Chapter 11
Inspiring stories
I wanted to end with some inspiring stories to keep you motivated. I hope you enjoy them and think about them whenever you get discouraged.
“Our first 3.5 years of marriage, we made some very poor financial decisions. We chose to live as if we had all the money (or credit) in the world! This was irregardless of our income, which wavered and changed quite a bit. At one point we had no money and no credit left to overuse. Bad & scary moves!
In October 2008, a church we had been attending advertised Financial Peace University.
Step One was very slow for us as we had so many debt payments (with crazy interest rates) weighing us down. But when we hit step two, it became fun to see our snowball pick up momentum! God blessed us so much in this time; we were even able to continue our debt payoff during my husband's 2-year layoff!
In February of this year we finally became debt free after paying off over $64,000 in credit card debt (the largest chunk of the debt), car debt & student loans.
We will be forever thankful to God, Dave, this fantastic program and the gracious hosts of the FPU group we attended!”
- http://www.daveramsey.com/articles/article-list/category/lifeandmoney_wedidit_user_generated/ These people used the information that they found in The Total Money Makeove r.
“Chris Zane is in the experience business. Whether it's selling bikes in his Connecticut store or filling orders for corporate rewards programs, he knows a successful business is about more than just selling stuff. Zane, 46, got his start at age 12 fixing bikes in his parents' East Haven, Connecticut, garage. At 16, he convinced his parents to let him take over the lease of a bike shop going out of business, borrowing $23,000 from his grandfather—at 15 percent interest. His mother tended the store while he was at school in the mornings. In his first year, he racked up $56,000 in sales. This year, he expects to bring in $21 million.”
- http://www.inc.com/ss/10-inspiring-small-business-success-stories#0
“Homeless man becomes a millionaire online.
Mark Anastasi explains his online business success.
Mark Anastasi is the author of The Laptop Millionaire and is an online business expert. Learn how to make money online with Mark.
Bryan: How has the internet changed your life?
Mark Anastasi: Back in 2004 I was an unemployed security guard, $12,000 in debt, with no job, no money and nowhere to live.
The Internet allowed me to connect with millions of people from around the world that were looking for products to buy! By applying the marketing strategy suggested to me by my mentor – The Laptop Millionaire – my business took off like a rocket.
Bryan: What techniques did you use back in 2004 to go from zero to $10,000 a month?
Mark Anastasi: I wrote a 70-page ebook on alternative therapies, uploaded it to Clickbank.com, and started charging $67 per download. I was driving traffic to the website by spending $15 a day, approximately, on Google Adwords, and getting 200 to 300 visitors a day.
Bryan: How sustainable was the income from your first project?
Mark Anastasi: That’s the most amazing thing. It peaked in 2007 with $462,000 in ebook sales that year – from a business I spend less than 2 hours a year on, but I still make money every single day, from that ebook and the other 26 ones that I uploaded on Clickbank.com.
Now, affiliates drive traffic to my websites, and they make 50% of each sale, but it’s completely on autopilot.
Twenty seven streams of passive income.
Bryan: Which of these 32 ways are the most profitable? Which ones work best for you?
Mark Anastasi: Here is the list of 32 strategies that have been proven to work for myself and my students:
1. Commenting on blogs, forums, Amazon, questions sites, Facebook Pages, YouTube videos
2. Twitter, the Twitter JV strategy, and the Twitter Direct Reply strategy
3. Selling tweets and retweets!
4. Pay-Per-Post (Blog hijacking strategy, or selling blog posts)
5. YouTube! (Uploading videos to YouTube, YouTube video hijacking, YouTube advertising)
6. Giving away viral ebooks that include affiliate links
7. Selling ebooks on Clickbank
8. Selling PLR products
9. Licensing products, bundling them, and selling them!
10. Listbuilding and email marketing!
11. Solo Ads, Adswaps, and Joint Ventures
12. Selling gigs on Fiverr.com, Buying gigs on Fiverr.com, and Fiverr Gig Arbitrage!
13. Buying & selling web businesses on Flippa.com
14. Webinars, webinar replays, and joint venture webinars
15. S.E.O (get your sites ranked on the search engines, and get free search traffic)
16. Review sites
17. Blogging
18. Selling online advertising
19. Selling Leads! Also: CPA marketing
20. Local Business Marketing
21. Buying expired domains that still get traffic!
22. Outsourcing! hiring outsourcers in the Philippines
23. E-commerce sites (e.g. purepearls.com, bike gear on www.cyclestore.co.uk, etc.)
24. Membership sites
25. Facebook Pages (getting thousands of ‘likes’)
26. Article marketing (e.g. ezinearticles.com)
27. Selling product s on eBay
28. Selling deals on Groupon & upselling other services! (also: LivingSocial, etc.)
29. Selling on the Amazon Kindle platform!
30. Web TV shows & uploading content to iTunes!
31. Pay-per-click advertising (Facebook Ads, Google Ads)
32. Media buying
There are many, many more ways to make money online, but these are the ones that have been proven to work for my students and myself.
The most profitable ones are probably WEBINARS, and MEDIA BUYING (this means buying a lot of cheap advertising online, and directing the traffic to highly-converting affiliate offers) .
I know this will sound like hype, but laptop entrepreneurs are making millions of dollars a year just with a laptop and an Internet connection, thanks to these two strategies. It is because these two strategies can afford you the most amount of leverage.
A lot of people make very decent money as well from offering Local Business Marketing services. You can make $30,000+ a month by setting up a company that manages the social media presence, SEO, and other Internet marketing services for business owners.
The strategies that work best for me include listbuilding and email marketing, selling ebooks, and webinars. But then again that is because I enjoy the process of researching and sharing new content.
Bryan: Have you tried all of these techniques?
Mark Anastasi: I’ve tried 21 of the 32 selected strategies myself, but over the years I’ve tried a hundred more that didn’t work!”
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/od/successstories/a/Homeless-Man-Becomes-A-Millionaire-Online.htm
“In a climate of economic woe and disparaging business reports (at least according to the majority of news reports), the success of any business seems to be an amazing feat. If you are someone who often wonders how aspiring entrepreneurs can ever make it with today’s seemingly difficult economy, the following stories of business women who have succeeded should give you hope for your own business ventures. In fact, perhaps these success stories are more of a true reflection of the business world today than the negativity that mainstream media enjoys portraying.
The following 5 women come from different backgrounds, different countries, different social norms, but all have one common element – in their journey to success they have overcome seemingly impossible obstacles in the business world. Be sure to check out their full stories as well as some of their company websites to see more.
Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu
While many women love shoes and own a pair for each day of the week, business woman Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu has taken a love of footwear and created a business that now employs approximately one hundred people. Despite the fact that she grew up in a village in which most of the inhabitants were living in absolute poverty because of the lack of jobs, Bethlehem didn’t let herself become another impoverished resident. Instead, she noticed the skills of her fellow villagers and used these skills to build a business and provide employment.
Her business Sole Rebels is based in Ethiopia and grossed one million dollars in sales in 2011. Ms. Tilahun hopes her success as a business woman helps to give the rest of the world a new image of Africa, one that is more than the sum of such massive problems like AIDS and childhood hunger that have gained International attention. As expected, her shoes are made locally, by hand, using eco-friendly processes and materials.
Lovin Kobusingya
Ugandan business woman Lovin Kobusingya says that women are naturally suited to the world of business, especially when it comes to the multitasking involved in juggling a job with family life. However, unlike many Ugandan mothers of two, Ms Kobusingye created a highly successful business involving a new product – the fish sausage. Now her business moves about eight tons of fish a week.
After graduating from school with a degree in administration, Lovin was finally hired by the local fish cooperative society. Many young workers came to her looking for jobs; but the fish market was one that was already struggling. She began brainstorming with her partner about ways to create more jobs, and improve the fishing industry. This resulted in her stumbling upon the idea of creating a fish sausage. Armed only with the Internet and plenty of determination, Lovin came up with a product that was an instant success. Now, Lovin is struggling with lack of facilities and experience to expand the business outside of Uganda; however, she is just as determined to seek ways to overcome these obstacles as she was when she first set out to make a change.
Sundeep Bhandal
Despite the fact that Sundeep Bhandal didn’t meet her husband until their wedding day, her family encouraged her in many ways that broke traditional female roles of their community. She was the only girl to drive a car in her small town, and she graduated not only from college, but also from law school with her family’s support. After her arranged marriage she moved to San Francisco to be with her husband, but unfortunately, her in-laws had more strict, traditional, Indian values than her own family. It took 3 years of convincing her husband before she finally was able to start her own IT staffing company, Anjaneyap.
Now, Sundeep has gained the respect of her husband and her family back home in India brags of her entrepreneurship. Furthermore, a year after starting Anjaneyap, her clients started chasing her for staff, instead of her chasing them to see if they needed more employees, a firm step in the right direction for her business.
Cath Kidston
British business woman Cath Kidston struggled with dyslexia while in boarding school, but she launched a business specializing in nostalgic houseware at the same time International business Ikea were telling folks to chuck out their chintz. In the midst of a recession, Ms. Kidston’s charming rose oilcloth accessories, among other items, skyrocketed her profits from £2.9 million to £4.6 million between 2008 and 2009 alone. Then in early 2010, her business was heralded at a value of £75 million.
Cath opened her first “glorified junk shop”, as she called it, in 1993 in Notting Hill. Her loud floral patterns and bright prints meant that the business was off to a slow start. However, Cath Kidston soon became a home decor store known all over the UK for its vintage style with a hint of modern flair. Now she boasts shops in several locations in the UK, as well as Taiwan, Thailand, Ireland, Japan, and Korea.
Rene Johnson
As a young mother and wife, Rene Johnson found herself in a violent and abusive relationship, and in 1994, she moved to a town in which she had no support and no job. Despite her circumstances, Rene took the necessary steps to become a powerful role model for any woman who has had to overcome difficult circumstances. She graduated from the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (IPEC) and wrote her famous self-help book,Leaving Your Comfort Zone: How to Lead Your Life from the Power Zone. As the CEC of the Power Zone Coach, Rene spends much of her time speaking at conferences in which she provides both men and women with the necessary tools to take charge of their lives and find peace while doing so.”
-http://urbantimes.co/2013/02/5-business-women-who-overcame-seemingly-impossible-obstacles/
“Starting a business was not something Anita Crook set out to do at nearly 60 years of age. But when her pocketbook organizer idea took off, this South Carolina grandmother found herself running a multimillion- dollar business.
At age 59, starting a business was something Anita Crook had never considered. Yet, by age 60, she was a budding entrepreneur, and by age 64, the owner of a multimillion-dollar business which produces a handbag organizer called Pouchee®.
Anita's inspiration for starting the business was also part of the reason for success: She found a need, then found a way to fill it.
"It was one of those things that just happens when you're not expecting it," Anita explains.
"My son bought me a really nice purse for Christmas one year. It was an expensive purse, but it didn't have any pockets in it to organize things, and I didn't know how to tell him I'd never use it. So, I kept thinking that if I had a way to organize this bag, I would use it."
Anita couldn't find anything on the market that would let her organize the purse in a useful way, so she "played around with some ideas" and came up with a design she thought would work. She designed Pouchee specifically to fit inside women’s handbags to make them more organized with a place for everything: Outside pockets for pens, sunglasses, mobile phone, credit cards, keys etc. Inside pockets for lipsticks or small flashlights, zippered pockets for change or personal items and inside dividers that keep it all organized and in one compact place.
There was one little hitch, though. Anita's design was on paper. She didn't know how to sew. Through a friend, she found a woman who could sew. That woman made Anita a prototype and put her in touch with another person who introduced Anita to a broker who helps US companies find reliable manufacturers in China.
"The next thing I knew I had a few samples in hand and 2000 Pouchees coming in from China," says Anita.
At that point, Anita took up the one task she most dreaded: finding buyers for her new product. Her target customers were the owners of gift shops and boutiques who wanted something different to sell to their clientele –things that couldn't be found in department stores. And at first, s he approached them with trepidation.
"Selling isn't my cup of tea," says Anita. "With fear and trembling I went door-to-door showing my little Pouchees to the owners of small specialty boutiques and gift shops. I was scared that if they rejected them I'd run out of the store crying."
Despite her fear of selling, she approached one shop owner after another, in the Greenville, SC area. "Every store I went to loved them and bought them, Anita recalls." In fact, Anita's Pouchees were such a hit with shop owners that she sold out the entire first shipment of 2000 before it arrived from China.
Anita reordered, and soon shipments of 2000 turned into 5000, and then more.
For the first couple of years, Anita stored the inventory and operated the business from the three-car garage attached to her home. And, in the beginning, like most startups, she did everything herself. She was not only the designer and salesperson, but also the bookkeeper and the person who packed up orders, shipped them out and kept track of inventory.
To expand the business she started exhibiting at the Atlanta Gift Show, and started using sales reps to widen her reach. Now, some 2000 stores carry Pouchees in the US and abroad. As the business grew, Anita hired a couple of employees and moved the business out of her home to a warehouse location.
"My biggest challenge has been in knowing how to regulate my inventory. Our business has grown 45% a year– - even in the last year's economy. I don't know how you plan for that. I remember looking at my inventory one August and my shelves were stocked to the ceiling. I thought, 'How will I ever sell all of these.' And September came along and our sales were 107% over the previous year's sales. I had very few of the style of Pouchees that everyone wanted on my shelves and we were heading into October, our biggest month of the year."
To keep overseas shipping costs down, Anita normally places orders about 90 days in advance and has them shipped from China by boat. But to accommodate her customers for Christmas that year, she had some Pouchees air freighted in.
One challenge other entrepreneurs often face that Anita has been able to avoid has been funding growth. She started the business with about $10,000 of her own savings, and applied for a line of credit early on so she wouldn't have to worry about running out of money. She still has the line of credit, but hasn't had to use it.
"An advantage of being older when you start a business is that you work a lot smarter," Anita says. "I knew I didn't have time or money to waste, so I did a lot of the work myself for as long as I could. I didn't go out and buy nice office furniture or get a swanky office. I worked out of my home in the beginning. Even now, the office we have is functional, but not swanky."
Working smart and staying out of debt "as much as possible" were two strategies that helped Anita build her business into a multi-million dollar operation. Another strategy has been to keep coming up with new designs and new products.
"We are always coming up with innovative ideas. We want to stay fresh. We can't keep selling the same old Pouchees to the stores. To keep them excited and keep them ordering more, you keep trying new things."
Those "new things" range from making Pouchees in different fabrics and designs to changing the placement of pockets and the size of the organizer. Some of the ideas have evolved from the customers, themselves.
"We had a lot of ladies who told me they love to take their Pouchee out of their purse and carry it by itself. We thought that if this is something people want to do, let's see if we can come up with a way to make it better.
So we made a slightly bigger Pouchee, put the credit card pocket on the inside, and put a pocket on the outside to hold a Blackberry or cell phone."
Anita's advice for other budding entrepreneurs? Try to stay out of debt, and "Don't try to be the biggest guy on the block at first," she says. "Test the market first. There's a learning curve in every business. I've hired PR firms, been on TV, been on QVC… getting your name out there is important. But you don't want to do too much too soon. In the beginning you're learning and you can pay a heavy price for that learning if the market isn't there for the product."
http://www.businessknowhow.com/startup/grandmotherstartup.htm
Fastest Internet Millionaires
Alex Tew
Website: MillionDollarHomepage
Age at the time: 21 years
Time taken: 5 months
The innovative idea of creating The Million Dollar Homepage crossed Alex Tew’s mind while he was still a student at the University of Nottingham; and needed money to fund his further education. Originally from Wiltshire, England, Alex was looking for something that could get him quick money and prevent him from applying for an educational loan.
The Million Dollar Homepage is a web page which consists of a million pixels fixed in a 1000 × 1000 pixel gird. Alex sold the image-based links for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. He offered people a minimum of 100 pixel block for $100; and these pixel blocks, while hovering the cursor, displayed tiny images that contained the title/slogan as well as the URL of the respective websites.
Alex launched his website on 26th of August and tried selling the pixels through the word of mouth. Three days later, one of the TV journalists of BBC noticed it and it instantly became an Internet Phenomenon. On 1 January 2006, Alex put up its final 1,000 pixels on eBay for auction; the bid closed on 11th of January paying him $38,100 that brought his total income to a staggering $1,037,100 in gross income.
It took Alex less than 5 months to become a millionaire and according to The Wall Street Journal his achievement initiated the new era of display advertising.
Reference: Wikipedia
Matt Mullenweg
Website: Automattic
Age at the time: 22 years
Time taken: 8 months
Mathew Mullenweg, an online social media entrepreneur, web developer was born in Houston, Texas on 11 January 1984; and is founder of Automattic which provides free WordPress blogs, and related web solutions. He is widely known for developing WordPress, a CMS which is used by over 200 million websites today. He is also the principal developer behind Akismet, the tool which is widely used to prevent SPAM. Moreover, he writes for a popular tech blog ma.tt and is involved in developing various open source projects.
A former CNET employee, Matt launched Automattic in August 2005 and raised $1.25 in funding and generated profit of $1.1 million in less than a year.
In March 2007, PC world named Matt #16 among the 50 Most Important People on the Web. He was the youngest on the list. The same year, Matt bought Gravatar for $200 million which provides unique avatars. The company, as of 2010 serves approx 20 billion images every day.
In 2008, he was featured on the Business Weeks’s top 25 most influential people of the web. Reference: Wikipedia
Suleman Ali
Website: ESGUT (Bought by Social Gaming Network , SGN)
Age at the time: 26 years
Time taken: 9 months
Suleman wasn’t happy even after working for one of the world’s best software developing companies, Microsoft. In 2007, he quit the company with no plan to join any other organization and started building an application for facebook which he named Superlative. The idea which stemmed out of killing boredom became an instant hit. Superlative, which lets visitors rate their friends, helped him develop some more applications and together he named them ESGUT. Suleman sold them to Social Gaming Network, reportedly for several million dollars.
Resource: CNET http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10119417-36.html
Rob Benwell
Age at the time: 22 years
Website: BloggingtotheBank.Com
Time taken: 12 months
Rob Benwell is a well-known online entrepreneur from the UK with specialization in search marketing, display ads, search engine optimization, blogging and website monetization.
Rob quit his college studies to try his luck in World Wide Web and started his business reportedly with less than a $100. He launched BloggingtotheBank.Com in early 2006 by educating people on how to earn money through fulltime blogging. He penned “Blogging to the Bank” a self-help guide that taught people how to monetize their websites and the essentials of search engine functionalities. The website helped him cross a million dollar earning in less than a year. Later, he wrote two more successful books titled “Niche Annihilation Method” and “Six Figures in Six Months”
At the age 23, his name was added to the list of Internet Millionaires. Even today, his website BloggingtotheBank.Com draws about 25 thousand unique visitors everyday and makes millions a year. Resource: http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/
Anshul Samar
Age at the time: 13
Website: Elementeo.Com
Time taken: Less than a year
Ever since in 4th grade, Anshul was deeply in love with playing games. However the idea of creating Elementeo.Com came when he was in 6th grade following an arguments with his parents who believed playing games had no learning curve involved. He wanted to create a game in which kids could learn a lot without even realizing it.
He then applied for a grant of $500 from the California Association of the Gifted. The grant was immediately awarded to him and he begin by creating the PowerPoint and experimenting with the prototypes. The next three years he spent on working on the technical aspects of designing a game and took help of professional software. Finally, in 9th grade, Anshul launched Elementeo.Com at the National Association of Gifted Children’s Conference.
The Elementeo is a Board Based Card Game which lets the user explore the world of chemistry facts through fun games. His company reportedly made over a million in its first year of operation and was featured on The New York Times.
James Murray Wells
Age at the time: 22 years
Website: GlassesDirect.Co.Uk
Time taken: Less than a year
James Murray is an English entrepreneur who started Glass Direct whilst studying at university. Son of an investment analyst, Murray Wells attended the prestigious Harrow School prior to attending the University of the West of London. The idea of creating Glass Direct came to his mind while he was preparing of his final year’s exams. It just happened a day when he came to know that the glass he bought for £150 originally cost £7 to £1o to make. Back then, he did not find any online retailer for reading glasses and immediately he made up his mind to start the venture. Glasses Direct sold over 22,000 pairs of glasses in its first year of operation which enabled him to earn over a million dollar.
Today, Glasses Direct is multimillion dollar company registered as Prescription Eyewear Limited.
In 2010, Murray set another online store, HearingDirect.Com that provides hearing aids at cheaper rate than the most of street retailers.
In 2009, Murray Wells was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion and became the youngest British citizen to receive the award. Resource: Wikipedia
Anand Lal Shimpi
Age at the time: 17 years
Website: AnandTech.Com
Time taken: less than a year
Born on June 26 1982, to Indian and Iranian parents, Anand Lal Shimpi graduated from William G. Enloe High School and completed his computer engineering from North Carolina State University. Anand created his tech blog, AnandTech.Com in 1997 and ended up making $1.5 million through advertising revenue by the end of the same year.
Today, AnandTech.Com is counted among world’s top tech blogs and receives about 50 million page views every month. Anand continues to contribute as CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the organization.
Ephren W. Taylor II
Age at the time: 17 years
Website: Ephren.Com
Time taken: less than a year
Ever since his childhood, Ephren W. Taylor was highly fascinated by the video games and wanted to create a library for his Super Nintendo. Taylor, back then he was just 12 years old, knew that creating a private video library was next to impossible. So he decided to learn how to make video games. Everyday, while returning from school, he trekked to the Overland Park and read How To Make A Video Game In 21 Days, by Andre LaMothe. A few months of hard work and Taylor coded his first video game which he sold to his friends for $10 a pop.
Four years later, Taylor started a job posting website with his friend Michael Stahl. GoFerretGo.com was to help high school and college students to find jobs. The website was an instant hit and Taylor made his first million dollars at the age 17.
Taylor calls himself a self-taught and delivers over 70 public speeches everyday. He also serves as chief executive of City Capital and calls himself an expert web developer. In addition, Taylor runs a holding company that invests money in socially responsible businesses.
Steve Chen and Chad Hurley
Age at the time: Chen (28), Hurley (30)
Website: YouTube.com
Time taken: One and a half years
Today, YouTube is as familiar a name as Google and receives mil