A Little History on Wordful

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.