Defining my online brand – should seattleduck.com remain as is?
I’m approaching one of those life “inflection points” this week (more on that in a later post) which is prompting me to take a hard look at my personal online brand. Right now, that consists largely of this blog, seattleduck.com. Seattleduck started out as my first real foray into serious blogging and has shifted and evolved over the past few years as my own interests and tastes have changed. Which is all well and good, except that the end result is a horribly unfocused mess.
I have a few high traffic posts, mostly related to work or marketing topics:
- The Facebook Overreach (which I mostly stand by today – FB should have focused on monetization)
- Passion starts with two simple words
- And way back when, at post #27 (over a thousand now): Blog vs. e-newsletter: a Microsoft test case
But the rest is mostly unsorted, and despite the above I don’t feel this blog is really considered a marketing or community-focused blog, the foci of my career and the logical goal for development of my personal online brand. At the same time I enjoy having an outlet for completely random personal thoughts that are not aimed at any specific audience – musings on family, MMO’s, photography, and the like.
On the URL – part of me likes the somewhat odd domain, as at least it’s reasonably memorable and invites people to ask “what’s the story?” Part of me dislikes it as its vague and limiting – a simple perhaps even petty example, but what if I move?
So what to do? I think it breaks down into a few choices:
1. Status Quo, with a touch of focus: Keep seattleduck.com, but set out to get it established as a marketing blog (Power 150 here I come!). Interject the occasional personal thoughts or ramblings for my own satisfaction.
2. Split my Focus: Keep seattleduck.com as a purely personal blog, and create a new marketing blog focused on social and community marketing. I’d have to keep a duck theme in there somewhere for kicks, so maybe socialmallard.com? :) I feel reasonable comfortable I could build up a readership on a new blog and establish that as part of my online brand, if I keep it focused. Lots of work, sure, but that process alone could be fun.
3. One-Stop-Domain: Following Brandon’s recent lead, and many other examples, should I go buy kevinbriody.net (.com being held by that other guy) and start from ground up there? With kevinbriody.net/personal and kevinbriody.net/marketing feeds, or just one blog that is basically option 1 above but under a simpler domain?
There are pros and cons to each – whatever I do I realize how painful it is to switch URLs given the impact on permalinks and so on (seattleduck.com wouldn’t be deleted, just a large “we’ve moved” note appended to each post). However I feel frustrated and reluctant to really dive back in to blogging until I get a clear plan laid out.
Any thoughts from my vast readership? :)
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I am thinking of doing the same thing and will likely go the new domain route. I have learned a lot in nearly 5 years of blogging. My life and focus have changed quite a bit and for me, I am looking forward to a new site with a fresh start.
Well said Scott – the idea of a fresh start is very appealing, and likewise I’ve learned a ton about blogging over the past several years and want to put that to use. Seattleduck has been a great experience, but I feel I could really do better.
OK my first impulse, as a lifelong Seattleite, is that anything associated with the Oregon Ducks is beyond hope, and you should strive for something more positive and uplifting: anOregonHuskyfan.com, perhaps? :P
All kidding aside, I would suggest that you keep this blog, focus your marketing efforts here, while still retaining elements of your personal life, and your personality. Your “brand” encompasses all of that, and a split between marketing/personal loses some of the personal elements that define the brand. Now if you want a blog to connect to your family on family goings on, that’s another thing, but the blogs I get the most out of all include personal reflections, off-topic posts, and displays of passion or enthusiasm for causes or events that, while they don’t fall into a “marketing” category, clearly help to move the brand forward.
[...] more to it than simply rebuilding my online brand. I intend to redefine my brand. Kevin Briody is in the middle of redefining his own online brand. In redefining my own brand, you won’t find “Sidebar Geek” here. “Sidebar [...]
Kevin – I’d keep the current blog going. Like Kip, I enjoy the mix of of content you provide here. It would be nice to see more of your thoughts on marketing, but I wouldn’t separate that out into two different blogs.
But I would consider a re-brand. Have Seattleduck redirect to Kevinbriody.net – this would help you in terms of marketing and “owning” the Kevin Briody brand. By having seperate feeds based on tags (”marketing” and “personal”) but keeping the main feed as the aggregate of all these would allow subscribers to get just the marketing / professional thoughts related stuff in one feed if that’s what they wanted, but I wouldn’t bother with the effort of breaking the site down by sub-directories – I don’t the the ROI.
Either way, keep up the good blogging!
@ Kip – I agree. Thinking about it, the blogs I have stayed the most loyal too are the ones who are clearly identifiable in terms of what their focus is (marketing, tech news, etc) yet also clearly the product of a person I can connect with and relate to. So a pure marketing blog might be better saved for guest posts elsewhere, a group project, etc rather than the mainstay of my online brand.
@ Alex – I like the idea of a unique RSS feed based on tags. I’ll have to poke around and see if there is a WP plugin for that or something I can route through Feedburner. I also think I’m leaning towards the kevinbriody.net/blog option as you suggest. I can dream up 1000 “catchy” blog names yet I want something that a) is “me” online and b) is built to last beyond whatever I think might be cool or neat today. Keeping it simple is probably ideal. I’ll save the cute names for side projects.
If I do the above however, I need to think about either leaving seattleduck.com in place in order to not break the permalinks, or some kind of Wordpress .htaccess hack or migration process to move them all and redirect over to the new blog. Fortunately I have a couple weeks off starting tomorrow, so I feel a project coming on! :)
Thanks for all the great comments. Any more, please fire away.
I like Alex Barnett’s suggestion of redirecting Seattleduck to kevinbriody.net – doing a re-brand. I did this with MSTechToday. It redirects now to my new blog.
I think you should split =)
Keep seattleduck for the social/marketing side of things.
Then grab kevinbriody.net for your personal blog.
Just my $0.02 :)
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