Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Resuscitate Or Let It Die?

I have this website that many of you know about. It's a place where I sell my scripts that I've written over the years for church dramas and homeschool dramas. I set it up a couple years ago because I figured, I have all these scripts sitting on my hard drive that I have no current use for, and there has to be SOMEBODY out there who would love to use them.

So, I spent the time one summer to create the website. Acting Out Christian Dramas. You can click there to get to it.

Just the process of creating this site was seriously out of my comfort zone. The research involved! Research is actually one of my least favorite activities. I very much enjoy taking information and doing something with it -- I really hate the process of hunting the information down to begin with. But I had to research places to create websites, sites where I could upload the documents safely, ways for the financial transaction to happen online . . . for some of you, this may all be "duh" kind of stuff. But for me, this was a major learning curve.

And then I went through all the grunt work of actually designing the pages (simple as they are), choosing which scripts, creating free "previews" people could download, uploading various things at various sites . . . oh, good heavens. This was a time-consuming process, both to learn how to do and to execute.

But I got it done. And I was rather proud of myself just for doing it.

As I said, that was about two years ago. In the meantime, I have a Facebook page for the website with about 60 likes. And a decent number of those people are folks I have never heard of -- I don't know how they found the page. I seem to get hits on the website pretty frequently.

But in the end, I've only sold a handful of scripts. I'm pretty sure that's because I do very little to market the site; other than putting out a link once a month on the Facebook page, I don't do anything with this. Frankly, it is quite low on the priority list. It's not that I don't want to sell my scripts. There are just other things more important.

And honestly, I hate marketing just about as much as I hate research. When I had my Creative Memories business, that was the part that weighed on me the most. It's the part I hate about teaching in the classroom. I don't like to have to "sell" myself or my "product." If you want what I have to offer and think it will benefit you, great! Let's talk. But I don't want to have to try to convince you that you need what I have. Ugghhh.

Yes, I know. If I intend to be in the script-selling business, I have to buck up. Marketing is what it takes -- just figure it out. And that's why I'm wondering if I really want to be in the script-selling business. I keep hoping that there will be someone in my life who actually has this skill set and maybe enjoys the selling process who will step in and offer to make this work. That's not happening.

Although my website is free, the site that stores the documents costs me $15 a month. Because of some quirks that happened last month when my credit card got changed, my subscription to that site will be cancelled in five days unless I go give them my new credit card info. I'm trying to decide if I'm just going to let it die a quiet death.

Because I'm just not a business person. But more importantly, I don't know how badly I want to be one.

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