What's In A Name?

A famous guy named Bill once wrote, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” True, but if it were called the “Thorny Stink Bush” do you think guys would line up to buy them by the dozen?

“I’m sorry sweetheart; here are a dozen thorny stink bush flowers.”

I don’t think so either.

How much attention do you pay to a blogger’s name or the title of their blog when deciding to visit or not?

I remember some bloggers by their name, like Chris Bloczynski, Dean Hunt, Darren Rouse, Rhys Wynn and Sapheyerblu. Everyone knows Darren and Dean’s blogs but I honestly have to really try to remember the names of the other blogs if I can at all.

I know other by the titles of their blog, like MeAndMyDrum, Enkay Blog, ArsenalMarketing and DoshDosh. With these guys, I have trouble remembering their names.

The third type are the bloggers who are known by the name of their blog. These would include John Chow, John Cow, Susan Suarez, and BlogGrrl. (Isn’t it interesting that even though she posts under her real name, everyone knows her as BlogGrrl?)

I know some of you guys are screaming at the computer, “It’s called BRANDING, stupid!” Just calm down, I realize this and I’m getting to my point.

What do you do when your branding is all wrong?

The theme of this blog was originally based on, what I thought at the time, to be a novel idea. The concept was to provide a test bed where bloggers could make suggestions for changes and find out the results without having to experiment on their own blog because I would freely share the trial and error results.

Unbeknown to me, half the bloggers out there were already freely sharing most of this information. They just weren’t making it the primary focus of their blogs.

This flood of entrepreneurial genius has left me with a blog that has come to have very little to do with its branding. Would you believe this blog ranks in the top 20 on Google for the searches “ad tracker” and “adsense tracking”, #6 for ”adsense tracker” and #1 for “adsense track”? I put the ad for AdSense Gold in my sidebar simply because of the search traffic for “adsense tracker”.

The problem is, I almost never discuss these topics and don’t have a great desire to.

The Google search rank stuff is just an interesting fact. The real problem I’m having is with the negative reaction to my name (Ad Tracker) and the blog title (AdSense Tracker Blog).

While I initially thought those names would be appealing to bloggers, I have come to understand they cause most bloggers to turn and run like customers from a greasy used car salesman.

Case In Point – I have been experimenting over the past ten days with StumbleUpon. During this time I have voted on over 180 pages and made a comment about most. While my SU page has been viewed by almost 200 Stumblers, very few have actually come to this blog. In fact, while I was typing this article, my latest post was Stumbled by a reader and I received only 2 hits over the next hour.

According to the accounts of similar StumbleUpon experiments by Average Joe Blogger and others, these results are unusually dismal. I can’t help but think my blog title and personal moniker are an extreme turn off to the social bookmark crowd. In a Web 2.0 world this is a BIG problem.

I don’t know if I should just start another blog and turn this one into an affiliate site to capitalize on the high keyword rank or try to re-brand this one.

I don’t think you guys would tolerate the concentration on affiliate sales. Besides, where would I put great posts like this?

What Do You Think?

I would really appreciate any ideas or input you guys would be willing to take the time give. I know some of you are professionals in this stuff.


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