Your given name as a URL
One of my good friends decided to put up his first personal website (a portfolio site) a couple months ago (Yes, he is VERY late to the game as far as that goes). Since the most obvious choice for a URL is your own name, (as a freelance graphic designer or illustrator, it IS what you’re selling isn’t it?) we went online to see if the URL for his name was available to register. We typed his first name only into a browser, adding a .com to the end and an all-black page with a few links came up, so I told him to email the owner and see if he would sell it. This worked for me with brad.com 5 years back (though I just sold the domain last year and made a good profit from it). The response was that the owner had bought it for his son, and was waiting for him to grow into it. (No isn’t that interesting?) So we tried his first and last name, it was taken by a book author with the same name. We tried shortened versions of his first name, using his middle initial, nick-names and combinations of all three. Nearly every good combination had been taken. I suggested that he use his first and last name divided by a dash. Dash domains – even if they are .com domains – seem to be slightly frowned upon in the commercial space, but search engines don’t know the difference. We’ll see what he finally decides on.
Have you Google’d your name?
Have you ever Google’d your name? Go ahead, do it right now if you haven’t. Don’t forget to put quotes around your name so it will only look for that exact name combination. Just for fun, I’ve Google’d several of my friends names and found it pretty comical when very interesting people show up who share their same John Hancock.
Why is it important to do this?
You can find what others can see about you. Where have you been mentioned before? What does a simple web search say about you? When I enter my name, I find posts that say I went for a Macromedia Flash training conference in Mountain View, CA 7 years ago. (I happened to email the teacher to tell him thanks and he quoted me and my name and employer still appears on his website.) My name also shows up in genealogy forum posts for a granny I was looking for nearly 5 years ago. But mostly my name appears in relationship to my website bradmccall.com and my freelance business as a graphic designer – I’ve been able to keep control over my brand online.
Your name online and your personal brand
Your name is an integral part of your personal brand (more posts to come about your personal brand later). Every post you leave, everything you write about online, leaves an electronic trail that can be traced back to you. Do these things reflect positively on your personal brand? Would an employer or potential client find these things positive? Especially as a freelancer, your brand is important to your livelihood – it should be carefully managed.