How to Become a Millionaire in One Year

Well the article title was supposed to be "The Million Dollar Challenge" but I thought this title is more catchy. Read on though, you may find the million dollar challenge worthwhile for yourself to take up.

We have all heard the web2.0 success stories - YouTube, Myspace, Digg, eBay, Trademe (New Zealand) and other non-web2.0 successes - , The Million Dollar Homepage, One Red Paperclip. If you have not heard of them, click on the links and check it out.

These websites have made the owners wealthy. Firstly, TradeMe was acquired for $700 million NZD. Sure, it was very impressive, but it took them about $300,000 to start up, and 7 years of hard work. So I thought it would be nice to be them, but I do not have the funds and 7 years is a lot of time to gamble, as you are not guaranteed to be successful.

Then I heard of One Red Paperclip, and that is when it grabbed my attention. The short story is, the guy started with one red paper clip, and his goal was to keep trading up until he gets a house. You might think, "that is crazy, why would I trade anything for a red paper clip!" But apparently there are crazy people on the Internet, and it only took him 14 trades, and less than a year.

"I started with one red paperclip on July 12 2005 and 14 trades later, on July 12, 2006 I will trade with the Town of Kipling Saskatchewan for a house located at 503 Main Street."

Compare to $700 million, a house is nothing, but for me being 22 years old, it would be nice to have a house, and a lot of people may even be happy to just have something worth a lot less than a house, say for example, a salary of $50,000.

So that got me thinking, what can I do that will make me some money quickly, say in a year. It would be unrealistic to get a house in a week, although possible. Let me know if anyone has actually done it. So I started thinking of ideas and an old idea came up. So I wrote up a proposal and gave a few people to read it. My lecturer thought I could give a bit more thought into it, and a business coach thought it was a great idea.

So it was time to start. The problem was, I knew nothing about web design. I do know a little bit about databases, as my Major is Information Science. However, I have only learned Java, Corba, Oracle SQL and Web Services. That is not enough to make a dynamic website, I needed to do more self learning. I started with W3Schools tutorials. I finished the tutorials on HTML, XHTML, CSS, SQL and PHP. I also clearly laid out a plan. July for learning, August for implementation, September for testing, and go live on 1st of October. I have even incorporated a company.

I would like to say, it is going well, I am getting 75,000 unique visitors per day and making around $10,000 a month. Unfortunately, it all came to a screeching halt during the learning stage. It stopped after finishing those tutorials. The reason was that I simply got way too busy with university work, I could not spare time even though I skip quite a lot of classes.

So I did not have time to think about it, until last month, the big news came out. YouTube was acquired for $1.6 Billion USD. That grabbed my attention again. What made YouTube so great was that it has not even been a year yet, and their idea was actually a really simple idea. I thought if they can make $1.6 billion, surely I can make $1 million or more, I just need to come up with the idea.

Then I remembered someone told me about the million dollar homepage, and had a look. In his blog he talked about how he came up with the idea. He lied on his bed with his notepad and brainstormed for ideas, and the idea just popped out of nowhere. So that is what I did, except I just sat in front of my desk and an idea popped up too.

I cannot tell you what my idea is, all I can say is that I have an idea and I think it will work. I will let everyone know when it is completed. Now we are finally getting to the topic - The Million Dollar Challenge. I have taken up my own million dollar challenge. I have finished my studies this year, and was supposed to carry on with postgraduate study, but I have decided to work on this full time. I encourage you all who have a dream and are a bit adventurous to take up the challenge too. There are a few things I thought of and could share with you on how to get started on the challenge.

1. Think of an idea, or have it in the back of your mind. Something might pop up.
2. Do not become a copy cat. The copy cat sites are almost never successful, because people get more sick of it the more copy cats there are out there.
3. Be creative. Your idea may not seem like something that would appeal to a majority of people, but with so many Internet users (I have no official numbers, but a lot), you only need a small percentage of people to like your idea for it to be successful.
4. Anything is possible. While it is nice to have a simple idea that can be easily implemented, if you have a great complex idea, it can still be implemented, just requires more time and effort. I do not think I can come up with an idea that cannot be implemented, even if I cannot implement it, I am sure with a partner or two, we can work out a solution. But check with someone you trust that can keep your idea a secret before you quit your day job.
   
5. Do not have advertising on the page. While advertising is a source of revenue, it is only when you have a reliable customer base. People get annoyed with advertising and would think you are just trying to make money. Remember business is not about money, it is about people. Once you build a good relationship with people with your unique product, that is when they will start bringing you money. That is when you can start advertising. However, only advertise if your product or service is free. In general, if you sell something, you would want that to be your main source of income. Advertising on your page would just make people leave your site.
6. If you are running a free service, your only income would be from advertising. Personally, I do not like Google text ads, they are ugly and not catchy and ruins a good looking page. I would use the Google image ads only, but I would prefer to find sponsors that would sponsor me to display their ads instead of on a per click basis. That is only possible if you can show good traffic coming to the website.
7. Provide a way for users to contact you and give feedback, and improve on that.
8. Hang in there, if result does not show in a short time, do not give up, have faith in your idea, and keep improving on it.
9. Advertise yourself. It can be paid or free. I have not done much research on paid advertising, but I think it would be quite expensive, and TV ads not be an option at the start. There are a number of free advertising you can do. Blog about it, post it on Digg, Local newspaper (if you have contacts), posters, and the most effective way is probably word of mouth. Remember YouTube, I have literally told more than 100 people about them, because they are so great. Then I'm sure they will tell more people, and so will I, and if you are really good, the whole world would know about you without any expense in advertising.
10. Final advice: All the best! (To me too :D)