Countdown to What?

2.) Should I open my brand up to be more than just my name, and find some kind of nifty monicker to share the wealth with others?

No, I don’t think you should “open up” your brand to join with others. YOU are your brand. If what you are thinking about is some kind of network or affiliation, then start a network or affiliation and since you made it, your brand will be one of the highlights, but I feel chrisbrogan.com is good for you and should be only you.

3.) Would you be interested in seeing some kind of “story” be told with my art? Do you follow any web comics currently? Where do you go on the web to be entertained? And finally, do you download VIDEO from the internet?

Yes- Rock on with your bad self. A large part of the reason I enjoy your site is the mix of personal and business topics you cover- and the coverage of your nascent personal enterprises such as the cards and posters.

If you started adding more of a different type of content to the mix, I think it would be all the better.

Web comics are a dime a dozen and finding ones worth reading a second time can be challenging, but frequently people connect with things because of who created them rather than inherent qaulity. That is to say that even if the web comic you created was not all that great (I think it would be good, though- I enjoy your digital art), I would very likely still read it because I like your blog. I’m also always on the hunt for new stuff to fill up my cheap chinese iPod Nano clone podcasts, or vidcasts might be an avenue for you to investigate. ;)

So to sum up this comment, which is approaching the length of an actual post- I suggest you stick with chrisbrogan.com as JUST Chris Brogan. If you want to add other people to the equation I believe you should encourage them to begin their own blogs and link up blog-to-blog instead of having more than one person associated with the blog with YOUR name on it.

I also suggest that in light of my ideas above, you broaden and expand chrisbrogan.com to encompass anything that is yours- art, comics, podcasts etc.

You might want to check out asmallorange.com – very flexible hosting, pretty much every bell and whistle you could concieveably want to play with. Good stuff.

I used 1and1 for a year. Satisfied with them – no reason to recommend against, but moved to ASO since they more closely matched what i needed for bandwidth and what I wanted to potentially play around with at a lower price.

You might want to check out asmallorange.com – very flexible hosting, pretty much every bell and whistle you could concieveably want to play with. Good stuff.

I used 1and1 for a year. Satisfied with them – no reason to recommend against, but moved to ASO since they more closely matched what i needed for bandwidth and what I wanted to potentially play around with at a lower price.

1. To your question: Should open you brand to more than your name.

Maybe…..I think that you should initially have one brand per theme. E.G. TRUMP was a brand on real estate that people associated with quality, before he moved into casinos. If you associate to many things with one brand you may loose value.

Another example, before Sel Improvement you did running. People associated you with running. Making the leap to S.I. was not hard, since running and SI go together. Making farther leaps (art/etc.) under your same brand may create confusion.

2. Topics:

I like the stuff about work, projects and technology.

El Senor Dinero.

Disclaimer: all IMHO, YMMV, etc.

* Part the First, in which I accept that these weren’t questions, but will answer them anyway, just to be annoying…

1) If the service is lacking, go elsewhere. There’s no shortage of decent hosts out there. You don’t want to get into problems, with your site down, and *then* regret going to someone who’s service you already knew to be poor.

2) EMail *should* be ok – should just queue whilst everything moves over. Main problem tends to be that anything that got delivered to your old hosting might be difficult for you to connect to when the domain has moved. Getting your client to check every few minutes when it happens should minimise the chance of anything going missing.

3) Good choice. WordPress is relatively easy to set up and use, and has *loads* of plugins and such like available. Like switching to Corel Painter IX after being stuck with Windows Paint for years.

4) For people who are subscribed to your feed through Feedburner, it won’t matter at all – once WordPress is set up, and you’ve got the old stuff transferred over to it, you’ll just change the address FeedBurner gets the feed from. Everything will appear to get republished, but we already know to expect that, so it won’t surprise anyone. If people are subscribed to your Blogger feed directly, they won’t get the new feed at all. Best thing to do is post to the blogspot address several times, telling people you’ve moved – like you did last time.

* Part the Second, in which you ponder matters of naming…

You can get away with even quite a silly name. PigPog. Heh.

If you’re trying to avoid it looking like a personal site / blog, then avoiding naming it after yourself could be a good move. Otherwise, stick with it. Works for such people as tompeters.com and davidco.com.

Oh, and 50 subscribers is plenty? Pah! Don’t give up on world domination so easily. Seriously, with your quality of content, that number *will* keep growing, and it’s got a long way to go yet.

* Part the Third, in which you didn’t quite ask a question, but seemed unsure about the mixture…

Count me as another one that likes the mixture of productivity, self improvement and creativity.

* Part the Forth, in which more questions are asked…

1) Difficult one to answer – I read quite a lot of feeds. Along with your stuff, things like D*I*Y Planner work well for me, with their mix. A few comics (Dilbert, of course, Diesel Sweeties, Megatokyo, Questionable Content (no RSS feed! Gah!), Applegeeks, Bunny (never makes sense (nested parantheses! Waa!))). Stuff like Boing Boing, Lifehacker, and anything Merlin does. I generally tend towards the ‘smaller’ people, rather than too many ‘A-listers’, and I try to subscribe to anyone who joins PigPog – that’s how I came to you.

2) Probably not. That could get confusing. Depends if you’ve got a good idea for a strongly themed site, but otherwise, let the theme be *you*. Doug pulled it off perfectly with D*I*Y Planner, but he had a strong idea for other people to get around.

3) Yes, if you’ve got one to tell. If not, it could still be interesting to experiment with. Megatokyo started out as a couple of comics, with no idea of a plot to continue with, and only done to shut one of Fred’s friends up (Largo/Rodney) – now it’s a full time job for both him and Sarah. As for video, I don’t, I’m on dial up. If I *do* want to see a video file, the most important thing to me is that it can be downloaded gradually over an hour or two, then watched from the local copy. Streaming just doesn’t work. That said, there’s very few people who can do audio podcasts competently – if you can actually do video and make it *good*, you could do very well with it.

Sorry. Probably gone on a bit much, but hopefully it will help. Even if not, at least it’s Google’s disk space it’s wasting not yours ;)

Oh, and when you’re redesigning, *blend* the AdSense – no borders. You’re turning money away there. I can’t claim to be any sort of expert on AdSense, but I’ve done quite a lot of reading and experimenting now, so please feel free to drop me a line if I can help at all with it. A tiny change can make a big difference. We added a half banner ad to the header block recently, and it nearly *halved* our income. Removed it, and it went straight back up. I know it’s probably not *why* you’re doing any of this, but like I said, your traffic *will* grow well, and you might as well take the free pocket money.

(Hey, have I outdone Roger for comment length?)

Disclaimer: all IMHO, YMMV, etc.

* Part the First, in which I accept that these weren’t questions, but will answer them anyway, just to be annoying…

1) If the service is lacking, go elsewhere. There’s no shortage of decent hosts out there. You don’t want to get into problems, with your site down, and *then* regret going to someone who’s service you already knew to be poor.

2) EMail *should* be ok – should just queue whilst everything moves over. Main problem tends to be that anything that got delivered to your old hosting might be difficult for you to connect to when the domain has moved. Getting your client to check every few minutes when it happens should minimise the chance of anything going missing.

3) Good choice. WordPress is relatively easy to set up and use, and has *loads* of plugins and such like available. Like switching to Corel Painter IX after being stuck with Windows Paint for years.

4) For people who are subscribed to your feed through Feedburner, it won’t matter at all – once WordPress is set up, and you’ve got the old stuff transferred over to it, you’ll just change the address FeedBurner gets the feed from. Everything will appear to get republished, but we already know to expect that, so it won’t surprise anyone. If people are subscribed to your Blogger feed directly, they won’t get the new feed at all. Best thing to do is post to the blogspot address several times, telling people you’ve moved – like you did last time.

* Part the Second, in which you ponder matters of naming…

You can get away with even quite a silly name. PigPog. Heh.

If you’re trying to avoid it looking like a personal site / blog, then avoiding naming it after yourself could be a good move. Otherwise, stick with it. Works for such people as tompeters.com and davidco.com.

Oh, and 50 subscribers is plenty? Pah! Don’t give up on world domination so easily. Seriously, with your quality of content, that number *will* keep growing, and it’s got a long way to go yet.

* Part the Third, in which you didn’t quite ask a question, but seemed unsure about the mixture…

Count me as another one that likes the mixture of productivity, self improvement and creativity.

* Part the Forth, in which more questions are asked…

1) Difficult one to answer – I read quite a lot of feeds. Along with your stuff, things like D*I*Y Planner work well for me, with their mix. A few comics (Dilbert, of course, Diesel Sweeties, Megatokyo, Questionable Content (no RSS feed! Gah!), Applegeeks, Bunny (never makes sense (nested parantheses! Waa!))). Stuff like Boing Boing, Lifehacker, and anything Merlin does. I generally tend towards the ‘smaller’ people, rather than too many ‘A-listers’, and I try to subscribe to anyone who joins PigPog – that’s how I came to you.

2) Probably not. That could get confusing. Depends if you’ve got a good idea for a strongly themed site, but otherwise, let the theme be *you*. Doug pulled it off perfectly with D*I*Y Planner, but he had a strong idea for other people to get around.

3) Yes, if you’ve got one to tell. If not, it could still be interesting to experiment with. Megatokyo started out as a couple of comics, with no idea of a plot to continue with, and only done to shut one of Fred’s friends up (Largo/Rodney) – now it’s a full time job for both him and Sarah. As for video, I don’t, I’m on dial up. If I *do* want to see a video file, the most important thing to me is that it can be downloaded gradually over an hour or two, then watched from the local copy. Streaming just doesn’t work. That said, there’s very few people who can do audio podcasts competently – if you can actually do video and make it *good*, you could do very well with it.

Sorry. Probably gone on a bit much, but hopefully it will help. Even if not, at least it’s Google’s disk space it’s wasting not yours ;)

Oh, and when you’re redesigning, *blend* the AdSense – no borders. You’re turning money away there. I can’t claim to be any sort of expert on AdSense, but I’ve done quite a lot of reading and experimenting now, so please feel free to drop me a line if I can help at all with it. A tiny change can make a big difference. We added a half banner ad to the header block recently, and it nearly *halved* our income. Removed it, and it went straight back up. I know it’s probably not *why* you’re doing any of this, but like I said, your traffic *will* grow well, and you might as well take the free pocket money.

(Hey, have I outdone Roger for comment length?)