Since for now I’m enjoying this loose, free flow writing, which is clearly not authoritative, I’d like to go into how Wordful evolved.
Writing is my predilection, but I tried for years to avoid that calling out of insecurity and job security. I figured that writers were important but highly undervalued people. And once I started a family, the hopes of making it big as a writer were quickly replaced by the need to make money. It happens to a lot of us.
In college I got an English degree with a 4.0 GPA, but also pursued “the holy grail” of careers at the time: the web industry trade. The internet was blowing up and I wanted a piece of it.
First came programming. I was going to be a programmer and make a lot of money and be cool. I took a C++ class in my first semester in college. At the end of the semester, I defiantly accepted an F for C++ on my transcript (instead of dropping the class when it was obvious early on that I would never program anything).
Then came web design. Ooooh, a web designer, look at me now, I’m so cool. These guys were kings back in the day because the web was all about “the look” and soon after, the Flash. I made some modest progress but it always took me so long to produce the most primitive of sites.
The list goes on. What ended up happening was that I got pretty handy at Photoshop, the designer pane in Dreamweaver and Adobe Indesign. Those things and my writing kept me alive. I landed an editor job where I cut my editing/publishing teeth. My boss was old school and really tough on me, but I learned.
After that I got a job as a “Graphics / Web Artist” position in a marketing department for a small charter travel company. It turned out to be a pretty pathetic position but for the first time I was exposed to marketing and working in a small but profitable “real” business. I learned about “vendors” and “revenue” and “the bottom line” and how much ridiculously more the fat cats at the top get paid.
Out of boredom, I started Wordful as an idea on paper to offer web copywriting services. I was enterprising enough to contact a professional web copywriter in Scotland and he was really on the ball. He gave me a copywriting test and then told me where I needed to improve.
For awhile, in my mind and when I talked about it, Wordful was a “small consulting company that wrote content for websites.” It sounded decent in conversations but the reality is that it was a tough sell unless you’re in the agency circles. And I didn’t want to go that way.
The charter company got bought out and I lost my job and the steady paychecks. Wordful went to full-time status even though I had no clients and no real profitable business model. On the side, I worked with my old supervisor and wrote a business plan to restart the charter company, but that fell through.
Wordful picked up a few consulting gigs but they turned out to be for web design and development. It was during this hellish time I realized if I didn’t do something that was truly me, I’d never realize my potential or vision or success.
Back up just a notch to my final attempt at being an expert on something that’s just not me: SEO and web optimization. After hymming and hawing I bought a paid subscription to Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, thinking I’d learn everything about SEO and sell services as such.
It took me a little while to catch on, but SEOBook was actually intended for niche web marketers looking to boost their traffic. That concept was new to me, but I was getting warmer. I thought niche marketing was my calling because it called for “great content,” which to me meant good writing. What was missing was vision and passion. I can’t just market something really well that I don’t really care too much about.
Not quite there yet, but really warm. Niche marketing led me more specifically to professional blogging and personal branding. And this is where I am now.
The lesson here is that I had to go far out of my natural abilities and embrace many different disciplines and for years endure countless frustration and discomfort just to realize I am a writer and editor. It’s what I do best.
But this full circle journey is by no means without merit. The struggles have given me a deep knowledge of the web, of people and of business. Not to mention a killer entrepreneurial vision.
Wordful is officially an extension of me, and I intend to accomplish great things with it. I’ll cover those things and more in a future post.
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