Hi Everyone

Today’s post is of the general round-up variety – not something I normally do at IncomeDiary.com, but there has been a number of happenings recently, so I thought I would bring all these things together in one post.

And of course it is also the Holidays! Not just Christmas, but Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year and I am sure, several others – So Happy Holidays Everyone!

Don’t worry – the Title of this Blog Post will become clearer as you read on.

1) My 21st Birthday

Firstly, for those of you who did not know, it was my Birthday yesterday – 20th December. Not any old birthday – but my 21st Birthday – see photo with my Hip Grandmother below.

2) Be Careful With Weights

On Friday morning I was at the Gym with my good friend Ali – when I offered to help him as he positioned to lift some weights. I don’t know how I managed to do it – but somehow in those few moments I ‘creaked” my neck and I have been in quite a bit of discomfort all weekend. I have been to see a lovely lady called Carol (a Manipulative Therapist) who has twisted me and turned me always – she assures me it will be good for me in the end.

Needless to say my Birthday Celebrations had to be somewhat curtailed – originally I was going to spend Saturday Night at a nice London Hotel with some friends – and we had Indoor Paint-balling planned for Sunday. Alas those celebrations will have to wait until 2010 now. I have to say everyone has been amazingly kind to me this weekend – doing there best to make me feel comfortable and I have eaten very well and friends have been dropping in. As long as I don’t have any sudden Jolts I am fine

Of course it is horrid to have this happen – but it has happened, I can’t undo it now so I find it is best to get on with things as best as possible. Anyway – I have had an opportunity to catch up on lots of DVD’s that I have been meaning to watch for some time. Plus I have been making notes on a pad for future blog posts – so not all is lost.

Anyway, enough of feeling ‘sorry’ for me.

3) Moneylove Man Of The Year 2009

Normally my Modest Persona would not allow me to mention the next bit – but I am deeply touched that Jerry Gillies (whom some of you will remember from the Moneylove Manifesto Post a little while back) has awarded me his Moneylove Man Of The year 2009 award

2009 has been my best year ever in so many ways – and I consider it an honor when great prosperity thinkers like Jerry Gillies who frankly was a Star long before I was born acknowledge my impact on their online career. Thank you Jerry.

4) Yanik Silver’s Underground Online Seminar

Many of you will have heard me mention about the great impact that Yanik Silver’s Underground Online Seminar has had on my online career. Well in 2010 Yanik and I have teamed up to add a Young Moguls pre-day, just before the official seminar which will feature some of the most remarkable young entrepreneurs – under 25 and making a living online.

Right now I am looking for potential speakers. Amongst those already confirming are: Neil Patel of Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics, Derek Johnson of tatango.com – ( See my interview with Derek Here ) and Kieran O’Neill – a 20 something serial internet entrepreneur with three huge successes online so far! Kieren sold his first website online for $1.25 Million at the age of 19 (See My Interview With Kieran Here)

Are you a Young Entrepreneur who would like to speak at this event? Or do you know someone who would make a good speaker? You can Contact Me Here to discuss.

If you have not already signed up for Yaniks Underground Online Seminar (affiliate link) BUT you are serious about your online career then now is the time to Book a trip to Washington DC next March. Yanik is offering the special rate of $1995 until 20th January 2010 which includes a whole raft of bonuses such as admission to a VIP Networking Dinner & Spy Mission for people who book now. I have to tell you, that Networking Dinner has to be experienced – to be believed. Yanik delivers and then delivers even more. I will of course be there. The people you meet, the insights you will get, the fun you will have is out of this world!

Yanik’s event attracts some of the brightest and best minds online – many of whom are generating significant incomes and building large businesses ‘underground’ – and are always a lot of fun as well as educating. Yanik also brings in some amazing Keynote Speakers. For example Bob Parsons of Godaddy and Tony Hsieh of Zappos both spoke at the event this year.

I really hope you can make it.

Give yourself the Ultimate Holiday Gift – a trip to DC and Yanik Silvers Underground Online Seminar next March

5) Some People Don’t Get It

Once in a while I get a really odd comment here on the blog – some that no matter how hard I try I really just don’t understand.

For example in last couple of days I have had an Anonymous comment …. from an individual who took issue with me promoting Hostgator.com and Woothemes.com

Apparently they took issue with me using affiliate links to promote products on my Make Money Online Blog? I mean, what planet are these people on? What – they expect me to run a Make Money Online Blog that doesn’t make money?

Just about every host offers an Affiliate Scheme – so clearly if you are going to recommend a Host after your research then you would use their affiliate scheme. I researched loads of hosts and have used a good number of them over the years and I chose Hostgator.com because for me the offered the simplest and easiest to understand support and CPanel with one click easy install for your blog.

Likewise with WordPress Themes – I had spent $1000′s on customising WordPress Themes prior to discovering the wonderful, beautiful range of inexpensive themes from Woothemes.com

The thing is this individual is clearly interested in making money online because they mentioned they had been looking at Make Money Online Blogs for a while – but we are all the same, using affiliate links to promote products! This is just my impression but I felt this individual hated the idea that anyone earned any money out of something they bought? I mean when they buy a cane of Coke at the Grocery Store they probably object to the retailer making a profit on the transaction.

The thing is their attitude here (objecting to someone else making money) is actually the attitude that is preventing them from making money. Personally I have always found it better to be inspired by what the other guys is making rather than jealous of their success. Or putting it another way – I really don’t care that much what someone else is making, as long as I am making money myself.

It is always my goal here to deliver awesome value and I have found that if you do that the money side of things really does tend to take care of itself.

Forgive my little rant – but I am also aware that it is individuals like this who steal other peoples dreams and make other people into sad cynical individuals just like they are. People who will tell you it is too late, you can’t make money in this business or that, or that other people can make money, but not you because you don’t have the right education, right background etc. Do not let these people steal your dream!

If a young college dropout and dyslexic can succeed online – why not you?

And for the record – I make no apology for repeating the affiliate links above – I mean if people really object to me earning from my recommendations – they can always strip out the affiliate link!

Finally

Thanks to the many of you who sent Birthday Wishes — I shall be returning to this ‘turning 21 thing’ again soon.

And watch out for at least a couple of interesting posts that I have planned for between now and the end of the year.

2009 has been such an amazing year and it is my sincere pleasure to count on so many of my readers as friends now – Thank you.

Enjoy the Holidays

best wishes

Michael

Hello Everyone

As some of you who have been following me for a while know, I have done several “Top Young Entrepreneur Lists” including the highly successful Young Entrepreneurs Rich List over at RetireAt21.com

Today I have compiled a list of the Top Young Entrepreneurs Making Money Online – aged under 25 – these are really impressive individuals, both as business people and as human beings. Of course you will already know some of these names (Matt Mullenweg and Mark Zuckerberg for example) but there should be some that are NEW to you as well.

All of these young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact on the world – and we all have so much to learn from them.

Talking of impact, I am very pleased to announce that Yanik Silver is adding a “Young Mogul Day” to his now famous annual “Underground Online Seminar“. What is more I will be working closely with Yanik to make this one of the best young entrepreneur events ever – with some of the world’s most incredible top young entrepreneurs already booked to speak. (Any of you young entrepreneurs who got attended Yaniks last UNDERGROUND back in February already know what a Top Notch event this is) Expect to hear more news about this soon.

Finally — watch out for a BIG UPDATE at RetireAt21.com in the near future – we are currently doing a huge redesign with some amazing new content, including profiles of some of the world’s best up and coming young entrepreneurs.

Enjoy the list – let me know what you think — and is there a Young Entrepreneur that you know / admire who I have missed of this list?

To Our Success

Michael

#1. Mark Zuckerberg (25 Years Old)

Website: http://www.facebook.comWhy They Matter: Mark is at the top of our list for two HUGE reasons, he is the world’s youngest billionaire and he runs the world’s largest social networking website which is actually the second most visited site in the whole world, not bad for 25 years, is it?

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#2. Matt Mullenweg (25 Years Old)

Website: http://wordpress.comWhy They Matter: Matthew Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress, the software that runs this blog and millions of others out there. Without Matthew, you probably wouldn’t be at this website right now because I wouldn’t as fond with blogging without his genius, easy to use blogging software. He has been offered over $250,000,000 for his company which he turned down.

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#3. Pete Cashmore (24 Years Old)

Website: http://mashable.comWhy They Matter: Pete Cashmore makes our list because he runs on of the world’s top blogs which is about all that is new on the web. With over 1,600,000 Twitter followers and 300,000 RSS readers, you know this guy is running something big!

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#4 & 5. Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith (23 & 22 Years Old)

Website: http://box.netWhy They Matter: Box.net founded in 2005 was originally launched as a college project to share and store any type of file, and make it accessible from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. The company nearly has 2 million users on the service, and netted a $6 million in venture capital.

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#6. David Karp (22 Years Old)

Website: http://www.tumblr.comWhy They Matter: Tumblr is a blogging platform that anyone can use. The service was built with customization and ease of use in mind. Karp invested money into the company from his previous job as a software consultant at a parenting website. Tumblr raised $5.25 million in funding from various investors, including 2 lead investors with the popular social network Twitter.

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#7 & 8. Catherine & David Cook (19 & 21 Years Old)

Website: http://myyearbook.comWhy They Matter: Catherine and her brother, David started MyYearBook back in 2005 and have grown it to become America’s third largest social network and since raising $17.1 million in two rounds of investment has become profitable!

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#9. Sean Belnick (23 Years Old)

Website: http://www.bizchair.comWhy They Matter: Sean is a real entrepreneur, at 14 years old, he locked himself in his bedroom and 3 days later, his business was born! Now he is earning over $50,000,000 a year selling business chairs online. Sean has been an inspiration to young people around the world trying to sell online!

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#10. Matt Mickiewicz (25 Years Old)

Website: http://www.sitepoint.com http://www.99designs.com and http://www.flippa.comWhy They Matter: Matt is an inspiration to thousands of webmasters around the world, whether it’s their first website or their 20th most people would have visited Sitepoint to learn how to improve their website. Sitepoint has evolved from the website to learn about web design to anything from selling your website for a million dollars, buying books on coding the perfect contact page, to hiring someone to create your twitter background.

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#11. Noah Everett (24 Years Old)

Website: http://twitpic.comWhy They Matter: Noah is the founder of the popular image upload website, TwitPic. His website has grown with the growth of the social media website Twitter and is now one of the top 200 websites in the world according to Alexa. Surprisingly Noah works from home, which is also where he powers his servers that have to deal with millions of pages a day!

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#12. Ryan Allis (25 Years Old)

Website: http://www.icontact.comWhy They Matter: Ryan who is just 25 years old runs iContact.com and email marketing service that expects to turn over $25,000,000 this year. With over 55,000 customers paying a monthly FREE, Ryan has build a membership program where he has been able to offer an unbelievable service and at the same time build a continuity program that should never end.

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#13. Jon Wheatley (22 Years Old)

Website: http://www.dailybooth.comWhy They Matter: Jon runs a great social networking website called DailyBooth which basically lets you snap a picture every day and it puts it all together in a little video. The site has really evolved since launching earlier in the year has got over $1million in funding from big names such as Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

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#14. Neil Patel (24 Years Old)

Website: http://www.quicksprout.com & http://www.crazyegg.comWhy They Matter: Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics. Through these 2 companies he has helped large corporations such as AOL, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal. The thing that really makes Neil stand out as a top young entrepreneur is how he got a lot of the top blogs in the world to permanently link to his site.

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#15. Kieran O’Neill (22 Years Old)

Website: http://www.psu.com and http://www.playfire.comWhy They Matter: Kieran is 22 years old and is a serial internet entrepreneur with three huge successes online so far! Kieran sold his first website online for $1.25 Million at the age of 19 and now has launched a new gaming social network which he raised over $1 Million in venture capital investment for as well as still running one of the world’s largest PlayStation fan sites.

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#16. Blake Ross (24 Years Old)

Website: http://www.mozilla.comWhy They Matter: Blake is an American software developer, who is probably best known for starting the Mozilla Firefox project. Firefox was released in 2004, when Ross was 19 years old. Firefox got over 100 Million downloads within its first year of being on the market!

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#17 & 18. Eric & Susan Gregg Koger (24 & 25 Years Old)

Website: http://www.modcloth.comWhy They Matter: ModCloth started as a small clothing business that Eric and Susan started when they left high school. They continued the business at university, shipping clothing items from their dorm room. When they graduated from uni in 2006, they decided to pursue the business, and since then it has grown into a huge success.

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#19. Anthony Volodkin (23 Years Old)

Website: http://hypem.comWhy They Matter: The Hype Machine keeps track of music discussion on blogs around the world. It lets people discover, listen and buy music that bloggers are writing about.

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#20. Ashley Qualls (20 Years Old)

Website:http://www.whateverlife.comWhy They Matter: Ashley Qualls who is already a multi-millionaire, and has taken the young entrepreneurs world by storm. Aged just 14, Ashley created WhatEverLife.com, a Myspace layouts site aimed at the female demographic, the site at its peak received over 250,000 visitors every single day, which is more than teen magazines such as Teen Vogue, Seventeen & Cosmogirl… combined. Ashley doesn’t charge users to use the site, instead, she strategically places ads on the site, and around 60% of her monthly income comes from Google Adsense.

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#21. Juliette Brindak (20 Years Old)

Website: http://www.missoandfriends.comWhy They Matter: Juliette first came up with the idea of Miss O and Friends ten years ago when she was 10 years old. Her business is now worth over $19 Million, and is visited by millions of girls every month. In 2006, Juliette released a book, and since then has sold over 120,000 copies of it!

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#22 & 23. Sam Tarantino & Josh Greenberg (Both 23 Years Old)

Website: http://listen.grooveshark.comWhy They Matter: GrooveShark was launched in private beta in early 2007, and is now a huge online music search engine and streaming service. GrooveShark employs 40 people (as of december 2007) and is part of the Escape Media Group which was formed in march 2006.

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#24, 25 & 26. Elliott Breece, Joshua Boltuch & Elias Roman (All 25 Years Old)

Website: http://amiestreet.comWhy They Matter: Amie Street is a music website, where the community decided the price of the music. Every song on the website starts at a very low price, sometimes free, and then increases up to prices of 98 cents depending on how many people purchase it.

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#27. Richard Ludlow (22 Years Old)

Website: http://academicearth.orgWhy They Matter: Richard is the founder and CEO of Academic Earth, a website that provides full video courses from leading universities. Academic Earth was included in Time Magazines top 50 websites of 2009 list, along with companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.

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#28. Kristopher Tate (21 Years Old)

Website: http://www.zooomr.comWhy They Matter: Kristopher is the co-founder of photo sharing website, Zooomr. The popular website service was created in 2005, and since then has grown and had many new features implemented into it.

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#29. Edmund Loh (23 Years Old)

Website: http://edmundloh.comWhy They Matter: Edmund started his internet business back in March 2005. He achieved success after selling other peoples ebooks online (with resale rights), and then went on to write his very own ebook, titled Edmund Loh’s Guide To Private Resale Rights. Since then, Edmund has written over 212 PLR titles.

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#30. Shama Kabani (24 Years Old)

Website: http://clicktoclient.comWhy They Matter: Shama is an online marketing master. She is the president of Click To Client, a full service web marketing firm. Shama travels the world speaking at many conferences about internet marketing.