It's official

I now have a domain name:

Digitalartteacher.com

I think I'm ready, I just have the time to follow through with it. 

So what are my next steps?

1. Set up my website

2. Build some content

3. Start promoting

     -Pinterest

4. Record more videos

Mustn't fail again...

I'm scared. I don't want to fail again. I know that failure is only failure if you don't get up and try again. But it just never seems like I will get to the point where I will succeed.

I've started so many businesses that it failed. I tried Mary Kay for a couple years, or really a couple of months and then I just had a lot of makeup for a couple of years. In fact, I think I still have some Mary Kay makeup in my vanity.

I thought about making tutorials on how to do different art techniques. But then I did nothing with it; there's probably a video of me painting somewhere on one of our hard drives.

Then there was the Amazon experience where I went out and bought things at retail stores on clearance and tried to sell them on Amazon. It works… Sort of, but I hated it in the end. I ended up dreading the clearance aisle at stores because I knew that I would have to look for objects to sell, and then became no fun to go bargain shopping.

Most recently I started trying to sell things on Etsy, again, now that I think about it. I think that I tried it a few years back with no success then either. In the end I just didn't enjoy what I was trying to do enough to keep doing it. Making digital cards is all well and fun, but a lot of people do that, I was having difficulty making my cards unique.

I think one of the issues with all those business flops was that I didn't really believe in what I was doing. I hear stories on Brilliant Business Moms podcast about women who build a business from the bottom up from an idea that really meant a lot to them. They're passionate about what they're doing.

Am I passionate enough about building lesson plans and video tutorials for Digital arts to follow through with it? Or is this just another thing that I'm trying? I think that it would be a good idea. I feel like people would like it, but would people buy it?

I just don't know.

I really enjoy having video tutorials for my students to work on. I believe that it is the best way to teach digital art, simply because some people just get it and some will need a lot of remediation. And if they have video instruction that they can go back and look at and repeat different parts without dragging the whole class with them, it makes the experience more enjoyable for all parties involved, including and especially myself. It allows me to really help the students who are struggling without feeling guilty for stopping the more advanced students.

It may even be a system that can work for schools that don't have art teachers. However, I don't want to admit that our teachers are obsolete. I think that piece of information makes me feel a little uneasy about selling my product. On the other hand, if a school can't afford to have an art teacher, this would at least be a way that they could get art. I would just feel bad because I would feel like I was taking place of an art teacher.

But no video can take the place of an actual person. If you're not an art teacher, or at least a person with a creative open mind, then you can only help them work through video, you can't help them spur on their creativity and produce unique and dynamic artworks.

So I guess that I will be marketing toward schools that can't forward to have a digital art class. Small schools that can only have one art teacher for middle and high school or even K – 12. It would certainly make life a lot easier if they did not have to make lesson plans or find projects for kids to work on.

But it's something that I really have to believe in, I think. I need to really go for it this time!

Time

I've started listening to the flipped lifestyle podcast. Their situation is very similar to mine. They were both teachers when they started their online businesses, parents of two young children, and they started the business in the subject areas in which they taught or coached. 

They make a lot of solid points about the way that they got started. The first podcast was just an introduction. The second podcast talked about all the different ways to make money online. The third podcast talked about setting goals. And the fourth podcast, which I'm listening to right now, is talking about the time factor.

"I don't have time"

The phrase said all too often. One thing that I've been hearing a lot from all the moms who are featured on the brilliant business moms podcast is that there is no such thing as "not having time."

"We all have the same amount of time, it's just a matter of how we spend it."

I thought about this in the past, and it really is true; no matter how much I might want to deny it. "I have kids," is not an excuse for not doing other important things in your life.  

The time is there you just need to find it. This is not to say that spending time with my kids is not important to me, but there are times when I waste precious minutes with frivolous things. A TV show here, Comfort eating there. I may not be able to carve out a whole work week, but an hour or two would certainly help. 

I like the idea of documenting my time every day for a week, but that could be difficult. Do I document every minute?