Blogging 101, Day Two: Say Your Name

The assignment for Day Two of our little blogging adventure is to edit your title and tagline. The reasons? Well for one thing, these are for the most part the first things your visitors will see, and you want to make a good impression. For another these two little pieces of information can define your blog and help explain to the people who wander by why they might want to stop and have a visit.

Now one thing that The Daily Post points out is that your blog’s title does not have to be the same as the url you chose for it when you set it up, and that’s very true. For instance, when I set up my blog I chose the url “nopageleftblank” and also used that as the title of the blog, but at any time I could decide to change my title to anything else I want. It’s nice if the url and the title match up, but not necessary at all.

Something else I will mention on this topic, however, is something else that I picked up from Kristen Lamb’s Rise of the Machines: Authors in a Digital World. That is, before even signing up for a blog in the first place, one should consider why they are starting a blog. When I started mine I was a bit hyper and immediately started trying to come up with clever names, but in retrospect I should have considered that this blog is going to be an important part of my author brand. To those ends, it would be nice if my url was something that is easier to find based on what little information people may have about me, i.e. my name. Don’t get me wrong, even if I could go back I would still name my blog, “No Page Left Blank” because I believe it defines my goals, but if I had considered the implications a little further I may have chosen my url to be traceylynntobin.wordpress.com so that it would be that much easier to locate via search engine. Get what I’m saying?

Anyway, back to the assignment. Now, I’m not actually going to change my title and tagline because I’ve already established those and they’re exactly as I want them to be, but if you’re just starting up, here’s how I chose mine. “No Page Left Blank” is my title, chosen because I wanted to immediately give the impression of an artist to people who wandered by. My goal is to become a published fiction author, and to those ends I try to write as much as I can, whether it be toward the actual fiction, or on this blog, or whatever other options present themselves. Thus, I attempt to leave “no page left blank”. Get it? It may not be the most clever thing in the world, but it’s a little catchy, a little memorable, and my impression is that people are easily able to remember it and associate it with me.

As for the tagline, this is a place for you to be a little more creative if you so desire. A title isn’t likely to be very long – in fact, a lot of people simply stick with their own name – but the tagline gives you the chance to actually describe your blog a little. Myself, I just chose to say “Tracey Lynn Tobin’s Blog” because the end game is that people who read my books will then come looking for my blog. It suits it’s purpose, you see? But get creative! And if you have no idea how to actually go about changing these little bits of information, The Daily Post explains how in the Day Two post. Check it out!