There’s this tendency to believe we need a revolutionary idea in order to get rich. The fact is, most of the world’s millionaires (and billionaires) got rich off of industries we probably thumb our noses at: fertilizer companies, trailer parks, and lawncare franchises work just as well as founding the next Zynga, Twitter or Facebook.

A recent article in Forbes drove home this fact when they profiled the Top 3 richest people in Africa. All three of them made their cash off industrial businesses:

1) Aliko Dangote, $10.1 billion in market cap in his cement company Dangote Cement. Also mills flour and refines sugar.

2) Nicky Oppenheimer, $6.5 billion from selling his stake in diamond company DeBeers. Also owns 2 percent of mining giant Anglo American.

3) Nassef Sawiris, $4.75 billion as head of Egypt’s biggest public company, Orascom Construction. Also building a fertilizer plant in Brazil.

There’s no shame in founding a company that does the sort of work no one else wants to do. Commercial cleaning franchises, for instance, often make Entrepreneur magazine’s list of the top franchising companies in the country. Copying an idea that’s proven to work and steadily growing your earnings year after year is the surest way to getting rich. And starting a franchise (rather than going off on your own) should help you avoid the pitfalls most rookies make (see our list of the Top Five Cheap Franchises to start $10,000 or less for some ideas).

One other thing to note: the richest men in Africa (and I can say men because there are no women who made the “top 40″ list) are old. They have an average age of 61, according to Forbes. That’s another aspect to getting rich that a lot of people don’t want to admit: it takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot of time.

One of my high school friends recently left his cozy corporate job to start a software company. It’s doing well, but he’s hardly sleeping. I get emails from his at 4 a.m. He thinks he’s getting an ulcer and his back hurts from “sitting all the time.”

Some weeks, he bills his clients more than 100 hours. That’s 14 hours a day, seven days a week. I ask him why he’s doing it, and he says “I have a plan. I’m going to trash my body for six months and make this work.”

“What if it doesn’t?” I ask.

“Then, I’m going to close down the business and go back to corporate America.”

At least, he’s trying, and that’s what separates him from almost everyone else I know. He’s willing to put in the hours that it takes to reach a goal – even at the expense of a social life and perhaps his health! It’s a tough trade-off, and it’s probably a pretty extreme example, but I think it’s the key to making lots of money.

It’s hard work, and it’s doing the things no one else can or wants to do.

Photo Credit: Nbauer.

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Hindsight is 20/20. I could have went to college and studied programming for mobile phones. I could have been a mid- to senior-level programmer by 2007 when the first-generation iPhone came out. I could have founded a mobile game development company and, well, started driving a Bentley.

No such luck. But I tell that what-if story to illustrate the point that we often identify trends in business long before that trend goes worldwide. But most of us don’t do a damn thing about it. A prime example of this is the newspaper industry. They reported on the Internet every day, while at the same time clinging to a print-first mentality that let younger, more nimble news start-ups steal eyeballs from them on the Web.

Like Wayne Gretzky skating to where the puck is going, we need to identify trends and get on the leading edge of them. This doesn’t mean we need to go to college and learn how to program applications for iPads. Getting on the leading edge of a trend could be as simple as an unemployed person in a town with high unemployment moving to a city where there are lots of high-paying jobs to be had.

Let’s take Bismarck, N.D. for instance. Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard points out that the discovery of a major oilfield (the Bakken reserve) has lead to a surging job market where “unskilled laborers can make up to $120,000 a year.” The work’s 12 hours a day, seven days a week, two weeks on, two weeks off (and you might have to live in a barracks-like “man camp”), but there’s money to be had. Even a McDonald’s in the town of Williston is paying $20 an hour for counter help.

The whole thing sounds too good to be true. So I got on some job boards and starting looking for oilfield jobs in North Dakota. Lo and behold, I found at least one that’s willing to pay people with no experience up to $80,000 a year. You just have to be able to lift 50 pounds and stay alert for 12 hours in a row. Here’s the posting (and here’s a PDF screenshot of the posting for posterity in case the posting is ever taken down). The pay range is listed in the right-hand column at $50,000-$80,000 a year.

The world belongs to those who see opportunities and find ways to exploit them. It doesn’t matter if those opportunities are in our backyards or 2,000 miles away.

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1) Stroller Strides. Stroller Strides offers fitness programs for new moms and their babies. Since the business serves new mothers, it makes sense to have mothers run the company’s franchised outlets. Currently, Stroller Strides boasts of more than 1,200 locations in 44 states. Start-up costs range from $4,000 to $18,000 (per Entrepreneur). www.strollerstrides.com.

2) GarageExperts. GarageExperts helps consumers “unclutter their worlds” by redesigning their garages to maximize storage and cleanliness. The company offers cabinets, floor coatings, racks and more. Start-up costs range from $4,600 to $20,500 (per Entrepreneur). www.garageexperts.com.

3) Buildingstars. A commercial cleaning company based in St. Louis, Buildingstars added 34 new franchisees in 2011. The company’s emphasis on “green cleaning” could be a part of that as it not only lowers costs for businesses, but protects the environment, too. Start-up costs range from $2,200 to $52,800 (per Entrepreneur). www.buildingstars.com.

4) Jazzercise. Jazzercise offers cardio classes that fuse jazz music, Pilates, yoga, and kickboxing for a one-hour workout that burns up to 600 calories. The company now has nearly 8,200 locations across the country. Start-up costs range from $2,980 to $76,500 (per Entrepreneur). www.jazzercise.com.

5) Fairway Divorce Solutions. A company that helps its clients agree on the best financial and custodial options during a divorce, Fairway serves as a mediator during the often-painful process of splitting up. The company added eight locations in 2011. Start-up costs range from $10,000 to 35,000 (per Entrepreneur). www.fairwaydivorcefranchise.com.

Other low-cost franchises include In Home Pet Services ($7k+) and restroom deodorizing company Aerowest/Westair Deodorizing Services ($8.5K+).

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DangDang shed more than 80 percent of it’s value in 2011 as shares free-fell from $30 to $4 a pop. I cringed every time I checked my 401K. But something magical seems to be happening for shares in 2012. Over the past month, DangDang has shot up 98 percent. What gives?

Here’s my assessment of why DangDang shares are recovering:

1) More users, more cashflow. DangDang used money from its IPO to expand its offerings and bolster the company’s distribution system. That’s helped drive up the number of orders at the site by 32 percent over the past year (per Fool.com). The site’s also driven up its total number of users to 5.5 million, up 36% over last year.

2) Renewed interest in Chinese stocks. With the Federal Reserve’s recent announcement that it plans to keep interest rates near zero until at least 2014, investors’ risk appetite has grown quickly. That’s pushed up a lot of Chinese stocks – and DangDang’s going along for the ride. Other winners include social networking company Renren Inc. (NYSE:RENN), up 60 percent since the start of the year, and video-streaming company Youku Inc. (Public, NYSE:YOKU), up 45 percent.

3) Robust EPS growth. According to CNAnalyst, DangDang’s long-term annual EPS growth should hit 53.3 percent. That puts it ahead of just about every top small-cap stock on the market besides Indian travel company MakeMyTrip Limited (NASDAQ:MMYT).

4) A new e-book platform. DangDang launched its e-book platform in December for use on iPhones, iPads and PCs. 50,000 book titles are available and each sale should net the company 20 percent of the sale price. Writer Kevin Chen expects DangDang’s ebook sales to start manifesting themselves in the company’s earnings reports in Q2 2012.

There are warning signs, though. For one thing, DangDang’s already blown through a lot of price targets for the company. Brokerage analysts have set an average target price of $8.01 (per CNAnalyst). DangDang’s competition could IPO soon, too (see our 2012 tech IPO calendar for more).

Despite the challenges the company faces, and the fact that it controls just 2.3 percent of the of B2C ecommerce market in China, investors seem to have warmed back up to DangDang. Shares still haven’t hit my dollar-cost-averaged price, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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Silver’s fireworks saw the metal rise 80 percent in three months last spring. When prices collapsed, the bottom fell out just as quickly. The metal crumpled 30 percent in five days! That rapid sell-off burnt a lot of investors, and they’re likely hesitant to re-enter the market.

Here’s what the pros think in a round-up of the Top 10 silver price predictions for 2012 from various sources around the web:

1) $33.21 an ounce. A Reuters survey of 45 analysts predicts silver prices averaging $33.21 an ounce in 2012 and $35 an ounce in 2013.

2) $34 an ounce. With low interest rates from the Federal Reserve, James Steel, analyst at HSBC, tells TheStreet he sees silver prices averaging $34 an ounce in 2012. He believes increased industrial demand could make up for any price weakness.

3) $60 an ounce. David Morgan, the publisher of the Morgan Report, has called for $60 silver by year end. “The key is to get through that $50 psychological barrier,” Morgan told Hard Assets Investor recently. “It’s probably going to take a couple of tries. And I do believe at some point it will. Once it does that, you could see silver go up from $50 to $60 in a matter of two weeks.”

4) $44.49 an ounce. A survey of members of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) shows they’re anticipating an average silver price of $33.98 an ounce in 2012 with a year-long high of $44.49 (that would be good for a 30+ percent gain on the year), per MineWeb.

5) $32.70 an ounce. Credit Suisse lowered their silver forecast from $33.70 per ounce to $32.70 per ounce (per SilverInvestingNews), but they did expect that a growing appetite for risk among investors could help the metal rise higher.

6) $35.48 an ounce. Morgan Stanley slashed their 2012 prediction for silver prices in 2012 from $50 an ounce to an average of $35.48 (per SilverInvestingNews). That’s a cut of nearly 30 percent.

7) Between $22 and $45 an ounce. Barclays believes silver will average $32.50 an ounce in 2012, per CommodityOnline. They also believe the metal will demonstrate more of its infamous volatility by touching a low near $22 an ounce and a high of $45 an ounce.

8) $100 an ounce. “With gold having passed $1700 (twice the 1980 high of $850) already … it stands to reason that $100 (twice the 1980 high of $50) silver is achievable,” Hubert Moolman writes on SeekingAlpha. Moolman argues that silver shadows moves in gold by several years. Just as gold broke through all-time highs four years ago, he thinks silver’s poised to do the same in 2012.

9) $50-$99 an ounce. Newsletter writer Patrick A. Heller gives 50/50 odds that we’ll see silver prices between $50 and $99 an ounce in 2012, per CoinUpdate. That’s by far the most likely range he believes the metal will land in by the end of the year (although he does give 14 percent odds silver will close out 2012 between $25 and $49 an ounce).

10) THE OPTIMIST: $200 an ounce. Gijsbert Groenewegen of Silver Arrow Capital Management told Forbes last week that a crumbling dollar could thrust silver up to $200 an ounce (per IBTimes).

I fully expect gold and silver stocks to outperform bullion prices in 2012. Check out our new book Top 500 Gold and Silver Stocks to learn more about our favorite miners.

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1) An average price of $1,765 an ounce. A Reuters survey of 45 analysts predicted an average spot gold price of $1,765 an ounce in 2012. That’s 14 percent higher than last year’s average spot price for gold.

2) New all-time high for gold. After getting pressed in an interview with the Washington Post, Puru Saxena, chief executive officer of Puru Saxena Wealth Management, didn’t name a price target for gold, but he did say: “My best guess is the price of gold could reach a new high.”

3) $2,300 an ounce. That prediction comes from Peter Schiff, a former U.S. senatorial candidate from Connecticut. He believes 2012 will be the year the dollar finally starts to “fizzle” out (per ETFDailyNews). “We’re a long way from a blow-off top that you would get at the end of a bubble,” Schiff said in the interview. “We might eventually get there, but we’re years away and thousands of dollars an ounce away.”

4) $1,845 an ounce. Global banking giant Morgan Stanley revised their gold price predictions lower on Jan. 17. They believe gold will average $1,845 an ounce in 2012.

5) $1,681 an ounce. Investment bank Goldman Sachs was more bullish than Morgan Stanley. On Jan. 9, they were predicting gold would hit a new record of $1,940 an ounce in 2012 (per Bloomberg). Two weeks later, they were revising that figure down to $1,681 an ounce in 2012.

6) $1,892 an ounce. Barclays Capital believes the yellow metal will surge 21 percent on the year. That said, they also believe the gold price could go even higher by Q3 2012: “Gold is likely to reach a new all-time record high above $2,000 per ounce during the third quarter of 2012.” (per IBT).

7) $1,450-$1,750 an ounce. Jeffrey Wright, senior research analyst at Global Hunter Securities, believes gold will remain range bound for the year between $1,450 and $1,750 an ounce (per NuWireInvestor). He echoes many other analysts, though, in arguing that we will likely see a sprint north of $2,000 an ounce in 2012 at some point during the year.

8) $1,000 an ounce. The bulls are tempered by Jon Nadler, a senior analyst at Kitco.com. Nadler argues gold will hit $1,000 an ounce before it hits $2,000 an ounce. “The question will remain for 2012, to what extent will investment demand be able to remain the principle driver and continue to attract interest from speculators and investors,” Nadler told TheStreet.

9) $3,000 an ounce. John Ing of Maison Placements Canada Inc. expects to see gold at $3,000 an ounce in 2012. “There’s just a lack of compelling investment alternatives,” Ing writes.

10) A Long-Term Prediction: $3,600 an ounce. Frank Holmes, CEO of U.S. Global Investors, believes gold prices could double in the next five years to $3,600 an ounce (per NuWireInvestor). “Does anyone really believe in the long term strength of the U.S. dollar … We’re just going to have to live with this volatility for another 12 months,” Holmes told NuWire.

The biggest beneficiary of high gold prices in 2012 could be gold and silver mining stocks. See which companies we think our poised for success in our BRAND NEW book: the Top 500 gold and silver mining stocks.

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It wasn’t until this week, though, that I heard Mr. Puplava actually give a price target on the metal:

“We aren’t even close to where I see the price of gold and silver going. We’re probably in the second phase of this bull market. Wait until we get to the third phase of this bull market where I think you’re going to see prices closer to $10,000. I know people probably think I’m nuts saying that, but I can make all kinds of fundamental reasons why we think that’s where we’re eventually going to end up.”

Mr. Puplava attributes the rise in gold to one thing: money-printing at, not just the Federal Reserve, but by central banks and governments around the world.

“The debt issue, as Reinhart and Rogoff have told us in This Time Is Different, it takes about 10 years to work those things off.

“We’re only four years into a 10-year debt cycle work-off. So we have another six years to go, and does anyone believe that governments are going to stop printing money? I mean just take a look at what they’re talking about bailing out, back-stopping, quantitative easing, they have all kinds of fancy names for it, but we all know what happens when they do this kind of thing.”

It turns out Jim Puplava’s not the only one who thinks we could see gold at $10,000 an ounce. Nick Barisheff (the CEO of Bullion Management Group Inc.) is actually working on a book titled “$10,000 Gold – Why it will get there sooner than you may expect.”

“Unless current monetary policy is drastically changed, it will almost certainly rise to $10,000 an ounce and beyond,” Barisheff writes (per ResourceInvestor).

He believes three facts are contributing to gold’s ongoing march toward five digits:

• The loss of purchasing power of global currencies
• The inflationary effects of money creation
• Irreversible trends (an aging population, peak oil and outsourcing) will continue to cause gold to rise

Barisheff goes onto point out what I think most outsiders fail to miss when they’re thinking about gold: it doesn’t rise in value. It’s only going up in price because the value of our dollars, euros and yen are falling.

And, if you fall in their camp, you’ll probably come to the same conclusion they have: the fiat currency system that President Nixon implemented in 1971 is on the verge of collapse. And until we get a new currency, gold, silver and other hard assets will be the only vehicles we’ll have to protect the assets we’ve a worked a lifetime to accumulate.

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1) Swiss miss? One of the strangest impacts of the news that Switzerland was pegging its currency to the Euro was the downward pressure it put on the price of gold. Before the news, the Swiss franc was generally regarded as one of the last strong currencies in the world, and the fact that it would no longer serve as a safe haven should have pushed gold up according to Hinde Capital CEO Ben Davies.

“Why was (gold) selling off just ahead of a really bullish announcement?” Hinde asked in an interview with King World News. “You have to believe that there was some coordinated action. When I say that, the central banks will all have been in on knowing ahead of time that the Swiss were going to announce this. So there was central bank selling because they really didn’t want the price of gold to skyrocket on what is incredibly bullish news for gold.”

Even Goldman Sachs’ head gold trader Zak Dhabalia was perplexed. “The immediate aftermath was in complete contradiction to prior recent episodes of intervention and what anyone would have expected,” he said (per Fool.com). “Instead of spurring a further gold price rally on the basis that it was one of the few remaining safe haven ‘currencies’ we saw a USD$50 collapse in minutes.”

2) Collusion among central banks. GATA.org is one of the most forceful advocates for transparency in the gold markets. And they’ve been trying for years to draw attention to comments by William S. White, former head of the monetary and economic department at the Bank for International Settlements. At a convention of central bankers in Basel, Switzerland, in 2005, White declared that a major purpose for cooperation between central banks is “the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices – especially gold and foreign exchange.” GATA’s went as far as taking out a $264,000 full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal re-printing White’s comments (along with a few others).

3) Gold margin requirements. I constantly go back and forth on whether or not the COMEX is attempting to manipulate commodity prices by raising and lowering gold and silver margin requirements. On the one hand, the COMEX exists to make money for its parent company, the CME Group. When prices get too volatile the CME Group tries to shake out weak hands (and protect itself from losses) by raising margin requirements.

On the week of Sept. 19, though, news leaked out that the COMEX would be raising margin requirements on gold at the close of trading on Sept. 23. This information got out even after gold prices were already falling rapidly (and the rumors likely accelerated those losses dramatically). Having followed the gold and silver markets closely for four years, this is the first time I’ve heard of the COMEX “leaking” news about margin requirements. Granted, it could have been an accidental leak by a rogue insider, but the whole thing feels fishy – particularly since it helped contribute to one of the biggest sell-offs in gold since 1987.

4) The Chinese have figured us out. It’s interesting that gold price suppression gets sneers in the U.S., but the U.S. embassy in Beijing was alarmed enough by a newspaper editorial in China to forward it to the U.S. State Department. That happened in 2009 (according to a cable leaked by Wikileaks). The Embassy forwarded on the following snippets from the editorial that ran in a State-sponsored newspaper in China:

“The U.S. and Europe have always suppressed the rising price of gold. They intend to weaken gold’s function as an international reserve currency. They don’t want to see other countries turning to gold reserves instead of the U.S. dollar or Euro. Therefore, suppressing the price of gold is very beneficial for the U.S. in maintaining the U.S. dollar’s role as the international reserve currency.”

It’s important to remember why central banks want gold prices suppressed: they need investors to maintain their faith in fiat currencies. Without that faith, an economy collapses, and few things erode faith in fiat currencies like a rapidly rising gold price.

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Typically, gold and silver act like hedges against market uncertainty, but the recent turmoil in stocks has me feeling like this isn’t typical market uncertainty. It feels like it could be something worse.

And when things really go south in the markets, there is no true hedge outside of cash. We learned that in 2008 when gold slumped 30 percent from $1,010 to $700 an ounce and silver shed nearly 60 percent from $21 to $9 an ounce.

Of course, history might not repeat itself (despite warnings of a recession from the ECRI). And there are quite a few investors who are still bullish in the near-term for gold and silver prices.

MF Global’s Tom Pawlicki is calling for gold to advance to $1,700 and silver to move toward $33 an ounce in the short-term (per Barron’s). Technical traders argue gold’s still in a four-week-old downtrend (per Kitco). If gold closes both $1,535, expect more selling. If it closes above $1,705, it could be time to get bullish.

For silver, bulls are looking for a close above $33.58 and bears are looking for a close below $26.15 (again per Kitco).

Today’s non-farm payroll report could determine the direction for gold and silver prices for the rest of the month. “Many think (the jobs number) could dash recession expectations or rekindle widespread macro economic uncertainty,” the CME Group said in a statement yesterday (per IBTimes).

It’s clear we seem to be at a turning point in the markets. And that’s evidenced by lower silver price predictions from leading analysts. TD Securities expects silver to average $36.11 per ounce this year and $39 an ounce in 2012 (per ResourceInvestingNews). That’s roughly in line with predictions from Credit Suisse. They expect silver to rise to $33.70 in 2012 and taper off to $30.60 an ounce in 2013. Credit Suisse also points out that another silver price sprint to $50 an ounce appears to be “increasingly unlikely.”

Natixis Commodity Markets sees silver averaging a ho-hum $27.50 an ounce in 2012 on decreased industrial demand, and gold at $1,450 an ounce.

The only thing that has me feeling like we might be near a bottom in silver prices is the fact that no one’s making bold predictions of $100 silver or $250 silver like they were this spring. That only happens when prices are in a strong uptrend, and the lack of bold predictions and media coverage could be the perfect buying opportunity as the precious metals consolidate.

“It would be quite conceivable to see silver test the strong support area at $20, but that gift would really be too much,” writes Warren Bevan at Goldseek. “Already, with this nice decline refiners are struggling or simply can’t keep up with demand.”

Indeed, the only place we’ve really seen increased demand for precious metals is in the physical coin and bar market. Those are investors who are in for the long-haul, though, and that doesn’t necessarily bode well for the short-run.

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Gold price suppression refers to coordinated efforts to lower the price of gold. On the face of it, that sounds like a meaningless goal. Dig deeper, though, and you’ll see there’s a whole lot at stake; namely, the future of the U.S. economy.

If governments, institutions and individuals lose faith in the dollar as a reserve currency, the Greenback’s value will plummet. It will be much harder for the U.S. to borrow money, and government services will have to be slashed. With 48.5% of the U.S. living in a household that receives some form of government benefits (per the Wall Street Journal), slashing benefits could collapse the U.S. economy.

Here’s what really changed my mind about gold price suppression: a single diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks (click here to see the gold price suppression cable from Wikileaks). In it, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing wrote to the U.S. State Department, warning that the Chinese government was proactively dumping dollars in favor of gold reserves in an attempt to undermine the dollar and raise the clout of the Chinese Yuan.

The cable highlighted an article titled “China increases its gold reserves in order to kill two birds with one stone” from a State-sponsored newspaper in China. It was apparently alarming enough for the U.S. Embassy to send it straight to the State Department. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

“The U.S. and Europe have always suppressed the rising price of gold. They intend to weaken gold’s function as an international reserve currency. They don’t want to see other countries turning to gold reserves instead of the U.S. dollar or Euro. Therefore, suppressing the price of gold is very beneficial for the U.S. in maintaining the U.S. dollar’s role as the international reserve currency.

China’s increased gold reserves will thus act as a model and lead other countries towards reserving more gold. Large gold reserves are also beneficial in promoting the internationalization of the RMB.“

Of course, right now, the yuan is tightly controlled by the Chinese government. It’s difficult for retail investors to even invest in the yuan (see our post How to buy Chinese Yuan for more), but China’s showing signs of loosening that control.

It’s not in their interest to de-couple the yuan and dollar yet, since tying it to the Greenback keeps Chinese exports cheap. It is interesting, though, that China’s could be building up enormous leverage over the U.S.

“When they [China] want the dollar to fall, they will let it,” Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of Washington’s Centre for Economic and Policy Research, told Al Jazeera recently.

In the meantime, China’s accumulating gold, even while they realize that the U.S. could be working to suppress gold prices. Should the U.S. economy continue to stagnate, suppressing gold prices looks like a losing battle.

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