I have been working online for over two years now. I have worked on several sites and I have had many of my own personal little blogs. My own personal little blogs have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Mostly because I had nothing invested in them – and I really didn’t care about them. At all. Zero.
What makes this blog different?
Well – I’m invested.
How am I invested?
Well – I put the most valuable thing I have into this. My name.
Are you on meth?
The most valuable thing you have is your name?
Well – Yes. I mean, NO! No, I am not on meth and yes, the most valuable thing I have is my name. I have nothing more in this world than my name. Sure, I have some money in the bank (and by some, I mean virtually none at all), a T-Shirt I really like and my wakeboard, but that is about it.
Your name is all you have. Your name is your brand! You can either take care of it, ignore it or drag it through the mud. I prefer to take care of my name. For those of you who are still reading – who knows your name? Your family for one, your employer (or teacher if you’re still at that stage in your life) your friends… but they all know you. Suppose someone who doesn’t know you gets your name. Maybe it was the nice girl you met last night. Maybe it was that guy you met who owns a business and is looking to hire someone who was in the right place at the right time. In today’s world people who want to know about you and who you are will use a little thing called a Search Engine. To your average Joe Bloggs (I should write a post about why that is funny) a Search Engine (SE) is Google, the Internet, Interwebs or MSN depending on their affinity with computers and IT.
This blog, literally, has my name on it. It already ranks page 1 on most search engines in most countries for my name. This is how I want my future friends and peers to view me if the search for me. I would like to avoid someone searching for my name and finding someone saying bad things. So far, that hasn’t happened, but it might. I cannot stop people from writing bad things about me. I cannot stop search engines finding and indexing that stuff, no matter how slanderous it is.
What I can do is to build a great site, surround myself with great content and hope that my friends link to me and say nice things. That way I’ll always be number one when searching for my own name.