Oprah Winfrey has graced the covers of countless magazines, but her proudest moment was when she ... [+] appeared on the cover of Vogue.

According to Forbes, Oprah Winfrey is one of the 10 richest self-made women in America. And her name is certainly the most famous to appear in the illustrious top ten. No American woman has ever managed to achieve the same level of fame as Oprah by their own efforts. Oprah Winfrey grew up in very modest circumstances. But, from a very early age, her goal was to become famous. In junior high, when she was asked to fill in one of those Where Will I Be in Twenty Years? forms every child is confronted with at some point or other, Oprah checked the box marked Famous. Many of the people who knew Oprah as a girl and young woman testify to the fact that she was always driven to become a star and be very rich. For her, wealth was primarily a means of attracting attention: In this society nobody listens to you unless you have some bling, some money, some clout, some access.

Oprahs Big Break

Oprahs career got started in 1976 with a television station in Baltimore. She was given the assignment of visiting a different Baltimore neighborhood each day to interview local people. Typical of Oprah, she judged her role primarily in terms of how it could increase her own popularity. It's good P.R. for me, she explained, It was a great way of introducing me to the city. Unfortunately, she lost her prestigious position as co-anchor after just eight months. She was demoted to weekend features reporter, which, by her own admission, was the lowest position in the newsroom hierarchy. The substantive stories Oprah was now asked to report on included a cockatoos birthday party at the local zoo. But at least she was still part of the newsroom. When she was chosen as the host of a new morning show, People Are Talking, she felt she had finally reached rock-bottom. Her boss at the time recalls: She really wanted to be a news person. She knew that news was all that mattered in television at the time. She saw daytime as a real come-down, a failure. She started crying. Please don't to this to me, she begged. Its the lowest of the low. ... What I was offering her was a real job and, quite frankly, she had no other option. Oprah finally agreed to do it, but she left his office with tears in her eyes.

It is a tribute to Oprah that she made the best of the situation, and in retrospect what seemed like a demotion proved a great opportunity for her further career. People Are Talking launched on August 14, 1978, and after interviewing two actors from her favorite soap opera, All My Children, Oprah said she felt like she had finally found her place in television. I came off the air, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do ... This is it. This is what I was born to do ... It just felt like breathing. It was the most natural process for me." Her show was so successful that it was soon picked up for national syndication.

Oprahs Image Change

Her show drew its highest ratings when it covered sex-related topics. Audiences also responded enthusiastically to features on diet and relationship issues. Later in her career, she reflected more critically on the kind of shows she had initially been so successful with: Ive been guilty of doing trash TV and not even thinking it was trash, she once admitted. Winfrey wanted to elevate her shows by focusing on more challenging featuresincluding, for example, promoting books. In addition to audience ratings, image had now also become important to Oprahshe no longer wanted to shed her reputation for doing trash TV.

She now saw herself as more of a motivational guru. In the late 1990s, Oprah started a series of Change Your Life shows. She positioned herself as the embodiment of the American dream: a woman who overcame a difficult and abusive childhood and went on to craft an unprecedented career for herself as and became the worlds first black self-made billionaire. Her story inspired many millions of peoplenot only in America but also in many other countries where her show was broadcast. For Oprah and her followers, her extraordinary success was proof of the power of positive thinking. People were inspired by her gospel: If I can do it, you can do it. Ultimately, talk shows were just one of the many vehicles that Oprah used to promote herself and achieve unparalleled professional success.

Oprahs Diets

As a girl, Oprah had never even dared to dream of being on the cover of Vogue. However, when the idea was floated, the magazines editor told Oprah, who was overweight for much of her life, that she would have to lose weight before she would be invited to pose for the cover. Oprah promised to lose at least 20 pounds by the day of the photo shoot. She enrolled in a weight-loss boot camp, followed a strict diet and trained hard to make it onto the cover of Vogue. In October 1998, Oprahs Vogue cover hit the newsstands. It went on to sell 900,000 copies, more than any other issue in the magazine's 110-year history.

Over the years, Winfrey has gone through repeated cycles of shedding pounds of weight, only to put them all back on again. On one of her famous diets, she lost 67 pounds. In order to show her audience just how much that is, she pulled 67 pounds of greasy animal fat into the studio in a small red wagon. To drive the point home, she tried to lift the bag of wobbly fat. Is this gross or what? Its amazing to me, I cant lift it, but I used to carry it around every day.

The show was the most successful of Winfreys talk show careerwatched by 44% of the daytime television audience. Following her diet, she declared that she would never gain weight again, but she had said the same thing so many times before and eventually always put the weight back on. Her mostly female viewers sympathized with her weight struggles, especially as so many of them had their own personal experience of this yo-yo effect. Her viewers found it easier to identify with a frequently overweight woman who struggled with diets all her life than they did with a presenter with the figure of a supermodel. But whether she was climbing up or down the scales, Winfrey always made her weight a topic of discussion on her talk shows and in numerous interviews.

Oprahs Affinity For Ordinary People

Just like Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, despite her incredible fortune and fame, has always managed to create the impression that she not only has an affinity for ordinary people and their problems, but that she was in fact one of them. And to a certain extent this is true. The problems Oprah had in her private lifeespecially her weight and diet issues, but also her relationship problemswere the same problems so many of her viewers were also grappling with.

As Oprah became increasingly famous, a growing number of acquaintances, both real and fake, contacted the media to sell scandalous stories about her eventful life. One of her ex-boyfriends threatened to expose the details of their past drug abuseover a number of years, they had repeatedly taken cocaine and other drugs together. Oprah initially tried to kill these damaging stories, but soon realized how difficult that would be and decided to adopt a more aggressive PR strategy instead. She invited a drug addict onto her talk show and thenseeminglyspontaneously confessed that she had also been a drug addict. This was an incredibly astute move: by publicly confessing her past problems with drugs, she defused the impact of the potential humiliation and robbed any such scandalous stories of their news value.

Oprah has always done everything within her power to shape her own image. She learned a painful lesson when she was humiliated by her drug-addict sister, who sold the story of Oprahs unwanted teenage pregnancy and drug abuse to a tabloid newspaper. After this devastating experience, Oprah made almost everyone in her life her sign a confidentiality agreement and forbade them from talking openly about Oprahs private life or business affairs. The more powerful she became, the more control she exerted over the medias coverage of all things Oprah. In fact, she even frequently hand-picked which photographer would be allowed to take her pictures for newspaper articles.

Image Is EverythingSeven Factors For Success

All celebrities care about their image, but rarely has anyone crafted their image as purposefully and consistently as Oprah Winfrey. She wanted control over media representations of her character, her appearance and her life story. The most important factors behind Oprahs success were these:

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The Seven Secrets Of Oprah Winfreys Success - Forbes