Basic Interweb Thingie Branding Tricks

While I am not an advertising expert, nor did I sleep in a Holiday Inn last night, I do work with some very talented people in the online business. On occasion, they teach me a few things.

One thing to be aware of is your personal brand. If you have a blog, you have one.

But did you know you may be sharing it with someone else?

How could that be, you ask?

Take a look at my website URL: http://anthony-pacheco.com.

Notice it isn’t anthony-pacheco.wordpress.com, or anthony-pacheco.blogspot.com. That’s because I don’t want to share my limited brand with WordPress or Blogger. My address is owned by me, exclusively. I could move anthony-pacheco.com off of WordPress, because I own that URL.

If you are not familiar with the particulars, for WordPress (because, I just love WordPress), to make this happen, here’s what I did:

1) Paid a fee to a domain registry company for the URL. This fee is variable; the cost per year decreases the more years you purchase.

2) Paid a small fee to WordPress for the domain name feature (I believe this is free with Blogger, but I don’t like Blogger).

3) Did some brief hookup of my domain name to my WordPress blog

If you have WordPress or a Blogger blog, these are easy things to do. If you don’t know how, a simple trip to their help files will reveal the steps necessary. You can also ask a resident internet geek. It’s not rocket science at all.

It doesn’t sound like much, but in the end, unless you are employed by WordPress or Google, there isn’t a reason to share your current and future popularity with someone else.