Inspired by Ashbo’s Teen Power!

Ashley Qualls! Who else? The 17 year old CEO of a million dollar online company? Does it ring a bell? Or at least, make you say “really”?

Yes, she is CEO at 17, and no, she did not started out rich. Ashbo (as she was fondly called by her friends and uses it in her MySpace account) told FastCompany.com that she and her family were onced cramped up in a one bedroom apartment, but now, she had a 4 bedroom house with a cotton candy colored basement which she uses as her office. Infact, she hired her friends and a $200 per hour business consultant!

She haven’t invested a lot either! She only asked $8 from her mom when she was 14 to make an online hub where all her friends and owners of MySpace accounts can get Ashbo’s designed MySpace templates. So checking out Whateverlife.com and cheking out what she’s got…. Well, she have FREE lyric layouts, FREE love layouts, FREE musicians layouts, FREE celebrity layouts, and the newest layouts there were posted last November 30 2007 (total of 3,363 free layouts), are the Star layouts, Scene layouts, Quote layouts, lyrics layouts, love layouts and heart layouts. And oh boy… how about banners, glitters and buttons, tutorials and DIY (do-it-yourself) graphics, fonts and photoshops! Whatever life brings, whateverlife’s giving them all out for free!!!?? From that, a 15 year old girl had stopped highschool and paid her own $600 worth of shopping spree! And the rest, they say, is history.

Wait, wait, wait.. If she invested $8 to have a website and give out FREE MySpace designed templates (which she designed herself), how come, her business is worth a million dollars, and she bought a 4 bedroom house at 17? Actually, her income only came from advertising, earning up to $70,000 a month and with Britney Spears’ manager calling her for some promotions and more than 100 google page rank higher than Oprah (349 for Ashbo and 469 for Oprah) and an Alexa Traffic rank of 5,973! Geez…Way to go girl!

Moving on, from Ashley Qualls to Alex Tew, the 22 year old owner of the milliondollarhomepage.com and currently ranked within the top 10 of google page rank. He started out with a dream to raise funds for his college university education and with the simple idea of selling an advertising space in his homepage. Allotting 1,000,000 pixels and selling $1 per pixel, he became a millionaire in 4 months!

According to Steve Boggan, after Tew’s press release, the news went viral which invited millions of unique visits to his homepage. The more page visits came in, the higher his traffic ranking soared, and so with that, more and more advertisers paid to advertise in his site. Since then, he got really busy doing interviews for ABC news, Reuters TV and even Cuban Radio. His milliondollarhomepage is already sold out and evntually, he did’nt proceed with his college education but, he is again ready to explode with a new and better website which he forcasted, will make him $900,000 richer.

Pixelotto.com is up and running already, selling again 1,000,000 pixels, but much better this time, because webpage vistors will have a chance to win up to $1,000,000 plus donating a $100,000 to the charity of their choice just byclicking and visiting the sites that he is advertising! Such a brilliant idea since visitors wilf just have to log in to play. He charges nothing! Today, his prize fund is already raised to $152,900.

With these opportunities, there had been lots of people who had been searching for a perfect internet business, but honestly, who wouldn’t? Internetworlstats.com had declared that there are more than 6.5 billion people in the whole world and 1/6 or more than 1.2 billion people had been captured by the power of the internet. Bringing your business in the virtual world will instantly make you go global and have the possibility of capturing even a quarter of internet users population. The internet had given us the power to reach and capture people in different places, of different colors and of different races.

So going back to Ashley Qualls and Alex Tew, these young entrepreneurs had really inspired me. Capturing a 1 million unique page visits is really impressive, but 7 million?? That is way uber. How much more if it is owned by a 17 and 22 year old internet amateurs?

Hmmm… That made me pondering really deep, but there is a hefty prize waiting for those who are giving yet dared to be different.

REFERENCES:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/dec/05/newmedia.workandcareers