Can a 17 year old really become a millionaire?

Whether you answer Yes or no - 1 particular 17 year old
girl has done exactly that.

Her name is Ashley Qualls and she is the creator and founder
of Whateverlife.com. A fun website that caters to teens who
use Myspace. Aimed predominately at tenage girls, Whateverlife.com
provides tutorials, themes and designs for Myspace users.

The site itself looks very professional and has a fun comic
element. Whateverlife.com attracts more than 60 million page
views per month according to Google analytics and has a following of
more than 7 million visitors each month. Most seasoned websites cannot
even create figures such as these.

Whilst Whateverlife.com is reaching staggering rates of pageviews
you’ll be interested to know that Ashley’s site is even beating
well known websites such as Oprah.com, Britannica.com, Americanidol.com
and CBS.com. As if weren’t enough Whateverlife.com even boasts a
larger audience than Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Cosmogirl! magazines
COMBINED!

So, how did Whateverlife.com start? Ashley Qualls is a normal 17 year old
girl with no connections, no rich family members, and is from a broken home
herself. Ashley started playing with web design at the tender age of 9!
And her break came when she discovered she could provide customised layouts
for MySpace pages to other teenagers. She began all this by providing layouts
to her friends and when demand grew she started to post them on her website.

Ashley Qualls is a Millionaire and had no list, no professional education,
no contacts, has never paid for advertising and in fact couldn’t even pay for
her hosting costs! Ashley would barter with her hosting company by offering
website templates in return for hosting. Her only cost in setting up her website
was $8 to register the domain name - and she borrowed this from her mother. When
traffic grew substantially Ashley needed her own server and her web host suggested
she use Adsense ads on her site to generate revenue. Ashley didn’t even know
that such an income could exist!

Once she designed several MySpace layouts and told her friends, word quickly spread.
I call this Krispy Kreme Marketing. When Krispy Kreme opened up its first store
in Australia, the company didn’t pay a cent for advertising. Nada, zilch, zero!
Instead Krispy Kremem relied on word of mouth advertising. By sending boxes of donuts
to radio stations and tv stations all they had to do was sit back and watch everyone
start talking about their product.

The same principle applied for Ashley Qualls. When a few friends visiting her site
turned into hundreds, thousands then millions through word of mouth via email
and MySpace. Not bad at all.

Whateverlife.com now earns in excess of $70,000 in revenue each month and Ashley has
received several offers to sell her company.

Naturally Ashley quit school and now works on her business full time. She has
already bought a house and has been offered $1.5M and a car of her choice to sell
her company. Ashley has declined the offer to sell and still makes a solid income
that most 40 year old would be envious of.

What’s the motto to this story? It’s simple, have an idea, target a hungry niche
and keep plugging away. Sometimes the simplest of ideas generate the most interest.