How I screwed up a chance to help a bright young man

My twenty-something nephew is a pretty impressive guy.

He’s tall, good-looking – and hungry. He wants to make something of himself and he’s willing to work hard for it. I remember when Sam [not his real name] was fourteen and getting ready to enter high school. He decided to try out for the state champion football team. All summer long, he beefed up, worked out, and got me and his grandmother to drive him to practice after practice in the sizzling, Southern California heat.

He got his wish.

Eventually, my nephew became a star offensive linebacker in several more championship seasons, then went on to a full-ride football scholarship. The future looked bright indeed. NFL dreams danced in our heads.

Then it all came to a crashing halt.

First, a shoulder injury sidelined Sam for a semester, then another injury required surgery. Finally, Sam decided to give up his football dream – and with it, his college scholarship. I’m just guessing here, but I think it’s a safe bet that he was pretty depressed for a year or two. Who wouldn’t be?

I didn’t hear much about Sam from the family until a few months ago, when his mother mentioned that he had started a small business making healthy snack foods in his kitchen and selling them to a couple of local health food stores. She gave me some to taste, and they were delicious. The more she told me about it, the more I wanted to do something to help.

On the spot, I offered to set Sam up with a free website to help his little company grow.

It’s what I do, after all. Helping Sam out wouldn’t cost me a dime and would give me the enormous pleasure of knowing that, some day in the hopefully not-too-distant future, I had something to do with his success. Of this I have no doubt: my nephew WILL be successful at whatever he does. I wanted to help him get there faster.

Sam called me as soon as his mother relayed the message. He already had a site but he wasn’t happy with it, and he was excited to have the chance to start over. He had heard good things about WordPress, so we were off to a good start. I explained that WordPress is a content management system, not just blogging software, and he could have a very businesslike site without having to learn any coding. I would set it up for him, give him a nice-looking theme, free hosting, and show him how easy it is to post and change content with WordPress.

I was curious how Sam came to start a healthy snack food business, and he told me that he had indeed been depressed after coming home from college. At 6’3″ and 280 pounds with no daily practice to go to, Sam’s weight had ballooned. (It probably didn’t help that he got a job in an ice cream parlor.) Physically and mentally, he felt terrible.

Then Sam came across some information about the raw food diet and decided to turn his life around. He read everything he could find about healthy eating. He lost the weight and felt fantastic – so good, in fact, that he wanted to share what he had learned.

See what I mean about being impressive? Sam wasn’t trying, but he even got me thinking about trying raw food! He’s just a born salesman – in the best way: he wants to help people.

I was even more excited about helping him reach them with a really fantastic website. We agreed to get together in a few days so I could learn about Sam’s needs.

Then it all went south, and I’m still trying to figure out how to fix it.

What happened was this: I’d had a difficult day with a client who, months after approving a site, had changed her mind. I didn’t want to leave her disappointed so I agreed to make changes. I showed her some options, but to her they all looked like BLOGS, and there was no way she wanted the site to look like a BLOG.

Here’s where I have to tell you I’m just a LEETLE bit biased in favor of blogs.

For one thing, I’ve been blogging since the Pleistocene era, first hand coding all my pages at Jump2Books.com [now defunct], then at Blogger, then moving on to Noah Grey’s late, lamented GreyMatter, MovableType, and Typepad before finally settling on, and falling in love with, WordPress five years ago.

I learned a lot along the way.

I saw first-hand how powerful WordPress can be in getting a small site ranked in the search engines, engaging users and fostering relationships. So I may have been just a tad defensive when my nephew called and mentioned in passing that he didn’t want his site to look like a BLOG.

“May I ask what you don’t like about blogs?” I said, gritting my teeth. “I mean, I understand that you can have your site any way you want it, but I’m just curious.”

“Well, for one thing,” said Sam, “I don’t want people leaving all kinds of comments on my site.”

“But, but–” I sputtered testily, “like I said, you can have your site any way you want, but I have to take a minute to say that you’ve got it all wrong.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause on the other end. I started back-pedalling as fast as I could.

“You know, I’m sorry. I’ve had a REALLY bad day, and I guess I’m a little defensive. Let’s talk about this when we get together, okay?”

“Uh – okay,” said Sam, and that was the last I heard from him. I called and left an apologetic message but got no response.

I want to tell Sam what I should have said in the first place:

Commentors are the people who walk into your virtual store and ask you for help deciding what to buy. They are interested enough in what you have to offer to engage with you. How could you not want that?

A blog is just a way to carry on a conversation with your prospective customers. It’s a chance to educate them about your product, let them get to know you so they feel a personal connection, and–don’t forget–get the attention of search engines every time you publish another post.

I’m going to try again with Sam [now that I've calmed down!] I think I’ll email him a link to this post and see if he’ll give me another chance to help him reach his audience. I’ll let you know what he says.

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