‘Nobody loves me’ – My tale of entrepreneurial rejection
No one loves me!
I’ve been feeling fairly disheartened that my business ideas haven’t really worked out the way I’d like them to. I’ve worked incredibly hard on my content and I feel that I add a lot of value for the audience. (Can you feel the ‘no one loves me’ narrative?!). But the revenue is not what I need it to be.
I’ll be honest, it’s also a little annoying to see that someone’s video clips of a squirrel running an obstacle course can attract such an ‘easy’ audience and revenue. It is NOT as easy as it sounds, especially if your specialism and content is not focussed on entertainment. Education is FAR less interesting. Sigh.
I haven’t managed to monetise this the way I wanted, and this is pretty depressing.
My goal?
I have wanted to monetise my content in various ways for about a year. I’ve been working on increasing traffic so that my site is more attractive to advertisers and sponsors. This has been tough, especially since I’m in the education space, in a fairly small, niché market. (South Africa is a FAR smaller market than the US or UK, and the accounting students are obviously an even smaller segment).
As a South African, it’s a little tough to keep translating advice from US-based experts on how to achieve success, since the content doesn’t seem to be designed for an audience with these characteristics. And if it is, it’s tough to figure out what and how to ‘translate’ it for my needs. (This also means that it’s easier to assume that it’s not your fault if the advice doesn’t work!)
SOMEONE likes me... BUT...
I recently shared my life lesson related to my fear-based decision, and this has been another one.
During the week, I received an email from an online sports betting organisation, saying that they had come across my website and felt that my audience was right for their targeting. They asked how much I’d charge for them to advertise on my site.
This was a double-edged sword for me. While it’s great to have ANY company reach out and say that they think your site has advertising value, I’m not sure how I feel about advertising ‘gambling’ on a site aimed at future finance professionals, whom I’m also teaching about professional Codes of Conduct, ethical behaviour and associations etc. It’s a bit of a tricky one.
My first reaction was to get annoyed. That’s just GREAT! The only company who’ll pay me is in an industry I’m not entirely comfortable with. Fabulous!
People can't say 'yes', if you haven't asked them anything!
While deliberating how I felt, or should feel about this, I had a ridiculously obvious flash of enlightenment.
I haven’t actually ASKED people to consider an advertising or sponsorship opportunity. I don’t have a page on my website, haven’t really contacted companies or organisations. So, unless they contact me and initiate the conversation, they wouldn’t really know that I do this.
I have had a few conversations along these lines, only one of which was converted to revenue. This further disheartened me. But, the truth is that I’ve had only a handful of these chats, so what do I expect? A 100% conversion rate?
So, what's my problem?
Yes, this sounds insanely obvious. How could I possibly have missed this? I can only refer back to my fear-based decision making habits, a high sense of anxiety and fear of rejection associated with reaching out in this way. Doing anything ‘sales-related’ makes me feel like I’m asking someone to make a charitable donation to pay for my cat’s food for the month. I struggle to approach these conversations with the perspective that we both stand to gain something from this, and will both get value from the transaction. I genuinely feel that there is a lot of value, but this doesn’t automatically translate to the way I feel about these conversations.
To be fair, I have been actively working on my site, traffic and content, to this end.
Perfectionism
But it’s also another form of ‘perfectionism’, right? I want to get everything just perfectly right BEFORE I reach out, because there’s less risk of being rejected. Brenè Brown sums up perfectionism SO beautifully here.
And this is so true for me in this case. By working so hard behind-the-scenes on my site, it means two things.
One: By the time I’m ‘ready’ to reach out, I won’t have to worry about rejection.
Two: It means that I don’t have to reach out just yet. I can wait a while! Because I’m not ready yet.
Whenever I have to press ‘send’ on a sales-focussed message, I get a physical cringing feeling. I have to close my eyes to press that button, and hold my breath for the strange sense of nausea and anxious thoughts about what the person reading it will ‘think’ of me.
Is this logical?
When I’m coaching my students and clients, I focus on their awareness of whether their decisions are based on logic or emotion. I can’t claim ignorance on this subject!
What’s the logic here for me?
- I’m in the process of moving my entire target audience and business focus, because of the lack of revenue
- BUT I haven’t actually reached out to people in my current market.
- Thus, based on my ‘logic’, I’m putting in a lot of effort to shift my business, because money and opportunities haven’t fallen out of the sky. (Slight correction: One or two opportunities DID fall out of the sky, and I STILL took no strength from that!)
I literally have NOTHING to lose by putting myself out there. If I get rejected, I’m planning and working on changing my audience anyway. I am anxious about rejection from an audience I’m moving away from.
What about rejection?
What am I actually afraid of? The word ‘rejection’ pops into my head straight away. But what am I actually worried about?
What people will think of me has always made me anxious. This is a tough habit to break, but if it’s getting in the way of earning a living, and building my business, I really need to get rid of these concerns, or at the very least, make decisions REGARDLESS of these worries.
What am I actually worried about? That someone will email me and tell me that my content is terrible, that they think I’m horrible at what I do and that they don’t like me? Let’s be honest, this is very unlikely. The most that is likely is that they’ll respond by saying “No thanks, this isn’t for us”. Surely not terrifying enough to prevent me from TRYING?!
I was recently listening to Mel Robbin’s ‘Take Control of Your Life’. (Apologies to regular readers for the repeated referrals to Mel’s content and work. I promise I’m not getting kickbacks for this, I just really find her content relevant for me!). Anyway, in one of her coaching sessions, she spoke to someone wanting to move into an entrepreneurial space, but had her idea ‘rejected’ by the first person she spoke to. I loved the factual way that Mel summed this up for entrepreneurs: Statistically, You’ll get 9 “No’s” for every 1 “Yes”.
This isn’t personal rejection, this is a statistical formula. I can live with that! Even though I’ve listened to this before, and again fairly recently, it still doesn’t come naturally, and I am now reminding myself of this multiple times a day.
What did I do about it?
I started an ‘advertise with me’ page months ago on my site. I started it, and left it my drafts folder, because I wasn’t ‘ready’ to publish it.
After my realisation that people can’t say no if they have no idea I even exist, I took one hour to finalise the page and pushed ‘publish’, before I started over-analysing, trying to perfect etc. If I took any longer, I knew I’d start finding reasons to ‘wait’ until it looked better, different, got more expert advice etc. So, I forced myself to close my eyes and get on with it. It was not easy. Even as I share it here, I want to include a few disclaimers that I KNOW it’s flawed, that the ‘experts’ will have lots of criticisms etc, because it’s not ‘just right’. I want to acknowledge that I KNOW it’s not great, before anyone else can.
I’ve shared it on social media, so this means that I’ve actually put it out there a little more than just hoping that someone will stumble across it! Another ‘close eyes and press send’ moment.
I have no idea if this will be successful in any way. (Watch this space, I’ll let you know!) But I cannot argue the logic, and I definitely have another life lesson for the week!
My message for you?
You will never feel ‘ready’ to do what scares you. But you’ll never know what opportunities are passing you by if you wait at home for someone to stumble across you!
If you feel uncomfortable, anxious and slightly irrationally terrified and resistant, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it, or that it won’t be successful. It just means you have to fight to find the courage to act in spite of those feelings.
And, you are NOT alone! A lot of entrepreneurs are not natural-born. We fight, grow, and awkwardly find our way in spite of a lot of inner resistance and anxieties!
