My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
Should you use your real name when creating your online presence? Well, maybe. Having a persona online is important, especially in this new social media era, but understand what the pros and cons to using your real name versus a pen name are before making this big and important decision.
It is kind of a weird decision, but it is one of the first decisions you need to make when starting a niche online website:
Do I want to be the “Poster-Child” for my Product?
It is an important question that needs answering, though. There are really three options and I’ll go over each one of them:
No Face to the Product or Website
Plenty of people don’t put a persona to their website. You can do this, but you really restrict yourself on your traffic and conversion options. First, it would force you to primarily use SEO and PPC for most of your traffic. That is OK, but social media and social marketing is big and growing!
You can use your “company” or “website” name as the persona itself (in places like social media and article marketing), but conversion and following is going to be poorer than a real person. People trust people more than companies. I think having a company presence is social media is a good idea, but more as a resource, not for social marketing leverage.
Using a Pen Name
This is the best “in between” solution that exists. Most people won’t know whether or not the name is real. The question here is whether or not you still want to be seen. Is it you in the images with a different name? Again, most people won’t know the difference.
Having a face to a name is important in social media, though. And if you choose to remain anonymous, you must be careful with how you manage your pen name and persona. This can lead to some legal matters.
Still, you protect your name. But if you are using your own face with the pen name, you do corner yourself into that niche, much like you would if you used your own real name.
Using Your Real Name
This is the most genuine way of doing it. Branding yourself and your name has definite social media advantages: most importantly, trust. It is easiest to manage online and being you is least amount of work.
But of course, you put yourself out there. Privacy can be lost. And you do need to do the “appropriate things” to protect your own identity.
Still, it can give you a lot of leverage in the social media world and help with your conversion and “story”. You do corner yourself into the niche, though. You can really only represent yourself in one niche, so choose the niche that is most important to you to act as yourself. Having pen names in other niches is fine (I do it all of the time!).
But using your Real Name is not for everyone. Anonymity is important to many of us, and I respect that. So if you do choose to use a pen name, do it smartly and just because your name or face may not be on the product or website, I would keep the persona as real to you as possible (because it will seem the most genuine to your audience!).
cheers…matt
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I have problems with your site properly with the newest release of Opera. Looks fine in IE and Firefox though.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:30 am