By Benprince Ezeh

MEDIA practitioners and bloggers have been urged to imbibe the culture of originality as that will earn them the audience that will help drive their business.

Sunday Folayan, president of the Nigerian Internet Association, NiRA, who stated this at a summit in Lagos on Thursday, October 20, cautioned that avoiding plagiarism and adopting the .NG as the domain are a sure way of boosting traction to a site.

Speaking with Realnews on the side line of the event, Folayan said that, the objective of being a blogger should be writing and creating original contents, and this should be driven by passion. He said: “It’s always a good choice to blog or write about what you love and have passion for, and my advice to the new bloggers is that they should take their niche, stick to what they believe and love, and make the best out of it.”

According to Folayan, bloggers should embrace .NG as the local domain. “I am excited today when I see a lot of businesses that were previously branded .com, being rebranded as .NG. It’s always good localising traffics on websites, and I’ m happy that people are catching that message and doing it, I think the future is bright for every website that is on .NG.”

Besides, he pointed out that there are many areas that people are not blogging about and that the vacuum should be blocked. In the same vein, he said there are many new openings that need qualitative education. “Once a blogger identifies a niche, they can act on it.”

James Nwabueze, project development trainer on IT products for TFHost, a web hosting company that are in partnership with .NG, said that 97 percent of web hosters are non-Nigerians. “We have to make .NG our own because it’s going to help in growing our

economy and our naira instead of dollars,” he

said.

According to Nwabueze, blogging is not a career, and that it should be seen as a hubby about what someone likes or loves doing. “It has to be what you drive joy from, like writing about nature and things and that NiRA will partner with the local domain to ensure traffic is driven to your various websites,” he said further.

In the same vein, Bayo Olupohunda, editor in chief NAIJ.com now ‘Legit.ng’, said that bloggers should be authentic, believable and original to their stories. “You have to be providing original stories other than stealing people’s contents. If you’re to take ones content, always ensure you credit them. Human interest stories and catchy headlines get you audience,” Olupohunda said.

On his part, Ben Bassey, senior editor Pulse Nigeria, gave an insight on how to get audience and make money from blogging. He said that knowing your target audience is key, “social media marketing (Twitter Facebook and Youtube are essential to making money online. Online videos now make more than 74 percent of all online traffics.

“Create a video or get permission from someone that owns one and embed it on your link. “You need to have a domain name for people and Google to take you serious, which is .NG.”

– Oct. 23, 2018 @ 15:58 GMT