Through one of my favorite blogs www.doshdosh.com , I found an interesting article; published by FastCompany.com magazine , about a teenager that makes more money than John Chow. Here name is Ashely Qualls of Michigan, and her website is whateverlife.com .
For those of you that don’t know who John Chow is, he is a Canadian guy that on August 2007 made $17,929.61 dollars via his personal blog. To me, making that amount of money was pretty exciting, I’ve been following John Chow’s progress on his blog since June 2007 approximately, but last week, I just found out that a teenager of just 17 years old, is making an average of $70,000 per month, that translates into $840,000 a year!
The facts of Whateverlife.com
I know it sounds unbelievable, but let me give you the facts of Ashley’s business so you can have a better idea of what we are talking about:
Monthly Visitors: 7 Million people
Monthly PageViews: 60 Million
Quantcast Site Rank: 349 out of 20 million sites
Just to give you an idea, Oprah’s website is ranked as No. 608 in Quantcast , and her website has a much larger audience than the magazines Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Cosmo Girl combined.
Also, as FastCompany article says, she refused two bids to sell her website, one for $1.5 Million and another to sell it for $700,000, a car, and her own show. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?
How does Ashley make her money?
As an amazing as it might seems, she doesn’t sell anything, actually she gives away MySpace layouts for free, to girls of her age. Her only source of income is through Advertising, which so far is made of Google Adsense and CPM ads run by Value Click . Currently Google Adsense accounts for around 60% of her income. She has also created an online magazine and is planning to sell cell-phone wallpapers that anybody can download for prices between 99 cents and $1.99 each.
How can we replicate Ashley’s business model?
It’s all about finding a niche and giving people what they want, branding ourselves at the same time. In Ashley’s’ case, she found that girls of her age, wanted to have a customized MySpace profile but they knew almost nothing about HTML coding, she had the knowledge, branded herself and now she is a recognized source in this field.
She also has been very persistent and constant, she started her website in 2004, when she was 14 years, by posting several HTML MySpace layouts a day. Most of us would have quit much sooner than that.
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