6 Rags-to-Riches Millionaires

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by Andrea N. Browne, John Miley, Susannah Snider and Michael Stratford
From Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs to J.K. Rowling, entrepreneurial success stories are the stuff from which American dreams are made. Much like these famous names, the six self-made millionaires we're profiling have one thing in common: Thanks to hard work, determination and sound advice from mentors, friends and family, they've been able to build thriving businesses from the ground up.
The rise to the top can be bumpy. In fact, some of the entrepreneurs we talked to were homeless during the early years of their companies. That's why they all agree that it's important to help others in need. All, including Radio One's Catherine L. Hughes and Life is good co-founder Bert Jacobs, give back to the community by volunteering time, donating to charitable organizations or running their own charities.
Learn how these six diverse entrepreneurs -- from a t-shirt designer to a media mogul -- turned meager beginnings into multimillion-dollar success and what advice they offer to budding business tycoons who hope to follow in their footsteps.
Catherine L. Hughes

Courtesy of Radio One

Age: 64
Occupation: Founder and chairperson, Radio One
Advice to young entrepreneurs: "Sometimes the ones who love you the most will give you the worst business advice."
By conventional standards, Hughes wasn't destined to build a successful multimillion-dollar media company. She was a teen mom by 16 and a high-school dropout. However, she later completed high school, followed by brief stints at area universities in her hometown of Omaha, Neb.
read more>>>

Bert Jacobs

Courtesy of Life Is Good

Age: 46
Occupation: Co-Founder and CEO, Life is good
Advice to young entrepreneurs: "Try to shoot for a timeless business."
You've probably seen the beret-wearing, smiling face of "Jake," the Life is good logo, on the company's tee shirts and products. Co-founders Bert Jacobs and his brother, John Jacobs, 43, started peddling their tee shirts on the streets of Boston -- going door-to-door at college dorms and sleeping in their van to save money -- in 1989. It would take nearly six years, however, before their shirts finally caught on with consumers, thanks to "Jake."
read more>>

Ali Brown

Courtesy of Ali Brown

Age: 40
Occupation: Entrepreneur, business consultant and publisher, AliBrown.com
Advice to young entrepreneurs: "It's important you seek out other business owners for information, advice, support and resources."
Fed up with her dead-end job at a New York City ad agency, Brown decided to quit in 1998. Armed with her brother's hand-me-down computer, she launched her first marketing agency, AKB Communications, from her kitchen table.
read more>>


Jill Blashack Strahan

Courtesy of Jill Blashack Strahan

Age: 52
Occupation: Founder and CEO, Tastefully Simple
Advice to young entrepreneurs: "Having goals is absolutely critical."
For Strahan, starting her multimillion-dollar company, Tastefully Simple, a direct sales retailer of specialty food products, began with "a dream and a shoestring." She grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota and later started selling gourmet food baskets, which inspired her business.
read more>>>

Farrah Gray

Courtesy of Farrah Gray Publishing

Age: 27
Occupation: Founder and CEO, Farrah Gray Publishing
Advice to young entrepreneurs: "Keep your business small . . . niche yourself."
When most 6-year-olds were worried about what time their favorite cartoon came on TV, Gray was already an entrepreneur. He was going door-to-door in his inner-city Chicago neighborhood selling hand-painted rocks as bookends to help his ailing mother make ends meet. "I can remember being very young and my mom having a heart attack. I wondered how we were going to pay the bills and thought to myself, 'I don't want to be poor like this anymore,'" he recalls.
read more>>>


Jesse Conners

Courtesy of FirednFabulous/YouTube

Age: 28
Occupation: CEO and founder, PeppermintPark.com
Advice to young entrepreneurs: "There is constantly some fire that you have to put out . . . Don't let it discourage you."
Conners had an unusual childhood: When she was 9, her parents joined a cult and -- believing that the world was about to end -- sold all of their worldly possessions. From then until she was 18, Conners traveled across the U.S. and to Mexico with her family, following the cult's message and searching for work along the way. As unconventional as it was, she says her upbringing spurred the independence she needed to succeed in business.
read more>>>

source: Kiplinger.com:

DRIVING TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG

So how do you drive traffic to your blog? Here are seven quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.

1. Tell People about it: Let your friends and family know about your blog. You can drive a lot of traffic to your blog by telling your family members, relatives, colleagues in the office or at work, neighbors, course mates and others about your blog. Tell them to read you articles and comment on them, tell them to give you feedback and tell their own friends about the blog too.

2. Ping your Blog: There are a lot of blog services you can ping. This means that you notify this service, that you've updated your blog. These services then list your new posts and you get the traffic from them. I've made a list of 50+ blog services you can ping on my site. These list are also available if you search Google or any other search engine for it. That should be enough to give an initial boost to your traffic.

3. Add buttons to popular news readers: What does this mean? Well there are sites like yahoo or Google or bloglines etc, which have a members area where you can select sites with RSS feeds to fetch the latest updates from different blogs. That way you can have the latest updates from let's say 50 blogs listed on one page.

4. Update your content regularly: Search engines and blog services love regular updates. It's very likely that you will get targeted traffic from search engines if you post regularly. That means you should make a new post to your blog at least once per day. But be careful. Too many updates per day can harm your search engines position and hits. What's too many? 10 or more.

5. Use Articles to market your blog: Write articles about your topic and send it article directories like
ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, articlealley.com, articlebase.com, etc. After the article, write a little about
yourself and your blog as signature. This will draws readers of your article to your blog.

6. Post in forums: Post in forums, but don't spam them. Post something fresh and interesting and put a link to your blog in your signature. Don't just post in any forum. For example if you're selling cds, post in forums that are about music and cds. Don't post in car forums if you're selling furniture. By posting in forums you will get one-way links which are good for search engine position in search engines like Google or msn or yahoo.

7. Submit to blog search engines: There are masses of search engines available, that list only blogs. Just Google for ‘blog search engines’ and you should find at least 20 of them. These blog search engines will help you with targeted traffic. Be sure to write a good title and a good description to your blog, so that people will easily find it and click on your link.

Follow these 7 steps and you will start seeing lots of traffic to your blog. And the so long awaited sales will start coming in. And don't forget to update your blog with fresh unused content that you write yourself.

source: INDIGITALworks.com

How To Get Referrals

Getting referrals is never a 1-2-3-job, in fact it is a very hard thing to do and since you are competing with millions of individuals and even big groups you must be aggressive and quick enough to promote your links.

Here, in this post I will post some of the ways on how to I promote my referral links and convert them into referrals.

Disclaimer

But first, I wanted to say that these strategies are based on research and personal experiences. The tips and tricks that I will post here are never assurance that it will be effective to you. You may follow these strategies or adopt them, add more personal touches and personal experiences as well. Your works are the result.

Tip Number 1

Advertising to all of the sites that you know can give you lots of exposure of your affiliate link. But be sure that details are there if not so the advertisement is redirected to your blog or main advertisements.

Me, I have a main advertisement through Sulit.com.ph then, I create an advertisement to other sites and redirect that advertisement to the main one.

Here are some of the advertisement accepting sites:

http://sulit.com.ph
http://premiumdirectory.com.ph/
http://88db.com.ph
www.freeadverts.com
www.buyandsellmax.com
www.adleaf.com
www.olx.com.ph

Want more just Google the word “free advertising”

Tip Number 2

Creating blogs like this can help you get referrals. Make sure that your visitors can get something out of your blog so they will have reasons to come back. Keep on updating your blog will surely help you optimize it and get lots of organic traffic. By the time you updated your blog with the latest opportunity, there is a big possibility your avid readers will click your banner and register under you.

Tip Number 3

Social Networking sites can help you earn more referrals, what you can do is post your earnings there and make that album public. What others do is they tag some of there friends for more exposure.

note: I am only recommending that you will only tag your friends because when you tag someone that you didn’t know will become spamming and someone might report you ass well.

Tip Number 4

Whenever you make a post or advertisements make sure that you will book mark it for more exposure. Just create an account with the social book marking sites then just play around with those sites because one site is different from one another.

Here are some book marking sites that I know:

www.reddit.com (will be posting techniques here soon)
www.digg.com
www.fark.com
www.blinklist.com
www.Technorati.com
www.delicious.com
www.slashdot.org
www.stumbleupon.com

Tip Number 5

PTC advertisements can also help, just advertise you affiliate URL on PTC sites. Here is the technique, you must find a new but promising PTC site then advertise it through another PTC site.

You can also do banner advertising to those site.

Tip Number 6

Joining referral exchange programs can also help, but, not quite.

  

Tip Number 7

Joining group that allows banner advertising will help you, these guys will also help you uplift your spirits and they will even give you useful tips for your business.

original post by:

http://thenextmillionairemaker.blogspot.com

Some Tips on Creating Traffic To Your Site..

To create traffic to your blog or site, then you need to make your blog picked up by search engines.
Here is some tips on creating traffic to your blogs or site..

1. Open site http://pingomatic.com/ in your Internet browser.
   
2. In the "Blog Name" box enter "About Warlito Roque"
   
3. In the "Blog Home Page" box enter "http://www.thenextmillionairemaker.com/?id=223"
   
4. Then in "Common Services" click "Check All" to have all services be selected.
   
5. Then click the "Send Pings" button.
   
6. Open site http://autopinger.com in your Internet browser.
   
7. In the "Url" box enter "http://www.thenextmillionairemaker.com/?id=223"
   
8. Then click the "Start Ping" button.
   
9. Open site http://www.pingmyblog.com in your Internet browser.
   
10. In the "Blog Name" box enter "About Warlito Roque"
    
11. In the "Blog URL" box enter "http://Warlito-Roque.blogspot.com"
    
12. Then click "Check All" to have all services be selected.
    
13. Then click "I agree with Terms Of Service".
    
14. Then click the "Ping MY Blog" button.
    
15. Open site http://www.feedping.com in your Internet browser.
    
16. In the "Blog / Site Name:" box enter "About Warlito Roque"
    
17. In the "Blog / Site URL " box enter "http://www.thenextmillionairemaker.com/?id=223"
    
18. Then click "Check All" to have all services be selected.
    
19. Then click "I agree to Terms of Service".
    
20. Then click the "PING ONLY ONCE" button.
    
21. Open site http://blogsearch.google.com/ping in your Internet browser.
    
22. In the "Your blog's address:" box enter "http://www.thenextmillionairemaker.com/?id=223"
    
23. Then click the "Submit Blog" button.
    
24. Open site http://pingler.com in your Internet browser.
    
25. In the "Website Name or Title:" box enter "About Warlito Roque"
    
26. In the "Website Url:" box enter "http://www.thenextmillionairemaker.com/?id=223"
    
27. Then enter text in the captcha image in "Enter the Captcha Text" box.
    
28. Then click the "Ping My Site" button.
    

Now visitors will read you blog and when someone of them clicks on link our server knows that this visitor comes from you.

You will be rewarded for every new visitor comes from your blog.

source: gainmoneyfast.com