- Pay yourself first. This is the biggest and most important step you can take to becoming a millionaire. Before you pay any bills or buy groceries, pay yourself. Put it in an ira or mutual fund and watch your money grow. It is recommended that if you want to become rich to save 10%, if you want to become rich faster save 15%, if you want to become rich super fast save 20-25%.With some mutual funds your money can double every 6-10 years which can mean a lot after compounding interest, no you won’t get rich today, or tomorrow but in 20 years you’ll be looking a lot better off.
- With the current economic front it is now more important than ever to get your house in order, get out of debt, and you absolutely have to have an emergency fund. Before you invest 20% into your mutual funds its advised to have a savings fund that could pay all the major bills for at least 6-12 months. This isn’t an easy thing to do of course but when you get laid off from your job of 20 years, you will wish you’d had the foresight to build an emergency fund.
- Find the little things that you buy that you could cut out. For instance many of us living in a fast paced life, eat a lot of fastfood and other junk food. Some people smoke, and could save a bunch if they quit, others drive a lot and could save by carpooling. The simple fact is the more you save, the more you can invest in yourself.
- Become a homeowner. Right now is a wonderful time to buy, owning a home is a great way to build wealth and equity. My tip is to buy a house that you can fix up and resell for more than you paid for it. Buy one that you can pay off in 5-10 years easily. You don’t need a grand house from the get go that’s going to cost an arm and a leg and take 30+ years to pay it off. Once you own your home you can then sell it and upgrade, and keep doing that till you own the house you’ve always dreamed of.
- Pay your tithes. If you’re religious of course, which I am – I always pay my tithes and I always seem to have more than enough to meet my bills, and if I don’t my church will pay them for me… If you’re not religious then it’s advised that you give 10% of your income to worthy causes trust me karma is a true principle and everything you give will come back to you more times over.
- Learn to cook. Eating out is extremely expensive, and the alternative can save you thousands per year.
- Ride a bike or take public transit. Not only will you be helping the environment, but you’ll be saving on gas, especially now that it’s around $4/gallon. You might also look into jobs that only require a 4 day work week, as that is becoming the norm, or even better would be to telecommute and work from home, if possible – I believe telecommuting will become the standard of the future, as energy prices soar and companies experience troubles recruiting.
- Don’t worry about brands, brands don’t mean crap. Buy the non-name brand items and you’ll save a bundle over time. Everything adds up.
- If you have the means invest in solar panels for your home. It is costly at first but over a 20 year period you will save a ton more than you paid for them, and may even be able to make money back off any unused energy.
- Teach your children the value of saving money. Today’s generation is all about borrowing, and if something doesn’t change our children’s future will be even more bleaker than ours. The way to stop this is to start from an early age and teach them how to manage money and finances.
- Freelance. It seems now a days everyone is moonlighting and freelancing is one of the top ways to do this. If you can pick up some extra money on the side why not do it? My suggestion is to immediately put all your freelance earnings into your mutual funds and investments to speed up the time it will take you to become rich.
- Lastly but not least – study the best resources on making and saving money. There’s the Automatic Millionaire, and many more great books, audio and video on this subject, just do a search.
I hope perhaps this little info might help you as it has helped me.
The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.
The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.[1][2]
Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 18 December 2009 (2009 -12-18)[update], it is 35,983.[3] On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income.
Alex Tew, a student from Cricklade in Wiltshire, England, conceived The Million Dollar Homepage in August 2005 when he was 21 years old.[5] He was about to begin a three-year Business Management course at the University of Nottingham, and was concerned that he would be left with a student loan that could take years to repay.[5] As a money-raising idea, Tew decided to sell a million pixels on a website for $1 each; purchasers would add their own image, logo or advertisement, and have the option of including a hyperlink to their website. Pixels were sold for US dollars rather than UK pounds; the US has a larger online population than the UK, and Tew believed more people would relate to the concept if the pixels were sold in US currency.[6] In 2005, the pound was strong against the dollar: £1 was worth approximately $1.80,[7] and that cost per pixel may have been too expensive for many potential buyers.[6] Tew’s setup costs were €50, which paid for the registration of the domain name and a basic web-hosting package. The website went live on 26 August 2005.[8]
The homepage featured a Web banner with the site’s name and a pixel counter displaying the number of pixels sold, a navigation bar containing nine small links to the site’s internal web pages, and an empty square grid of 1,000,000 pixels divided into 10,000 100-pixel blocks.[9] Tew promised customers that the site would remain online for five years – that is, until at least 26 August 2010.[10][11]
[edit] Pixel sales
Because individual pixels are too small to be seen easily, Pixels were sold in 100-pixel “blocks” measuring 10 × 10 pixels; the minimum price was thus $100.[12][13] The first sale, three days after the site began operating, was to an online music website operated by a friend of Tew’s. He bought 400 pixels in a 20 × 20 block. After two weeks, Tew’s friends and family members had purchased a total of 4,700 pixels.[5][14] The site was initially marketed only through word of mouth;[2] however, after the site had made $1,000, a press release was sent out that was picked up by the BBC.[5][14] The technology news website The Register featured two articles on The Million Dollar Homepage in September.[15][16] By the end of the month, The Million Dollar Homepage had received $250,000 and was ranked Number 3 on Alexa Internet‘s list of “Movers and Shakers” behind the websites for Britney Spears and Photo District News.[17] On 6 October, Tew reported the site received 65,000 unique visitors; it received 1465 Diggs, becoming one of the most Dugg links that week.[18] Eleven days later, the number had increased to 100,000 unique visitors. On 26 October, two months after the Million Dollar Homepage was launched, more than 500,900 pixels had been sold to 1,400 customers.[19] By New Year’s Eve, Tew reported that the site was receiving hits from 25,000 unique visitors every hour and had an Alexa Rank of 127,[19] and that 999,000 of the 1,000,000 pixels had been sold.[2]
On 1 January 2006, Tew announced that because the demand was so great for the last 1,000 pixels, “the most fair and logical thing” to do was auction them on eBay rather than lose “the integrity and degree of exclusivity intrinsic to the million-pixel concept” by launching a second Million Dollar Homepage.[19] The auction lasted ten days and received 99 legitimate bids. Although bids were received for amounts as high as $160,109.99, many were either retracted by the bidders or cancelled as hoaxes.[20][21] “I actually contacted the people by phone and turns out they weren’t serious, which is fairly frustrating, so I removed those bidders at the last minute”, said Tew.[20] The winning bid was $38,100,[22][23] placed by MillionDollarWeightLoss.com, an online store selling diet-related products.[24] Tew remarked that he had expected the final bid amount to be higher due to the media attention.[20] The Million Dollar Homepage made a gross total of $1,037,100 in five months.[21][25] After costs, taxes and a donation to The Prince’s Trust, a charity for young people, Tew expected his net income to be $650,000–$700,000.[2]
Pixel purchasers included Bonanza Gift Shop, Panda Software, the producers of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, British Schools Karting Championship, Book of Cool, Orange, The Times, Cheapflights.com, Schiffer Publishing, Rhapsody, Tenacious D, GoldenPalace.com, 888.com and other online casinos, Independiente Records, Yahoo!, small privately owned businesses, and companies offering get-rich-quick schemes, online dating services, personal loans, free samples, website designs and holidays.[26]
[edit] Media attention
Following the September press release that first brought attention to the site, The Million Dollar Homepage was featured in articles on BBC Online,[5] The Register,[15] The Daily Telegraph,[27] and PC Pro.[28] Tew also appeared on the national breakfast television programmes Sky News Sunrise and BBC Breakfast to discuss the website.[29][30]
The crucial thing in creating the media interest was the idea itself: it was unique and quirky enough to stand out. I only had to push the idea a bit in the first few days by sending out a press release which essentially acted as a catalyst. This interest coupled with traditional word-of-mouth created a real buzz about the homepage, which in turn created more interest.
Alex Tew, 22 February 2006.
[4]
By November the website was becoming popular around the world, receiving attention from Financial Times Deutschland in Germany,[31] TVNZ in New Zealand,[32] Terra Networks in Latin America,[33] the China Daily,[34] and especially in the United States where it was covered in Adweek,[35] Florida Today,[36] and Wall Street Journal.[1] Tew hired a US-based publicist to help with the attention from the American media and made a week-long trip to the US, where he was interviewed on ABC News Radio,[37] the Fox News Channel,[38] Attack of the Show!,[39] and local news programmes.[40][41]
The concept was described as “simple and brilliant”,[36] “clever”,[42] “ingenious”,[14] and “a unique platform [for advertising] which is also a bit of fun”.[27] Professor Martin Binks, director of the Nottingham University Institute for Entrepreneurial Innovation, said, “It is brilliant in its simplicity … advertisers have been attracted to it by its novelty … the site has become a phenomenon.”[14] Popular Mechanics said, “There’s no content. No cool graphics, giveaways or steamy Paris Hilton videos for viewers to salivate over. Imagine a TV channel that shows nothing but commercials, a magazine with nothing but ads. That’s The Million Dollar Homepage. An astonishing example of the power of viral marketing“.[43] Don Oldenburg of the Washington Post was one of the few without praise for the site, calling it a “cheap, mind-bogglingly lucrative marketing monstrosity, an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop-ups.”[13] Oldenburg continues, “it looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can’t not look at. It’s like getting every pop-up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It’s the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower.”[13]
As the final pixels were being auctioned, Tew was interviewed on Richard & Judy,[44] and profiled in the online BBC News Magazine.[8] The Wall Street Journal wrote about The Million Dollar Homepage and its impact on the Internet community. “Mr. Tew himself has taken on celebrity status in the Internet community … the creative juice … paints an interesting picture of online entrepreneurship”.[2]
Tew dropped out of the business degree the site was set-up to fund after 1 term.[45] He subsequently set up a follow-up site selling pixels for $2 each, with going $1 to Tew and $1 to the eventual winner, who would receive $1 million. He claimed “This idea has longevity” adding “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to win $1m dollars, so I can keep doing it again and again.” The site, Pixelotto, was a relative failure and the eventual prize was only $153,000. In 2008, Tew founded Popjam, an Internet aggregation and social networking business.[46][47]
[edit] DDoS attack
On 7 January 2006, three days before the auction of the final 1,000 pixels was due to end, Tew received an e-mail from an organisation called The Dark Group, and was told The Million Dollar Homepage would become the victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) if a ransom of $5,000 was not paid by 10 January.[48][49] Believing the threat to be a hoax, he ignored it, but a week later received a second e-mail threat: “Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$.”[48] Again, he ignored the threat, and the website was flooded with extra traffic and e-mails, causing it to crash. “I haven’t replied to any of them as I don’t want to give them the satisfaction and I certainly don’t intend to pay them any money. What is happening to my website is like terrorism. If you pay them, new attacks will start,” Tew said.[50]
The website was inaccessible to visitors for a week until the host server upgraded the security system, and filtered traffic through anti-DDoS software.[49][50] Wiltshire Constabulary‘s Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were called to investigate the extortion and attack; they believed it originated in Russia.[50][51]
[edit] Similar websites
Many other sites sell advertising by pixels.[2][13] Tew said of the sites, “[they] popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels. The copycats are all competing with each other.”[1] “They have very little ads, therefore I guess it’s not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty. Any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy plus. So I say good luck to the imitators.”[52]
1. The Million Dollar Homepage
1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.
2. PickyDomains
Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year. Full Story
3. Doggles
Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.
4. LaserMonks
LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord. Full Story
5. AntennaBalls
You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire. Full Story
6. FitDeck
Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.
7. PositivesDating.Com
How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.
8. Designer Diaper Bags
Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.
9. SantaMail
Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer. Full Story
10. Lucky Wishbone Co.
Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.
To see other businesses that have not made the top 10 list but came pretty close, visit Uncommon Business Ideas Blog
