30 Most Memorable Fictional Entrepreneurs

You may never have thought you'd see the name Homer Simpson mentioned with the word "entrepreneur", but believe it or not the lovable yellow and quite often absent-minded cartoon dad made a top 10 list, of fictional entrepreneurs. Homer checks in at #8 on the list provided by Inc. magazine, which talks of the various money making endeavors Homer has been part of such as Internet consultant, tabloid publisher and sugar tycoon. Coming in at the 1 spot on the list is Hank Rearden a steel magnate from the novel "Atlas Shrugged". Other memorable names you may recognize in the top 10 include a sports agent who "shows the money", a magic candy factory owner, and a weapons-dealing man who's alter ego is tough as Iron.

30 Most Memorable Fictional Entrepreneurs

1) Hank Rearden (Atlas Shrugged, steel magnate)
2) Milo Minderbinder (Catch-22, uses war for opportunity)
3) Daniel Plainview (There Will be Blood, oil tycoon)
4) Jerry Maguire (Jerry Maguire, sports agent)
5) Mildred Pierce (Mildred Pierce, book/movie - working class mother of 2)
6) Willy Wonka (Chocolate Factory, owner and tour guide)
7) Homer Simpson (The Simpsons, multifaceted dad)
8) Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane, wealthy media magnate)
9) Tony Stark (Iron Man, weapons dealer & superhero)
10) Harold Hooper (Sesame Street store owner)
11) Maxine Lund (Being John Malkovich, co-founder of the experience Malkovich biz)
12) Stringer Bell (The Wire, real estate developer/dealer)
13) Fred and George Weasley (Harry Potter, owners of Diagon Alley shop & owl-order business)
14) Bree Van De Kamp (Desperate Housewives, self-sufficient housewife, Caterer &
Author of Mrs. Van de Kamp Recipes)
15) Rick Blaine (Casablanca, cafe owner)
16) Lorelai Gilmore & Sookie St. James (Gilmore Girls, managers of Dragonfly Inn)
17) The Once-ler (Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, entrepreneur)
18) Seymour Levov (American Pastoral, business owner)
19) Bill Henrickson (Big Love, owner of 3 wives & 2 stores)
20) Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett (barber and baker)
21) George Jefferson (The Jeffersons, owner of Jefferson Cleaners chain)
22) Calvin Palmer (Barbershop, owner)
23) Benjamin Horne (Twin Peaks, owner of Great Northern Hotel)
24) Yermolay Lopakhin (The Cherry Orchard, change agent)
25) Frenchy (Small Time Crooks, founder of Cookie business/bank robber)
26) Peter Venkman, Raymond Stantz &
Egon Spengler (Ghostbusters, founders)
27) Paul Dombey (Dombey & Son, wealthy shipping magnate)
28) Forrest Gump (Forrest Gump, founder of Bubba Gump Shrimp)
29) Julia Sugarbaker (Designing Women, interior design firm)
30) Tony Soprano (The Sopranos, mob boss extraordinaire)

(Source: Inc. Magazine)

Surprisingly Zach Morris from Saved by the Bell failed to make the list. After all he started several different product lines, published modeling calendars, spaghetti sauce, magic rings, formed a rock band, and even tried to pawn off Screech as an alien to make some extra dough from the FBI as reward money. Zach was the epitome of a hustler trying to make money while working but also while coming up with various money making schemes. I might also argue for Ari Gold from the hit HBO series, Entourage. Ari was fired from his job and ended up forming the Miller-Gold agency with Barbara "Babs" Miller, still managing his talented young client, Vincent Chase. He even gave up a lucrative position as major studio head to continue running his own biz.

So what do we take away from this list? Possibly the notion that you don't have to be a rocket scientist, truly famous, or a business person to become a successful entrepreneur. Seeing this list has given me some food for thought in terms of movies I'd like to see such as There Will Be Blood, and books to read including Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps these characters, although fictional, can serve as inspiration for us all. One day you even may see this character, the lovable Monetizer who makes money online ranking up on the list too!

Latest Linkbuilding & Exchange Strategies

In the past month I purchased three new domains and set up Wordpress blogs on them, in the hopes of generating even more online income. Recently, I began to focus on just one of the sites in particular, as well as The Monetizer blog, in a linkbuilding frenzy. Day by day I've used the 3 methods below and suggest if you're serious about your linkbuilding campaign you look into them as well (if you're not using them already).

1) Grizz Niche Support Page - This is one great resource created by Grizzly, author of Make Money Online with Grizzly and Make Money Online for Beginners. On this page you'll find a list of bloggers from new to veteran, looking for link exchanges. Each blogger lists out their various sites and you can add yourself to the list in the comments field. You can also go about emailing as many of those people as you want, letting them know you're interested in setting up a link exchange, whether it be inside a blog post or on your blogroll. Grizz recommends the in post variety, while the sitewide blogroll link doesn't necessarily hit you at all in your attempts to increase page rank and search traffic.

2) Entrecard bloggers - A lot of people tend to bash Entrecard as a traffic source, and they may be justified in this, however the site does offer another advantage: finding blogs in your niche(s) to network with and exchange links with. I've made several great link exchanges here with all sorts of blogs. As you know the Make Money Online category there is heavily saturated, so you can likely find someone there willing to give you some link love. Simply go to the "Campaign" tab, then search on your desired category, message the person on Entrecard (or their site), and you've got another potential link exchange. I think it's good practice to drop your card on them also, just as a way to intro yourself and blog, but don't get caught up in the dropping! :)

3) Article submissions - This is the tried and true linkbuilding method, recommended by Courtney Tuttle, and I have to say it's worked quite well for me. I currently use a free program called Article Directory Submitter which requires some manual work on your part, but definitely makes things easier than going to each site on your own. Of course you'll need to register yourself on many of these sites before you can proceed. From there I develop articles around 500 words total, and insert 2 links into the main body as well as the author resource box. Some sites allow the links in the article, others prefer them only in your resource box area.

Now depending on the search term you're trying to rank for you may need to write 10 plus articles to see some success. Outsourcing may be your friend for that, more on that below. I usually find that 2-3 articles, combined with submitting your site or specific page links to Socialmarker.com's sites can usually help you rank pretty well for a medium competitive term (maybe 600,000 results or less). Terms in the low millions for search volume will require quite a bit more work on your part. Something I've yet to try but will soon be looking into is outsourcing the article writing. As much as I enjoy blogging and writing, it can become tedious and paying someone else a few bucks for a 500 word article isn't such a bad idea! Consider Craigslist.org as your source to set up ads to find writers. A tip I learned from an interview on Yaro Starak's Internet Business blog - Entrepreneurs Journey is to use the Phillipines as your source, because you can hire writers cheaper there. According to the gentleman in the interview, they see the lesser (several dollars for an article) money you pay them as quite good based on their own currency rates. Of course use that advice at your own discretion based on your own feelings towards paying someone less in another country. Give it a try if you want and experiment with how much money you offer for an article there. I've noticed people in the Entrecard marketplace who offer to write blog posts as well, so consider asking them to write you an article and pay up the EC's.

The above 3 methods are my latest means of linkbuilding for some new blog websites I've created. I'm focusing on one site in particular and doing a little bit of each of the above each day. The key to success for any blog project you're working on is consistent action day after day, so that one day it all pays off in the form of passive earnings from online income. Give the above a try yourself, stay focused and consistent and you'll be doing yourself a great moneymaking favor!

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer

Make Money Online with Entrecard!

Finally, for all those who have bemoaned and complained that Entrecard is a big waste of time and traffic, the blogging advertisement system has some great news. The Entrecard powers that be made a major decision to help all its users make money with Entrecard while improving the value of EC's.

The following comes from an email I just received from Entrecard:

A real ad network
We will be opening as much as 50% of our ad impressions network-wide to third party advertisers. We will be accepting cash payments to run 125x125 advertisements through our widget network. Ads will be sold as run of network, or targeted by category, for a low CPM rate to be announced. Please plan your daily entrecard ad purchasing accordingly. Whereas before, when you purchased an ad, you were buying a minimum of 100% of the impressions, you are now buying a minimum of 50%. However, the maximum is still 100% of the impressions, because if we have no ads booked for that category, or for the network, for any given day, you will still get all of the impressions.

Exchange your credits for CASH
With the money we make selling as much as 50% of our network impressions, we will purchase your credits from you, and delete them from the system. This means we're going to let you sell credits for cash, right from your dashboard! This has been the single most requested feature since we launched Entrecard. Members have clamored for a way to sell Entrecard credits for cash, but the same problem always arose: where does the money come from to let people sell their credits? How do we use our greatest resource (millions of daily impressions across ~60 niches) to benefit everyone? After much deliberation, the answer became clear. We must open up our ad network, and funnel the proceeds of the entire operation back to you, the members!

Their email goes on to discuss them making your Entrecard credits more valuable then they used to be. Basically Entrecard credits have been created rapidly but not used as fast, leading to what they consider inflation. To combat this they want to buy out and eliminate all those spare credits. Of course there's a few catches, such as the fact all Entrecard bloggers must now display their widgets "above the fold", and also the fact that 3rd party advertisers will be able to utilize your ad space now.

Entrecard's email offers a nice concise recap of this major announcement....

You can boil this down to the following 4 bullet points:

1. In a week, we're launching an ad network where anyone can advertise through Entrecard widgets for CPM rates. This can be run of network advertising, or targeted by category. We are making available 50% of our inventory, or approximately 40 million monthly impressions.
2. With the money we make, we are going to buy credits back from you. You will be allowed to sell credits via your dashboard, and we will devote 75% of daily sales to buying credits back.
3. The economy will no longer be in a state of inflation, but rather in deflation which means your credits will gradually start becoming more valuable.
4. For all this to work, we must institute an above-the-fold rule, which goes into effect in a week.

So let your creative gears start turning...You can see now that if you're offering services through the Entrecard marketplace, you can earn actual cash for that work rather than advertising credits. Plus if you have credits just sitting in your account, now you can cash em in for money! So add Entrecard to the list of ways to make money online!

Download Jean Chatzky's The Difference FREE!

There's a great free download available over at Oprah.com. Today until 10:59 PM EST, the website is offering a free PDF download of Jean Chatzky's 2009 book, The Difference: How Anyone Can Prosper in Even The Toughest Times. The book is a great look at the traits and habits that wealthy people have that we can all acquire as well as how to find the right career for you, how to take risks, working hard and working smart and making money work for you.

Here's Amazon.com's product description of The Difference:

Can you really start from nothing and become truly secure financially?

What’s the difference between you and Warren Buffett? Between you and your boss? Or between you and your successful neighbor? What do the financially comfortable have that you don’t?

It’s not that those people were born into money, caught a lucky break, or have an Ivy League education. It’s not even that they are smarter than you or make more money than you do each year. So what do they have that you don’t . . . at least not yet? What’s The Difference?

Trusted financial coach Jean Chatzky shares the secrets her groundbreaking research of the self-made wealthy has uncovered so that anyone can break through the barriers that stand between them and true financial freedom. Find out why it’s important to:

• Get happy, but not too happy
• Do what you love, but don’t quit your day job
• Read every day
• Remember that failure is not an option–it’s a necessity
• Harness your intuition to take risks that make sense
• Practice the Kevin Bacon Principle–make connections
• Say thank you–and mean it
• Make your money work as hard as you do

Through candid interviews and a study of more than five thousand people, Jean reveals the traits and habits of those who have moved from the lowest economic strata to the highest. The Difference helps you take a look at where you are now and offers simple strategies for going where you want to go. The Difference, you’ll see, is within you: You have the power to determine your financial future and achieve the next level of wealth.

From what I've read so far, The Difference is an interesting and entertaining book. One habit mentioned early on is the habit that many wealthy people have of constantly reading and learning. Definitely worth a free download, but it's a limited time offer. Download yours by heading to Oprah.com and registering for a user account.