Ashley Qualls and WhateverLife.com: Case Study of a Teenage Millionaire
Her numbers are indeed impressive. 17 years old high school dropout. Made more than $1 million. Earns as much as $70K a month. Owns a website that attracts more than 7 million monthly visitors and 60 million page views.
Her first Adsense paycheck was $2,790 and she has already rejected a $1.5 million buyout offer. I’m referring to Ashley Qualls, the founder of Whateverlife.com, a free MySpace layouts website.
Fastcompany recently published a fascinating feature article on Ashley, a teenage entrepreneur from Detroit who has made a substantial amount of money online by targeting a niche market (girls on Myspace/social networks) and fulfilling their needs.
Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience–and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless.
She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.
Inspirational, no doubt. And a clear example of the massive potential that the web has when it comes to generating substantial and consistent income. The amount of money she currently earns would be difficult to replicate offline, although what is really important here is that her online income is very scalable.
What she is currently earning can be exponentially increased through the development of business models which make use of her influence within the specific demographic. In this article I’ll take a quick look at her website and offer some general suggestions on how she can improve her income and reach.
Monetization Strategies: How Whateverlife.com Can Make More Money
Like other high traffic websites, Whateverlife.com runs CPM ads by Casale Media and Value Click, alongside Google Adsense and Nabbr, a revenue sharing video widget. The integration for each ad type is relatively well done and not too intrusive. The main problem is that Ashley doesn’t seem to be selling ads directly, which is a huge loss considering the amount of traffic she gets.
Currently, a site like Techcrunch makes $10K per 125 x 125 ad block and that’s with 4.0 million page views per month. Whateverlife gets 15 times more pageviews and I’m sure an aggressive direct ad campaign will bring in at least $10K more per month, even after one takes into account the variance between technology and lifestyle/teens-oriented advertisers.
According to the article, Whateverlife.com has a larger audience than the combined circulation of magazines like Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl!. This is something remarkable, that should be taken advantage of in full.
I would suggest contacting these magazine owners and many other similar businesses which share the same demographic to pitch ad space on your site. I’m quite sure many of them would be interested. It’s also important to set up a simple Advertise page in order to better accommodate potential advertisers.
- Affiliate Programs. Establishing affiliate arrangements with products or brands Ashley already uses or supports is also an excellent way to make some extra income through personal recommendations. Even generic web hosting affiliate programs or other non-specific items would generate some income, because of the sheer amount of traffic.
- Donations. They work best when combined with a free service and I think she should put up a simple Paypal badge or customized icon for those who might want to make donations. Even if most visitors are teens, some do have access to online money accounts and can offer appreciation in the form of money.
- Premium Services. Instead of producing layouts en masse for free, Ashley could offer premium design services for corporate clients, businesses or individuals who want a highly customized and specific design.
In essence, brand Whateverlife.com as a design community which understands the teenage demographic. She already has a number of employees working for her and their output can be partially directed towards premium services instead of free content.
- Personal Branding. One of the ways to make more money from any website without increasing traffic or reach is to leverage the exposure the website generates to build your personal brand. Depending on her interests, Ashley could participate in conferences as a paid speaker on specific topics or hold workshops or classes for aspiring young entrepreneurs/designers.
Pushing the personal brand gives you the ability to delve into parallel or adjacent industries that might require your services or skills.
Apart from these monetization strategies, I do like how Ashley is aiming for the mobile market by launching $0.99 to $1.99 cell phone wallpaper downloads in September. This will be a big step forward and will provide some much needed diversification: Currently Adsense is responsible for 60% of her total revenue.
Entrepreneurial Strategy: How to Branch Out for Greater Income and Reach
I like the fact that Ashley has branched out into a magazine, a shop and has set up a forum. It’s important to direct the attention you receive elsewhere, particularly into areas which will spread your brand. Let’s say a visitor arrives at Whateverlife.com and downloads a free layout. Do you want her to click off and visit another website?
Or would you rather have her sign up as a community member in your forum or subscribe to your newsletter? Never assume that a visitor will come back once they visit your website. Some will but others do not and your greatest chance of building an audience is to encourage recurrence and loyalty.
- Build Sticky Communities. A community is a great way to do this. Create your own social network and learn to cross-market your existing sites. Don’t think that a search engine visitor will know of your other websites if you don’t tell them about it.
Connect the dots for them. Each of your websites or projects should increase size or reputation of another, if they are just simply feeding off traffic from one another, you are doing something wrong.
- Create Multiple Niche Sites. Another good strategy would be to develop multiple niche sites off the same domain, each offering a specific bait. Unless you have a link building strategy at hand, it is better to put most projects on a single domain because you are leveraging the trust that search engines has already given you.
If you create multiple new sites on different domain names, be sure that you know how to build links and an audience that will help you develop authority and the ability to rank, particularly if you are in a competitive niche market.
Examples of niche areas to explore include a teens marketplace, a classifieds section, niche Yahoo Answers clone, social video community, a teens social news/voting site, wallpapers and entertainment fields like celebrities etc.
Reinvesting Income into Your Business is Important
Fastcompany reports that Ashley doesn’t do any paid advertising of any sort. I’m not sure how she reinvests her income into Whateverlife but I do think that some of it should definitely go back into the promotion of her online empire.
Such a substantial monthly income ($70K) will allow you to play around with various paid advertising programs, particularly for your business models or spinoff websites which are not prominent in their niche. Her lifestyle magazine is an example of a site that could do with more promotion outside of the design/layout crowd.
Apply these Strategies for Your Own Ventures
Hopefully some of what I’ve written will be applicable to your own online business or websites. Let this case study remind you that it is indeed possible to make lots of money through the simple act of building of websites that work.
I particularly like how Ashley quit high school and took classes online to concentrate on her business because it shows her passion and her determination for success. She knows that she has a golden goose and did the right thing by devoting full attention to it. Never be afraid to quit your day job when you have a real money maker that has potential.
Don’t despair if you aren’t making money now. Research your market, consult with those more experienced, learn the business and be strategic to achieve your goals. Want more inspiration? Here are profiles of some other money making websites.
For more case studies and tips how to build a profitable online business or website, do subscribe to Dosh Dosh’s RSS blog feed or sign up for free email updates.
Good post again!
It is another brainstorming article to study!
Thank you
Great article and analysis. Amazing how someone as young as her is able to make such amounts of money. Anyway, also subscribed to your feed
Some people have the midas touch!!I hope I get it!!
Steven
Informative article, however no one has commented that the AdSense Terms and Conditions, state publishers must be at least 18 years of age to participate in the AdSense program.
If you are not yet 18, you may have a parent or guardian submit an application using their name as the payee name. All payments will be made to the adult responsible for the site, therefore the money that she is making is payable to her parents not her.
Wow, great article
Rose, The money she is making is actually being held by a court-appointed conservator until she turns 18. In any case, Ashley is trying to emancipate herself and be declared as an adult so it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter who applied for the Adsense account.. The gist of the article is all about how someone as young as she was innovative enough to turn a hobby into a million dollar business.
Maki,
First, I really enjoyed the Fast Company article on Ms. Qualls. She’s a real-life capitalist hero and an inspiration for entrepreneurs-to-be of all ages. It’s a great American story. If a 17-year old girl (or boy) from a broken home living in Detroit can get rich through the Internet, the rest of us don’t have many good excuses for failure or non-action anymore do we?
Second,
“Premium Services. Instead of producing layouts en masse for free, Ashley could offer premium design services for corporate clients, businesses or individuals who want a highly customized and specific design.”
So much for scalability. If these premium services took off in popularity, she’d have to staff up dramatically and thus add significant payroll costs plus benefits. Furthermore, she’d increase her risks of employee lawsuits and maybe even — Heaven forbid — Detroit-style unionization.
Instead of custom design services, Ms. Qualls should charge for limited edition layouts that are of a higher design quality than the free layouts. That way, she’ll get paid many times over for the same limited edition layout. After 90 days, she could remove the limited edition layouts from her inventory. Customers who paid can use the layout indefinitely. Limited editions would offer Ms. Qualls a far better scalability option for premium services — build it once, sell it again and again. She’d make a killing during the Winter Holidays!
Good article!
Logan.
Logan, Thanks for your insightful comment. Premium services are scalable if they are truly premium (read: expensive/pricey). For example, top Wordpress designers can charge over $2K for a complete design.. and not all of them always gets work. The high price offsets any payroll costs, which should be quite minimal when it comes to design work (Designers and coders are a dime a dozen.)
Scalability is also a controllable factor: management can always decline work or reduce assignment loads to match economic growth.
Limited edition layouts might be interesting but I’m not sure how it’ll fit into their overall free-for-the-community slant. Ashley has a LOT of material on how to create your own templates and a new free site builder is coming soon as well. I’m more for the premium services factor because it allows her to generate income through specialized and unique layouts for clients who can afford it.
But good point, nonetheless.
Maki,
In my business, ’scalability’ generally refers to one’s ability to increase revenues without adding labor or at least, very much labor. Web hosting is a great example of this. My company’s hosting business has tripled the number of servers and quadrupled the revenues those servers earn and yet we haven’t added a new server administrator in over three years. Revenues grow, but labor costs remain fixed (save for raises, of course).
Perhaps the best scalable business is portfolio management. Depending on investment style, a portfolio manager can manage $1 million or $10 billion or more in assets and generate ever increasing revenues off of those assets (in management and performance fees) without adding another employee. No wonder all those hedge fund managers make so much money, eh?
Logan.
Wow that is very impressive. I am not surprise because Myspace is very popular and she chose exactly the correct niche to invest time and money in.
Terrific analysis. Like ¨always¨, http://whateverlife.com/ has only a bitten more traffic that Dosh Dosh, so
dosh dosh is millonaire, too ..
jeje .. go ahead you can do it and get some interesting deal with big aversiting company.
Whatever. I´m looking for some analysis from the best of the best blogs from blogspot.com , do you know some of them? thank u
Manu
[BajaenergyBlog]
Excellent post, but I can’t say that I agree with your part where you compare quitting ones day job to Ashley quitting high school.
You point out how she doesn’t reinvest her own money, which is likely due to a lack of understanding of marketing simply due to her degree of familiarity. Similarly, you mention how she isn’t taking full advantage of monetization through direct advertising and similar opportunities.
Calculating CTR and determining the price of an effective monthly ad spot relative to what sites such as TechCrunch are charging — and in turn comparing these values to what she’s earning from AdSense and the CTR maintained there — are parts of simple high school level mathematics. By quitting school, she might not have all the concepts she needs to be able to perform such calculations and make optimal decisions.
Thanks for sharing this Maki. I find this kind of posts like fuel to keep working hard.
Matt,
Thanks for your comment. I just don’t see how I’ve compared quitting a day job with Ashley dropping high school.
The line above applies to ALL entrepreneurs, high school drop outs, MBAs and young or old. In fact, I’ve already listed this as one criteria of success in another post, which very clearly states my opinion on this topic. Here is the post in question:
Making Money and Knowing When to Quit
First of all, Ashley didn’t quit high school completely.. she took classes online. Secondly, I would disagree that it’s difficult or impossible to learn how to understand CTR or the eCPM for an ad without completing high school. There are even specific ad calculators which allow you to do that online. Formulas are readily available as well.
If you’ve read the Fastcompany article, you would know that Ashley also has a business development mentor which would help undoubtedly in the learning process.
I did not correlate Ashley’s dropping out of high school with her eventual success. Her success obviously came from effectively targeting and successfully fulfilling the needs of a popular niche market.
I said she did the right thing by dropping out of high school to turn her hobby into a million dollar business. I didn’t suggest that dropping out of high school was the right thing to do for EVERYONE. Obviously, this depends on what you have going.
The high school bit is, in my opinion, irrelevant but inevitably sensationalized because it does show that you don’t need an MBA or higher education to make tons of money online.
Very nice post indeed, but I wouldn’t try to do premium services, at least not on the same site. She could create a Company that manage all their assets and that company could do that. Never try to ruin the girlie style of the site. It’s worse than adding porn. IMHO
If, for example, a magazine shared the same domain and capitalized on Google searches, could the magazine reproduce a group of blog posts without triggering the duplicate content rule?
That’s a specific example. I would like a way to use established content, with slight revisions, to extend the reach of my blog.
I wish I would be her girlfriend
Great post Maki, gives me even more power to do what I do. Make money on net.
I mean this could happen to anyone that has potential to spread out the word and with luck.
Just imagine Maki you on CNN or some other news talking about your site, sure you would make that month at least 10.000 your self if not even more, and the traffic you would get would stay might not for long but sure for a month.
I am telling you kissing as$ from big dog’s can bring you fame.
You think that I knew about problogger before? Hell no, I saw this one epizode “E!” on bravo Tv last year, where they mentioned his website as “money maker”. I looked up the alexa status on his website, guess what I saw? big a$$ increase in traffic , since then he lost mightbe 5.000K per day visitors.
There is a lot of social networking sites and they might expire some day because it will be too many good s.net sites. But bloggers like you and I are still out there not only to make money but to help others.
I love reading about young people getting it so early in their lives. That’s awesome! Thanks for the article.
I really don’t think she needs advice. She made a nice simple site that gets traffic.
Thats a great peice of Info and He had created A great Ninche
Another teen blogger cashing in on the web. Their are quite a few popping up, including Harrison Gevirtz (15) and a Chloe Spencer (15). I’m not sure on Harrison’s income, as he doesn’t display it, but it might very well be in the same league as Ashley. Chloe is on a much smaller scale (for now) she is doing around $1,000 monthly from her virtual pet site, http://www.neopetsfanatic.com
Amazing but true. There are people that wont believe this, that refuse to believe a 17 year old, and two 15 year olds, can make this much moola off of websites.
But it is 100% true.
WOW! That is indeed fascinating that these Young Entrepreneurs are making this amount of money, it definitely goes to show that entrepreneurs are beginning to get younger & younger. And the scope of business that these young entrepreneurs are conducting goes way beyond just setting up a lemonade stand or mowing a few yards.
This is indeed a very great story.
How to get the secret sauce? Any idea?
Ashley,
god give you more strength, earn more and spend for the betterment of the poor child of the universal
inspirational.this girl is a whiz!
Great post. I can only hope when my kids get to be that age they’ll have just as much business sense as Ashley does.
Thanks for the inspiration Maki
Awesome story. That was a great read. I don’t have aspirations to be a millionaire, but that’s a cool life she’s led.
Ashley`s success is a combination of luck and her own quality. Both flourished with her perfectly. Great!!!
great post Maki, Ashley is real dedicated to getting money online that is for sure. I considered going back to college, as I read your post about Ashley I have doubt. thanks
Prasanga:
Don’t be fool. Go back to college.
You can do both thing, study and create great sites
There are two things I would like to say -
A) If she has managed to penetrate what is called Social Media Optimisation to this extent, congratulations to her.
B) I treat this story with extreme suspicion.
My main issue is that by everyone writing articles on the net that say ‘hey, wow, a 17 year old internet millionaire’ you are creating back-links to her site. The result of this is that you are driving her traffic up (through articles, social media sites and google) - it is being sensationalized and this is giving her alot of free publicity. Therefore,(dare I say it) the implausible nature of this story is what is getting it high rankings on social network sites including MySpace and Technorati, because it is a heartwarming story and we would all like to side with her. If you think I am being too skeptical, try and think of this story outside “she is a 17 year old web business genius”. Maybe I am old and bitter, but I can’t think of anything with the exception that she has a very strong understanding of social media.
There is really nothing that unique or special about this website - that sounds harsh, but in the big scheme of things there are alot of sites making MySpace templates and I don’t think hers is that different. The only big difference is that she has a tonne of links from social media sites writing about “the 17 year old web marketing genius”.
But, that’s just my opinion, and for what its worth I have been posting back-links to the site and I hope that she have every future success, but it should always be from the quality of her product, not from the fact that she has a billion and one links from social media sites writing about how young she is.
@Mr Skeptic - I completely agree. It would be easy for a company, or even one skilled programmer to be the brains behind this using Ashbo as a paid front woman/girl.
I have no proof of this, and I’d have no problem being proved wrong.
Does anyone remember lonelygirl15?
Makes me wish I’d kept on making MySpace layouts when I had my own layout site!! Maybe I’d be making more money these days!!
@CVOS dnr I can see what you mean but honestly its not anything like that she is the brains and artist behind it all I’ve met the girl and she is a wonderfully skilled person, she deserves every penny if not more!
There is really nothing that unique or special about this website —Mr. Skeptic
There nothing unique or special about most websites. It doesn’t mean it can’t be popular.
And she was a marketing genius before all the backlinked stories.
CVOSdnr -I’m not a computer wiz or anything close. But I am Ashley’s father. I have to tell you. Everything in the Fastcompany article is true. Ashley had her first website when she was 10 or 11. I don’t want to get too personal. But I do want to let you all know that Ashley is presently attending a community college that allows her to split her credits toward her high school diploma and toward her college degree.
“CVOSdnr -I’m not a computer wiz or anything close. But I am Ashley’s father. I have to tell you.”
Interesting how ‘Ashley’s father’ is sticking up for her in this blog assuming she is the tech savvy one. Rule of thumb - if you are famous expect criticism.
Nothing anyone has said has dampened my belief that she is the figurehead to attract alot of media to this site for a group of developers. There is a big difference between her writing her own personal page with some templates on it (likely) and her writing a web portal with databases etc. (unlikely).
She’s the greatest thing out of Detroit since Eminem…lol
Another great and inspiration post. It is amazing what is out there. You are running a very informative blog here.
Dear god… *faints on the spot*
I envy her (my blog will go online this week, let’s see if I can beat her…), though I’m not sure I would want to be in her shoes. The pressure!!!
For example: selling ad spots. I would panic because I have no idea how to approach companies or how much money to ask! I don’t even have a clue what’s appropiate for a website like hers… I’d have a mental meltdown trying to figure that out. Perhaps she’s going through the same thing and that’s why she sticks to the ’safety’ of what she knows: google adsense.
Just a theory, of course.
@ CVOSdnr obviously you don’t know the whole story… yes she makes myspace layouts and does mostly everything on her site but when you mention her not doing databases well duh she even has credit for the programmers who made the sitebuilder.
Great post but this girl must be told to go back to school because education is the greatest resource.At least, she must finish her high school.Otherwise, the impact of her entrepreneurial skills will be very limited.
Always remember, it’s not how much money you have. It’s what you know. The free markets do a horrible job of rewarding dollars to intellect, character and wisdom.
It truly is a sad society that can reward a high school dropout but let elementary school teachers and social workers scrape by.
I thought this story would be a blueprint for the good of the world and then I came to my senses: Is it really true she makes $70,000.00 per month? Think it through. $70,000.00 per month off of that site? Have you seen the site? Without proof of her actually getting the money you never know. Money is a very weird thing and without actually being able to verfity it you can never really know.
If she really does make that kind of money this story is one of the greatest in the world. Again, without going into detail, think about it - she makes, at 17, per month, almost twice as much as the average American makes in a year. This story should be taught to all students, young and old, the world over!
I would like to read the article by doskdosh to learn the strategies that ashley used. My fifteen year old son is very interested in doing what she does. He wants to be a webdesigner.
WOW! What an inspirational story. Even if the money, as questioned by some, is a fraction of the stated 70k p/mo, I’m taking notes - come back to read about me next year!!! Thank you for the post and the advice!
$70,000 at 17 also means $70,000 worth of work at 17. There is a very steep learning curve on the internet, and even if she is getting help so do large web firms - it’s not really the issue here.
“My fifteen year old son is very interested in doing what she does”
In regards to your post Judy there is more to what Ashley/whateverlife.com are doing than simply web-design. Try and get him work experience as a web designer, and buy him books on publishing html and web development. Also, a large component of the success in this story is due to a thing called Social Media Optimisation, which is the child of a webmaster practice called Search Engine Optimisation.
Social Media Optimisation involves an extensive understanding of Social Media sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com and the people who use them, and catering to their wants. The thing that draws people to whateverlife.com is the promise of a free template via links on MySpace.com (they don’t arrive there magically, there is deliberate marketing here) and also online articles and discussions like this one (Ashley is now deeply involved in the media in the real world and on the internet). The thing that actually makes her money is the use of advertising programs such as AdSense on her site, as opposed to getting paid as a web designer, so take this into account when you look at the $70,000 sum.
An effective understanding of these things could land you on the path of a success story like Ashley’s, but it will take time and persistence, and unlike working a job as a web developer in a firm (for example) you are not necessarily guaranteed a promotion or more money as time goes on (although persistence and good research are the key here, and the value of your site should theoretically increase over time provided you keep it current).
For those people who propose to drop out of school to be like Ashley Qualls / Steve Jobs / Bill Gates you need to wake up and smell the coffee. Before you drop out of school, you need to start your online business and -
A) have a significant income from it
B) have time commitments to your business which eat into your academic life
before the thought of dropping out of school should even cross your mind. Also take into consideration that Bill Gates was a good student before he left his university studies to pursue Microsoft, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ashley was too.
These people worked incredibly hard at their goals doing what they loved, and only left their academic pursuits after their businesses became successful enough that their time constraints meant they had to leave. As an internet entrepreneur you will also have to have the ability to train and retrain yourself on internet technologies and trends, which takes alot of discipline. If you don’t necessarily have this, stay at school until you are confident you have developed these abilities enough.
Also for aspiring web authors a qualification is not always a necessity provided you have the correct skill-set, but keep in mind that this skill-set is not always easy to acquire and that you can study these things at university - if you want to do any sort of complex web development you will either need to develop the infrastructure to hire programmers or go to a technical college or university and learn to program. A good place to start is w3c schools, which is a set of w3c (World Wide Web Consortium) approved tutorials online -
http://www.w3schools.com/
Enjoy!
I must agree with Mr. Skeptic, I happened to come across this girl on the net tonight and was not convinced…
From one of her articles Sept 2007 … “Late last year, Ian Moray stumbled across a cotton candy pink Web site called Whateverlife.com. As manager of media development at the online marketing company ValueClick Media, he was searching for under-the-radar destinations for notoriously fickle teenagers. … But Whateverlife stood out. It was more authentic somehow. It featured a steady supply of designs for MySpace pages and attracted a few hundred-thousand girls a day.”
ValueClick Media was founded in 1998 and was among the first online advertising networks, an early pioneer of applying performance-based pricing methods to the ad network model.
Today, ValueClick Media is one of the largest and most comprehensive online advertising networks, reaching over two-thirds of the U.S.
Their monthly network stats are; 28 billion available ad impressions, 135 million unique users, 13,500+ quality sites.
My guess is when Mr. Moray stumbled onto her site he was more than happy to suggest his companies click ads…
I’m also aware that Google similarly does it’s own stumbling across high traffic sites and recruiting them…
If you check Google Adword and search “MySpace” it will return a list of keywords with cost per click to the advertiser that was more than tempting for Google. i.e. “myspace layout maker” CPC = $2.15
I have never trusted MySpace, knowing the creator and CEO was Chris DeWolfe who pre MySpace days had an e-mail marketing firm (spammer) called ResponseBase with over 30 million e-mail addresses at their disposal.
Tom Anderson was hired as a copyeditor and became their poster boy so we wouldn’t learn who was really behind the site.
Also if you do a little searching, her website WHATEVERLIFE.COM was registered/created on: 13-Dec-04 and expires on: 13-Dec-15. Seems there was more than a 5 year plan involved … how old was she when it was created … 14?
I’ve been creating web pages and writing code for web application since 1995 and to be honest, after trolling through her site I have to say that practically anything she has on her site may be found anywhere else and much better.
I might further believe that it might be a fishing site affiliated with MySpace … they advertise her site.
Only my opinion … believe not what may sometime appear to be real!
This is the type of story that gets everyone thinking that THEY can make money online. Don’t be fooled, making money online these days takes a good amount of work, it’s not quite as easy as putting up a Myspace resource site and sitting back waiting for the profits to roll in.
My web community gets sixty million page views a month and traffic has doubled every year for five years in a row. We have always turned down advertising as it makes a mess of the site, but are we really turning away 70k a month?
my demographic is 15-35 year old males, average age 25, college educated, and nearly all major entertainment companies in the world are registered on my site, including microsoft, sony, nintendo and others.
We are a digital and entertainment art community with the highest quality content in the niche and each user being extremely tech savvy.
75 percent of my users are in the US…20 in Euro and the rest are floating around.
Should we reconsider? I had no idea what our traffic was worth until I saw that her site and ours gets similar page view numbers.
Best
JM
There are always going to be Neggie Nellies in this world that will feel compelled to cut other’s dreams and accomplishments down. That’s because for some reason they feel threatened or are insecure within themselves. They have to cut others down in order to build themselves up. I say, “God gave you a dream and will give you the skills to accomplish that dream. It’s your gift. Use it!” As for the Neggie Nellies…garbage in, garbage out. SWSWSW (that means some will, some won’t, so what!) Surround yourself with positive people and things, because we become like those we surround ourselves with.
This is an absolutley fascinating story of young ambition, I am so impressed with 17 year old Ashley!!! I am 41 years old and certainly appreciate learning from someone who is young. Never give up your independence no matter how lucrative the offers may become. I wish Ashley, her family and friends nothing but the best.
Wow! Very inspiring article. Very inspiring success story. Thanks for posting it.
maki you are by far the best blog for making money online. i follow your blog from time to time but now i am hooked. this articled is old but i clicked cause of whateverlife i found in a search. the way you reply to the comments and your indept analysis is just golden. better then showmoney or johnchow or problogger
Nothing is impossible in this world if you have determination, will power, honesty and hardwork.
Hi,
Need some ideas on how to go about making money on the internet to help me over financial problems am currently facing
I have been checking out “whateverlife” since she started it a couple years ago. I has changed dramatically, you can tell she is definitely growing with her business. You people need to stop over analyzing what she’s doing. What are you doing that’s worth talking about? She’s 17 make a mill a year and from what I gathered from the FastCompany article she’s still grounded. Hope she stays that way and doesn’t go all gangsta rapper wasting her money on nonsense. Good for her and her early accomplishments. She had no excuses for failure even given her family life.
ashley is really an inspiration to all of us online!
technology and the internet has made the seemingly impossible becomes I-M-Possible
http://www.google.com/search?q.....+years+old
some punk kid making all that money? ought to be laws against that
I always love a great article on a fellow young entrepreneur. I have networked and made friends with hundreds of other entrepreneurs at YoungEntrepreneur.com and I agree with a lot of the comments above, it does seem as though entrepreneurs are starting at a younger age these days.
That is great! A teenage millionaire. That is the power of the internet. thanks to the world of Information Technology