Starting Your Own Business with Successful Entrepreneur Erica Douglass

Manifest money — even huge sums! Here’s how. I smile at the delicious irony of this blog post compared to my last one. However, one of the things I enjoy most about having this blog is sharing things as I’m doing them.

It’s really easy to already be successful in some area of your life and then blog about it, looking back with rose-colored glasses and saying “This is why I am successful.” It’s much harder to blog as you go, trying things, bumping into walls and fumbling around in the dark, and risk looking like a complete fool when things don’t work out as planned.

I wish I would have had the discipline to blog as I was growing my hosting company. Now, though, I have a second chance, and you get to see in from the ground floor as I grow another million-dollar+ business–and learn from my mistakes as I’m making them. This is a rare chance for both of us.

First, something that, as far as I know, I’ve never shared publicly: In 2006, right after watching “The Secret” on my computer, I wrote a check to myself for $1,000,000 and posted it on my bathroom mirror. Every time I brushed my teeth or my hair, I’d stand there and look at that check, and pretty much every day I’d visualize how I’d feel when I sold my business for $1 million. It got to the point where I knew it was going to happen–it was just a matter of when.

This is an actual image of the million-dollar check I hung on my mirror, which I ambitiously changed to $2 million and “or 2008″ when I thought I might not sell my company in 2007.

It didn’t take long: In 2007, I boldly told Bruce, who would soon buy my company, over lunch that I “wouldn’t accept a penny less than $1.1 million” to sell my company. Why $1.1 million? Well, my company had some debt, and I owned 91.5% of it, with the rest of it owned by two loyal employees.

We signed the papers on September 7, 2007, and I remember clearly the euphoric feeling I felt upon receiving Bruce’s first check for $100,000. He said, “How does it feel?” and I didn’t even know what to think. 6 years of work, and it had all culminated in this one moment! Every emotion I could possibly have ran through my head. It was sheer adrenaline.

After My Last Post…

I shed a lot of emotions in my last post. Then I took 5 days off to visit Portland, Oregon, and just got back. During those five days I had a chance to break (gluten free bread with some other bloggers, including J.D. Roth from Get Rich Slowly and Tyler Tervooren from Advanced Riskology. Having good conversations with them really helped me understand that everyone goes through this, and it often happens right before you break through and take off like a rocket. (Similar to the near bankruptcy of my former hosting company four short months before I sold it for $1.1 million.)

Now, interestingly, I have the same feeling of electricity. Here’s what happened:

In June, before I promoted Profit Instruments, I set an intention to make $40,000 per month. I came up with that number based on being able to live on a small portion of my income and having plenty of money left over to do more things I want, like travel–and fly first class! Plus, I want to do really amazing things with my money. I want to become a shareholder of corporations I love, perhaps do some angel investing, and donate to causes close to my heart.

Anyway, after adding up all my monthly expenses and multiplying them out, plus adding in things like first class plane tickets, $40,000 per month was the number I wanted to aim for. So I set the intention.

I kept coming back to it every day. And, in a new twist for me, I didn’t try to figure out how I was going to make it. I simply decided to let inspiration strike.

Inspiration Strikes

And strike it did. The first thing I did was hire a programmer here in San Diego for Best Blogs. Then came Profit Instruments. I kept blogging. Three guest posts of mine ran on other blogs on three days straight (not planned), resulting in a nice influx of new subscribers. I decided I wanted to write a new free ebook for 2010.

Of all that, the most meaningful part for me was Profit Instruments. Buried in the course was an explanation of how to get your sites ranked higher in the search engines by getting links back to them. Doing more research, I discovered thousands of sites that had high PageRank, and a way to add my links to those sites. (Apologies for being vague–it’s probably not what you’re thinking. These aren’t free directories or other “scummy” sites, and this isn’t an “illegal” tactic or something that will get you banned from Google.)

I began compiling spreadsheet after spreadsheet of high-PageRank sites. Then I tested it, first on one site, then another. I watched in amazement as the sites I worked the system on ranked higher in the search engines.

Then, there was a momentous day in late July. My programmer turned to me while we were working together at a coffee shop here in San Diego and said “I know you can only afford for me to work part-time on Best Blogs, but I really need something full-time. I want to give you the first option on that.”

I replied, “Well, I do have an idea for something…” and I started to sketch it out.

I explained the concept. How the sites worked. I showed him the results. (I’ve since started documenting my results on YouTube.)

Changing Direction

I took it to my mastermind group. Out of 6 other people in the room, 4 said they would immediately sign up and try out a beta version. I knew I had something. Excitedly, I shared everything with my programmer. Then I made the decision I knew I had to make: We postponed work on Best Blogs, and went to work on the company I named Whoosh! Traffic.

Here’s how Whoosh! Traffic will work: For a monthly fee, we will build links to your site with keywords you choose, so your site will rank higher in the search engines for those keywords. If you’re not sure how to pick the best keywords that will deliver the most traffic to your site, I’ll have a product for that, too…my new Maximum Clients, Minimum Time will give the complete breakdown of how to get your website working for you and generating leads and sales while you sleep instead of it just sitting there and being a money suck.

My two products–Maximum Clients, Minimum Time and Whoosh! Traffic–will work together. Maximum Clients will take you by the hand and show you how to get your website working for you, and Whoosh! Traffic is a monthly, done-for-you service that lets you have us do the (incredibly boring and time-consuming) procedure of building links back to your site, while being assured we will operate in the highest of integrity and not associate you or your brand with scummy “link farms” or any other below-the-belt SEO tactics that give many SEO firms a bad name.

Here’s How You Can Manifest Money

So, how did I get from meditating on $40,000/month of income to doing it? Here’s what I’ve done so far, and how you can do the same thing:

Step 1: State your goal as if it has already been achieved. I started out by saying “I am making $40,000 per month.” Then I listened to how that felt in my body.

Step 2: Acknowledge, then question, the resistance. At first, I felt a whole lot of resistance. So I asked each part of me that was resisting why it was resisting.

I got back a whole lot of answers! One concern was that I would work too hard and be exhausted. I replied to this concern with, “First, now that I am gluten free, I am not as tired as I used to be. Secondly, I only want to do work that energizes me. I am not interested in money-making ideas that exhaust me.”

Then I asked that piece of resistance if that resolved its issue. If it did, I didn’t feel it any more. (This is hard to explain in words–try it for yourself and see!) If it didn’t, I went back to asking it why it was resisting.

Step 3: Do this consistently. I did this night after night, sometimes spending 20 minutes or more in a question-answer state with my body. After several nights, I no longer felt resistance. I continued every day, sometimes more than once a day, to state “I am making $40,000 per month.” It got to the point where I was really excited to state this!

Step 4: Start making your external reality match your ideal reality. Then repeat all the steps. Once I conquered my internal resistance, I focused on my external world. I asked myself what my ideal reality was when making $40,000 per month. Then, based on that, I started making changes in my reality. My ideal reality included owning a house, so we went and looked at houses. Then I learned that I needed W-2 income to buy a house, so I set up my corporations to do payroll and pay me via W-2 instead of dividends.

I decided I’d be cleaner when I was making that much money, so I started filing papers and getting rid of Stuff. I purged my closet, getting rid of over 2/3 of my clothes. I shredded document after document, scanning the ones I needed a record of into my computer. I donated an entire carload of items to Goodwill. I posted old items I was no longer using on eBay. I donated over 30 books and my entire DVD collection save just three DVDs. I even got rid of Stuff that hurt a little bit, like my Kindle, because I felt inspired to live more simply and purge the house of unnecessary items.

All of this was based in large part at looking at my reality through the lens of someone who is making $40,000 per month. Would I need to hang on to old items, or could I simply buy new ones? I decided it had to be the latter, and acted accordingly.

Slowly, I was pulling my old reality into sync with my new one. And–I wasn’t spending major money to do it. In fact, interestingly, I was making money doing it, by donating so much old stuff and selling items.

Even through the worst times (like the day last week when I wrote my last blog post), my confidence that I would do this never wavered. After I wrote the blog post and took a few days off, I got right back on track, and on Monday I decided to start accepting advertising on this blog. You’ll see a new blog design here soon, with some ads (but not ones that interfere with your enjoyment of my site!)

Is This Completely Insane?

I don’t doubt that some of you think I’m nuts. You might be thinking “Your body actually tells you where you’re resisting financial freedom?” Yep! And yours will, too, if you dare to listen to it.

The real question is: What do you want? Most people fail because they don’t make their intentions clear. Whether it’s money, health, or relationships, anything you can intend can be yours. The challenge then is following through with where your intuition leads you.

It can be pretty scary to go where your intuition says you need to go. You may have to quit your job, move to a new city (or even country!), or break up with a loved one to get what you want. But follow through, and know that even in the darkest moments you are not alone, and you too can manifest just about anything you can dream of.

Recommended Reading:

• Take This Job and Shove It (PDF). Upcoming blog rockstar Tyler Tervooren has written a great free ebook on how to quit your job and live freely (even if you don’t think you can quit right now!) Check it out.
• The Failure Manifesto. My last post…read for an interesting contrast to this post!
• Manifesting a Trip to Tahiti. I wrote about manifesting a trip to Tahiti–and then manifested it, and went to Tahiti!