How can a Nigerian graduate earning very little increase their income?

Know photoshop? Start your own small business. It is not too difficult to learn photoshop, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube.

Just a few days ago, I had a need to get some banner ads made. Nothing fancy just wanted up web headers (banners) made for a couple of websites I have. Not wanting to design them myself, I went to Fiverr, hired half-a-dozen designers and paid $7 a pop ($5 for the gig and $2 card processing fees).

All in all, I think I must have gotten 24-25 headers made. Some were shit, most were average, and a few were good.

This led me to think, there are quite a number of women (and men) in Pakistan who are graphics designers but never pursued their careers, or some form of an art major, but never really pursued the field. Most of them know how to use Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Illustrator.

If you were to invest $500, here is what you can do with that investment:

- Spend $249 (one-time) and you can download 750 templates from Shutterstock
- Then go to Creative Market and purchasing another say $150 worth of banner ad sets from there
You will literally have over like 1,000+ templates in your collection when you’re done buying from these two websites. With the remaining $100, spend $50/month on Adobe Cloud Suite (you get all the Adobe software, please don’t use pirated software).

Now you have a collection and the software. Head over to Fiverr.com and create an account and start selling a banner ad, and web / social media headers. If you’re worth your salt in designing and have a decent sense of using Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, you literally can make an online business.

I recently saw a Pakistani developer go from like 5 reviews to 150+ reviews at the time of this writing in less than four months. It won’t be long before this person would be a certified Level 2 Seller on Fiverr.

…and to this my friend Salma Jafri suggested:

To add to this: pick a niche to go after vs staying a generalist. So going with Faisal's example, design headers for specific people in specific industries and you can position yourself an an expert faster.

For example I'm in YouTube marketing and I need stuff designed for YouTube such as YouTube channel headers and custom thumbnails. I recently paid $50 for a single custom thumbnail. And I need a new one every week. I paid $300 for a custom YouTube channel header. Bulk rates, specific niches. That's where the money and clients are.