.

That aside, in freelancing, you offer your skills or expertise to a client in need of completing their assignments for a price.

If you are skilled in writing you can offer your skills remotely to a business/client in need. You simply have to put yourself out there and market your skills.

To do so, you can set up profiles on freelance market platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and People Per Hour.

For example, if a business or an individual is in need of a graphic designer to design their social media posters and flyers, they’ll head out to these freelancing platforms.

Since you display your skills and expertise on your profile, an interested client may hire you based on your expertise and other factors such as the skills, and ratings that you have.

Once the client is interested in your skills then they will hire you to complete their tasks for them.  

You are paid hourly, per task, or after a specified period. Freelancing platforms constitute of various tasks such as content writing, web designing, translation app development etc which you can apply for or a client makes an order from you.

After accepting the job, you are required to complete the job within a given time and submit it for approval. As a freelancer, you are not basically under any agency but working on things individually. In simple terms, you are your own boss.

Various gigs are available for Ugandan freelancers to explore such as translation from local to foreign languages or foreign to local languages, transcription, web design, and graphics design among others.

You can start by getting job opportunities from sites like Fiverr and Upwork and later create your own website portfolio where to personally connect with your clients without the need for the platforms.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model which involves a person selling products on behalf of others for a commission. Under this kind of method, you earn through product recommendations.

You simply place a link to the product on your site, when a user clicks the link, goes to the site, and proceeds to buy the product you have endorsed, you earn a commission for the sale.

Affiliate marketing has become a lucrative business model that the online community heavily embraces. It is one of the easiest forms of making money since you do not need to create the product yourself. You refer buyers to the product of the brand. The buyer does not incur any extra cost for purchasing products from you, an affiliate marketer hence enabling you to make money online in Uganda.  

For example, you have a blog about electronics, you write a post about the best laptops a user can buy. When a user clicks a link to the product on your site and proceeds to buy a laptop you recommended, you earn income from the sale you endorsed.

Established brands have independent affiliate programs where they reward affiliates for gathering conversions, sales, and awareness for their brand. Find and join affiliate marketing programs that align with your interests, brand, or target audience.

Strictly speaking, recommend products you have personally used or strongly believe in. This will also help you win your audience’s trust. This will keep them coming to the products you refer them to.

Various affiliate programs offer rewards or commissions for sign-ups, site visits, trial subscriptions, and product sales that you as an affiliate marketer get to drive.

With a solid affiliate marketing business model, you can earn anywhere between 100$ which totals about 350,000 UGX per month by just referring people to buy products.

Personally, I am an affiliate of brands like Canva, SEMRush, and Hostinger among others which I promote on this blog.

4. Start a YouTube Channel

YouTube receives 122 active million users worldwide and 1 billion hours of content being watched daily.

The statistics are mind-blowing. Think about it!

At this point, you realize that people are constantly consuming video content. Find a niche that works well for you and build an audience.

Once your channel makes 1000 subscribers and 4000 public watch hours, you can monetize with the YouTube Partner Program by showing ads from Google AdSense on your videos.

And guess what? A YouTube channel also opens you up to other monetization streams like sponsorships from brands, promotion of your products, and affiliate marketing, among others enabling you to make money online in Uganda.

5. Content Writing

Besides creating your own blog you might want to dodge the hassle of starting a blog, registering a domain, and paying for hosting but instead get paid for writing content for other people with blogs.

If you are of a kind, here’s a big idea!

You should consider exploring opportunities like freelancing, and ghostwriting, where you get to write content that clients will publish under another person’s name. You get paid for your services but do not own any copyrights to the material you submit.

Furthermore, you can harness the power of Guest Posting and write content for sites that accept posts from external writers to contribute to their sites. Some guest posting opportunities are paid, whereas authors are paid for their contributions.

Still, you can explore freelancing platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr by offering your writing services to make money online in Uganda.

6. Video Editing

As discussed above, video content consumers are increasingly growing, and many YouTube channels are being created.

So, what am I talking about?

Let me explain. Even though video content consumers are growing, various YouTube channels are being created every now and then but few professional video editors are available in Uganda to match the growing demand.

Beyond that, brands are now looking for more creative and dynamic ways of presenting their products to consumers. They have adopted video content as part of their marketing plans. These can be manifest, for example, in product displays.

Suppose you are a skilled video editor with knowledge of using programs like Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and other video editing programs and certified qualifications.

In that case, you should put your skills to use. Avail yourself in creating content for brands and businesses to earn you income.

7. Start a Podcast

Yes, you could earn income by merely writing online, but did you know that you can also earn with your voice?

Similar to YouTube video content creation, voicing content is another dynamic way of reaching audiences but this time with no need to necessarily show your face.

Currently, there are 600 million blogs and only 2.4 million podcasts.

What do these stats indicate?

The outright answer to this is that the online digital space as far as Podcasting is concerned is not yet saturated. There is plenty of potential for business opportunities through sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate marketing, or ads that could make you bag some cash for yourself.

All you need to have is a smartphone, laptop, and internet connection to get started.

Here’s what you have to do.

Identify a specific micro-niche to build a loyal, sustainable, reliable audience. It is this audience that will help you break out of your shell.

Podcasting will require relatively low startup fees and resources compared to starting a YouTube channel.

With just a smartphone or laptop, you can have your first episodes up and running on sites like Spotify, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other streaming platforms.

Once your Podcast is established, with quite a number of downloads for your episodes, brands will look out for you to promote them, you can sell your digital products directly to your audience or monetize with ads and Patreon.

Below is a tutorial on How To Start a Podcast by Pat Flynn who is one of the people earning big with Podcasts.

Check out my Legal Transit podcast, a podcast I recently started in the Legal niche to help law students understand concepts better through discussions.

8. Sell an Online Course

Do you have expertise in a certain field? Then preparing a well-stuffed course explaining concepts to beginners is a great starting point.

Whether you are a teacher, social media guru, or developer, this is a good fit for you to make money online in Uganda.

People want to learn various skills such as Programming, Graphic designing, and Crypto-currencies, Trading among others.

So yes, you could make money by sharing your knowledge and skills with the world. Assemble course content in the form of Video lectures, E-books, or audio properly explaining concepts and selling them to the world.

People are willing to pay for such courses in order to learn these concepts. Create courses with the motive of helping people to understand concepts you are well versed with, this will at the same time, earn you income as more people enroll.

Various sites such as Thinkific, Udemy, and Coursera, among others, easily host your courses and make them simple to be accessed by other people online.  

9. Consultation Services

Establish yourself as an expert in a field and offer coaching/tutoring services to those in need. Whether it is relationship advice, self-improvement, fitness, digital marketing, or any other skill you possess, you can start a consultation business venture online.

In any case, consultation involves trading sessions such as calls and one-on-one engagements with clients who pay you.

Clients are looking for value and are willing to pay for your consultation services.

For example, as an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultant, you should possess expert SEO knowledge and offer clients solutions in the field of SEO. These can range from how they can increase their brand visibility on Search Engine Result pages (SERPs). How best to optimize their content to rank higher and other SEO-related services.

But that’s not all.

Set up how clients can locate and get in touch with you online. This can be through social media, website portfolios, or freelancing platforms.

You will be set to start your consulting firm and make money online in Uganda.

10. Web Designing

First impressions last! Visually appealing websites retain visitors for a long. Since businesses and individuals are looking to establish their online presence, website owners are, in turn, constantly looking to improve the visual appearance of their websites or portfolios.

As a web designer, this is an opportune moment to utilize and earn income from your talents or skills. Additionally, the arrival of no-code sites like WordPress has made it equally easy to implement web design and development.

Themes are provided from which you can easily tweak the appearance to suit your client’s needs.

11. Web Development

If you are a programmer with web development skills, this could be a great opportunity. Whether you are a programmer or not, still good news for you. The internet is free; you can learn programming utterly free on the internet via sites like FreeCodeCamp, W3 Schools, and EdX.

What could be better?

After learning these skills, monetize them by making yourself available for hire on freelancing platforms.

Website development is one of the most lucrative on-demand skills on the internet today. Since the lockdown, most businesses have shifted and are now utilizing the online space. Enterprises are looking to establish themselves online through websites, which could be an excellent opportunity for you to explore making money online in Uganda.

12. App Development

Besides freelancing as a software developer, you can also create your software portfolio and put it out to the world. Do not let your technical skills go to waste. Create an app that solves people’s problems and publish it on app stores.

It could be a game for leisure and entertainment, productivity, or utility apps. Create and publish the app on mobile app stores like Play Store, App Store, Samsung Galaxy Apps, etc.

With the recent trends, the most exciting bit is that you do not need coding knowledge to build apps. No-code sites like Appier enable you to easily create apps and build programs merely by using drag-and-drop builders.

To earn income with apps, you can set in-app purchases, subscriptions, and ads and also add affiliate links. Make the app, sit back, and earn passive money online in Uganda.

13. Graphic Design

Graphic design involves the creation of visual designs. Create themes, logos, branding design templates, downloadables, fonts, posters, flyers, and images for social media posts.

You can work as a freelancer or start up a graphic design agency to pick up tasks and jobs from clients who will in turn pay for your services.

Since the internet has evolved, you do not need a university degree to become a graphic designer. Learn to use and operate tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom Adobe After Effects, and get started on getting clients. Head to YouTube and feed yourself various tutorials.

Alternatively, you can use other simple drag-and-drop tools like Canva to get your designs to existence within no time.

With Canva, you get professionally designed templates for just about anything such as invitation cards, social media posters, and flyers. You just need to customize, replace text with your own, add your own logos, and then own the designs all for FREE.

Personally, I rely a lot on Canva as my go-to design tool. All the featured images on this blog are designed by Canva, I also get side gigs for designing which I take to Canva and choose from the templates they offer and customize them for my clients.

Although the free version of Canva is enough for basic designs, I use Canva Pro which costs 12$ per month.

As a beginner starting out, begin with the free version and as you scale up, then opt for paying for the pro version.

14. Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is a remote worker who carries out administrative tasks for their employee. A virtual assistant carries out tasks such as scheduling tasks, carrying out operations like picking up calls, sending E-mails, and making appointments, among others.

Let’s face it!

Various businesses, startups, or Individuals are shifting their focus on significant aspects of their companies while filtering out the subsidiary duties. Virtual assistants are constantly in demand to handle other operational activities.

The takeaway here is that you do not need to be physically present. The job is remote-oriented, and as a virtual assistant, you can coordinate all the activities from the comfort of your home.

15. Domain Flipping

Domain flipping is similar to the real estate business. Your job is to identify abandoned assets and renovate and sell them at a higher value. In this case, you will be dealing with domains.

Allow me to explain.

A domain is a website address i.e., www.workaguide.com. Your task as a domain flipper is to scout for these expired domains on marketplaces such as Odyss and revive them.

Many websites expire for many reasons, such as owners dying or running bankrupt. Despite the success, these sites might have gained traffic and published content; if payments are not made to keep them up and running, then these domains will expire.

Get them up and running, refurbish them with content, and re-sell them at a higher price.

Old or expired domains possess much SEO value in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Old sites do not have to go through a phase of breaking through the Google sandbox, like the period Google offers before it deems a site fully capable of ranking.

Note: You should be careful about which sites you choose. It would be best if you did thorough research on whether the site is not banned from ranking or spammy, and you can revive it for future sale.

You can acquire an expired domain for as low as 3$ and re-sell it for about 1000$.

16. Influencer Marketing

Do you have a large following on social media? Having good engagement on your account, be it Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram name it, you could be in for a great business opportunity to make money online in Uganda.

Businesses are looking for more creative ways to market their brands and spread awareness of their products.

Influencer marketing is a great channel for exploiting and putting the products out there. Influencers include Nano, Macro, and Micro-influencers.

As an influencer, you will create content and collaborate with brands to realize their marketing objectives. The goal is to reach more customers, which is what brands are willing to pay for.

17. Publish on Amazon Kindle

Are you a lover of writing? You could earn a fortune by putting together books on just about any topic and publishing them on sites like Amazon Kindle for the world to see.

Create your author account and self-publish books to be accessed by readers at a price.

18. Online /E-commerce Store

Set up an online store from which users can search for products of their choice, choose the quantity, colours, and size, and place orders for delivery. Avail products such as cosmetics, clothes, shoes, and fragrances and avail them for delivery to clients who make orders.

You can directly sell your products or products owned by others. You can also create a platform where sellers can list their products for buyers to buy.

Notable E-commerce stores in Uganda Include; Jumia, Odukar, Ubuy, Masikini

Most importantly, ensure that your E-commerce site is properly functioning so that your clients do not find difficulty finding products and placing orders.

20. Sell Stock Images

Stock images are pictures that are uploaded on the internet, and made available for re-use to various users after obtaining licenses or paying for them.

Stock images fit well with portraying brand messages while helping businesses achieve their marketing goals.

Enterprises continuously use stock images for their posts on social media, and blogs to deliver messages to their audiences. Capture images and upload them on sites like Shutter Stock, and Unsplash; for clients in need to easily find them.

To use stock images, one must first purchase a license from the owner or purchase for re-use of their own purposes.

This way, as a stock image publisher, you can make money online in Uganda when someone purchases a license to your stock images.

Reasons Why You Should Start an Online Business in Uganda

• Make Money. The primary goal of a business is to make money. If you are reading this post, chances are you are looking for ways to make money online, and yes! If well-executed, online businesses can make you good income more so passively.

• To gain skills. As an online worker, you will be exposed to various skill sets, such as marketing and SEO, which are relevant to online businesses.

• To gain traction and brand visibility. Get your online business’s brand name out there in the digital community. An online business defines and establishes your online presence and helps create awareness about your brand. It enables you to connect with other online business owners.

Verdict on the Best Way to Make Money Online in Uganda

Off this list, some of the businesses you can start with no investment are affiliate marketing, content writing, freelancing, translation services, and influencer marketing. All you need is stable internet and an online presence.

Those that require little to no investment include, podcasting, starting a youtube channel, blogging, and creating an E-commerce store.

Like any other business, the reality is that online businesses require hard work, investment, dedication, and patience. Do not expect overnight success, but your business will be headed for triumph with strategic planning and a stable online presence.

My recommendation on the best way to make money online is to start a blog.

A blog requires a minimum investment of about 250,000 UGX. It opens you to various income streams mentioned in this post such as display ads, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, consultations, selling courses, selling e-books, and other digital products from which you can start earning yourself about 350,0000 UGX and more passively per month.

I hope you found this article helpful. Which business idea are you considering taking on?

Let me know of any feedback in the comment section.

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