I want to address the elephant in the room.

"You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?"

Fear.

Fear of failure.

Fear of success.

Fear of things you can't control.

Here's another story about me to illustrate an issue.

"Okay..."

In August of last year, I started taking a course to create online courses. I had two ideas for an online course that I wanted to create: 1) How to Get Your Daughter into College, and 2) Increase Your GRE Verbal Score. If you follow me online in any capacity, then you know that I chose the latter.

Creating a course on how to Increase Your GRE Verbal Score made sense to me, even though I was afraid no one would buy it. I have coached students for years on how to take the GRE and how to get into graduate school. There is an obvious market of people out there who need to take the exam to move forward in higher education.

So I went through the steps of the course, much of which hinged on having an email list. For six months, I worked really hard to get people to sign up for my Increase Your GRE Verbal Score email list. At the end of the six months, I had a total of eight people on the list, two of whom were my spouse and me.

Fast forward to today, February, I'm in the middle of the course launch, and it's not going how I expected. People have clicked on the course page, but they haven't signed up for the course.

[Update: Apparently, people have clicked on the page and signed up for the free part of the course,  but I wasn't alerted in my email. I'm still figuring out how this online sales funnel thing works. It's the first one I've ever created, and I did it all by myself. I majored in Film Production, not Computer Science. 😏]

I have failed. [Update: Let's keep going with this theme, so that the rest of the post makes sense.]

"It’s all for naught."

Or have I?

Yes, I have not achieved my main objective of selling an online course.

However, over the past six months, I have realized a number of unexpected achievements, including the following:

• I doubled my followers on Twitter.


• I increased my Twitter impressions by 400%


• I made new friends and acquaintances through Twitter.


• I developed a Retweet strategy to increase exposure and engagement for my Twitter profiles.


• I created my first Facebook ads.


• I produced my third web series, Word Nerd Wednesday.


• I wrote, presented, produced, edited, and distributed two separate online mini courses providing GRE test prep for ESL and International students.


• I learned a bunch of other skills involved with developing an online course, but you get the picture.

Regina King knows what I'm talking about.

I wanted to share this story with you Dreamers because I don't see a lot of stories out there about entrepreneurs failing. I see stories about which company is the new unicorn in Silicon Valley, who raised how much money, and how to get venture capital for your new app.

Apparently, failure doesn't sell...clicks on pages? I don't know exactly how article publishing success is evaluated by major media companies, now that information is consumed primarily in digital form, not print magazines.

My overall point is, yes, I failed. And, I am learning from that failure. I'm looking at what worked, what was a waste of time, what I enjoyed doing, what frustrated me, how I engaged with people, who responded to my messaging, and most importantly, how I can serve the people who have followed me.

I Am Not Your Guru...available on Netflix!

That last one is not an easy question to answer. How can I serve the people who have followed me? For whatever reason, there are people reading and watching what I have to say. There aren't that many people (I couldn't fill a living room, much less a hotel ballroom in Florida), but it's a start.

And the people who are following me, the ones whom I know, are people I like!

I didn't let my fear stop me from moving forward. I acknowledged my fear and tried to create and sell my online course anyway.

I will make another online course in the future. I will likely make multiple online courses in the future. This time, instead of developing what makes the most logical sense, I will research what makes the most personal sense for me, based on my engagement and my relationships with the members of my audience, the majority of whom are American women, ages 25-45.

Women similar to, but not (yet) including, national treasure America Ferrera.

I wonder what will happen.

Let's watch.