Manifesting Creativity by Amanda Shertzer

About six months ago my friends/business partners and I decided to really focus on a way to make our wildly popular and free genealogy site DeadFred.com profitable. After 4 years of volunteer effort on all our parts we decided it was about time for us to recoup our expenses and reap a little reward.

One afternoon we sat down and brainstormed about how to make money for the website without compromising its amazing research value and without charging our visitors. What was it that we could offer which wouldn't cost us much to produce, but would be of great value to them and would also support the archive?

First we set a monetary goal and decided to focus on this goal and let the answers come to us. Every evening I would read the goal over and over for about 15 minutes before I went to bed and also when I first woke up in the morning. If I had any free "brain time" during the day (standing in line, on hold, etc.) I would focus on it again.

Suddenly I seemed more aware of opportunities and "clues" that came my way that we could use to help us attain our goal. One night I listened in on a free business marketing tele-conference where the speaker talked about how to create an e-book to sell. My mind started spinning and I stopped listening to the speaker and started wildly writing notes to myself about a new project which would surely meet with great success.

Thus, our "Desperate" project was born. "What if..." I thought "we emailed all the most prominent authors and experts in the genealogy field and asked them to contribute just one article for an eBook to support the archive"? When I got to work the next day, my friend and business partner Jeannette and I sat for a couple of hours and brainstormed again to knock out the details. We had to decide what kind of articles to ask our experts to contribute and we had to come up with a title so catchy, no one could resist finding out more about it.

The email to our experts list was met with great enthusiasm about the project and before long we had an unbelievable collection of the most fabulous genealogy articles from the greatest genealogy authors around. Our design genius Eric formatted the book and cover (150 pages!) and Jeannette expertly arranged and edited the articles. As a thank-you, we offered our contributors 30% of the sales of the eBook through affiliate links. After all, it wasn't costing us a thing to produce except our own time.

Early next week we'll be officially launching the anxiously awaited eBook: "The Desperate Genealogist's Idea Book: Creative Ways to Outsmart Your Elusive Ancestors". We've already had our first official sale (we let our contributors announce the eBook to their lists 1 week ahead of our official release as another thank-you) and are expecting so much success that we're already planning a print release.

I have absolutely no doubt we'll make our monetary goal and feel good about giving something of value to our visitors and promoting our great authors who contributed to the book and made the project so successful.

If you're a Desperate Genealogist, or know one, you can get the eBook before its official release on DeadFred.com by visiting www.desperategenealogist.com.

Good luck to you in your manifesting goals!