At the age of 24, Johnny “Cupcakes” Earl is running one of the most unique marketing initiatives that I have ever seen.

He named his company Johnny Cupcakes, has his retail store set up like a bakery, and dresses his staff like they are ready to sell cupcakes to hungry patrons. The only problem is Johnny Cupcakes does not sell cupcakes at all - he sells T-shirts.

Johnny started the company as a joke when his friend gave him the nickname of Johnny “Cupcake”. Johnny made a T-shirt with the name and people started asking where they could find a shirt like his. He began selling them out of his car and then on the Internet. When he toured with his band he gave a few of his shirts to the other bands he played alongside and when one of them showed up on MTV wearing his T-shirt, Johnny Cupcake was officially a sought after brand.

His T-shirts, each of which show a cupcake in a unique position (ex. Statue of Liberty holding a cupcake) are now selling for up to $70 each. When Johnny opened up his Boston retail store there was a lineup of over 500 people waiting to get in on launch day. “It’s just got this really big cult following that keeps growing and growing. They’ll buy one of everything. And every time I’m here, people will ask to get their picture taken with me. They’ll ask for my autograph. It’s just word of mouth. It’s unbelievable.”

In an interview, Johnny gave his keys to success for young entrepreneurs:

• Don’t rush.
• Don’t get bummed out if you go broke.
• Travel, travel, travel.
• Get a catchy domain name.
• Try to limit/not mass produce anything.
• Be prepared to toss out any relationships or hobbies.
• Focus, focus!
• Personalize your online orders.

Visit Johnny’s site at http://www.johnnycupcakes.com/ 

Evan Carmichael

Making a living online can be a difficult and time consuming process. Fortunately there are many free tools that website owners can use to help achieve success. Here are 3 of the tools that I use on a regular basis:

LinkAdage Reports: Link Adage has two free reports that I find very useful. The first is a metrics report. It allows you to enter in your domain name and two keywords. It then goes out and searches a number of the Google data centers, Yahoo and MSN to tell you where you rank for those keywords. The second report is the PR-data report which looks at your wesite’s Page Rank in 50 Google data centers and tells you how you rank. This tool is particularly useful as a Page Rank update is being released. Changes will often occur in a few data centers at time so you can get the early scoop on new updates as they come out.

Alexa: Alexa is free tool that gives you an estimate of how popular your website is as well as your competitors. The lower the number you have the better. For example, Yahoo is #1, MSN is #2, Google is #3, ebay is #17, and Amazon is #30. YoungEntrepreneur.com is #20,964. They chart your progress so you can see how you are improving (or losing ground) over time. Your Alexa ranking is also a key factor that advertisers look at when they make sponsorship decisions. The number is not completely accurate, however. I have had a number of months, including this one, when my traffic has been at record highs but my Alexa ranking has decreased - but it is the best measure available at the moment.

StatCounter: StatCounter is an analytics tool that tells you who is coming to your website, what search terms they are using, and most of the other features you would expect in a web statistics package. I use Google Analytics for the detailed number crunching that needs to be done on a regular basis to support my advertisers but the data is always a day late. I like to keep track of my numbers on a live basis and that is where StatCounter comes in with its up to the second information. StatCounter is free for a limited number of page impressions and they have inexpensive upgrade options.

Which web tools can you not live without?

Evan Carmichael

What would you do if you were 20 years old and just received one million dollars? If you are Jake Lapin, you buy a hunting and fishing shop and become an entrepreneur.

Jake used to work at the Sargento cheese factory when he entered a lottery pool with 99 of his fellow coworkers. They won the $208.6 million dollar Powerball jackpot on August 5th and Jake received $1 million of that total - before taxes.

Jake had always been an avid outdoors man and decided to use this opportunity to follow his passion and become an entrepreneur. In December he purchased Dutch’s Trading Post from its longtime owners and Jake was in business. “It’s always been a dream of mine, and now it’s reality.”

Jake quickly found out what life was like as a young entrepreneur. “At 20, most people don’t think about the 10 or 11 employees they have or who they’re going to schedule next week.”

Because of the long hours Jake has to put in to run the company he had to drop out of university and hopes to return to finish his business degree when he has more time. Jake’s sister helps him with the accounting and the former owners, who have had the shop for 25 years, have been mentoring him on how to run the business.

What would you do if you won a million dollars in the lottery?

Evan Carmichael