NetBusinessBlog

Archive for March, 2007

Breaking News: Calacanis Still Clueless

Posted on 29. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

I was really trying hard not to blog about this, but I just can’t help myself. For those of you who haven’t heard, Neil Patel (SEO expert) recently challenged Jason Calacanis (some guy who’s popular for some reason) to an SEO challenge where he claimed he could increase Jason’s SE traffic by 10-20%:

So to you Jason, I offer the following challenge: I can take your blog and increase your daily search traffic by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect. I will NOT be doing anything “shady” or unethical and will even point out all the changes that will be made to your blog. You can even have your own designer/programmer make the changes to your blog; I will even layout everything for them using step-by-step instructions.

Neil has already won the challenge which he posted about Monday and updated today with the exact strategies he used. Here’s the techniques (10% of total changes according to Neil) that he posted:

Post titles where: The Jason Calacanis Weblog – [Name of post entry]
New Post titles: [Name of post entry]

Meta description tags before were blank and contained nothing.
New meta description: [First 20 or so words from the post]

Wow, rocket science right? These couple of changes, according to Neil, resulted in a 21% increase in SE traffic to Jason’s blog. He also argues that the increase would be much more significant if Jason hadn’t had bloated numbers toward the beginning of the challenge due to a post about the Oscars or something. But Jason, of course, disregards most of these results attributing them to other factors. That’s not really the point of this post, however.

So why the hell am I ranting about all this?

People Have No Clue About SEO

Jason is a really popular blogger. I personally don’t enjoy his writing – it comes across as completely frivolous to me – but many people do. You would think one of the top bloggers on the net would understand the purpose and practice of SEO. I mean for the love of god, how does someone become an “A-lister” without knowing how to use proper title tags?

Yet his ignorance still did not stop him from calling the practice of SEO complete bullshit. How does someone who knows little to nothing about a subject disregard it absolutely and without exception? Jason embodies the common opinion of SEO on the internet. People think it’s spam.

How is setting up your title tag to display the most SE relevant text first spam? How is creating proper meta description spam? How is pursuing inbound links on related sites using keyword-targeted anchor text spam? It isn’t. So is all SEO good? Hell no. There’s plenty of SEO spam out there – but we have a word for it. It’s called Black Hat.

Is “Black Hat” an arbitrary qualifier to justify the use of SEO? I don’t think so, though others may argue. White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO are two extremely different things in my mind, and that is something that Jason and people with similar mindsets need to remember.

White Hat is optimizing your website and its content in a way that makes it most receptive to search engine crawlers.
Black Hat is attempting to attain a higher ranking in a search engine by tricking or confusing the search engine – ie. keyword stuffing and similar practices.

SEO As a Short-Term Solution

I constantly hear people (including Jason of course) claim that SEO is a short-term solution to the traffic question. Jason even compares his little spike in SEO traffic to a hit of crack. This just shows his ignorance.

All of these changes Neil makes would have cost me $10-20,000 in consulting fees with an SEO firm from what I understand (correct me here if I am wrong), and these kind of changes do NOTHING for the reputation of you site. They get you a quick, free hit of traffic.

There’s a couple things wrong with this statement. First off, I assume he is referring to the $10-20,000 number to describe all of the changes Neil is doing, but assuming that he’s already done 10% already, we’re talking $1-2,000 just to change title and meta tags. If that is the going rate for 5 minutes of SEO work, I need to start pushing myself as a consultant. Secondly, he claims that SEO gets you a “quick, free hit of traffic”. That’s dumb.

To begin with you cannot group all SEO traffic into one huge bracket labeled “google[organic]” and make any overarching claims about it. There are different kinds of SE traffic. If you are referring to popular terms such as “pirates of the caribbean 3″ then you probably will get a huge jump of temporary traffic if you manage to rank for that term when the movie is released. If you’re talking about “hdmi cables” then that is going to be a worthwhile term for at the very least the next 5-10 years. You can even get more stable and target a keyword like “coffee tables” which will never (in the forseeable future) let up in search traffic. There is never going to be a day when the world wakes up and decides coffee tables are unnecessary. In that sense, search engine traffic is a very stable source of visitors.

For anyone to claim that search engine traffic is always spike traffic is ridiculous. Digg is spike traffic. Stumble is spike traffic. Slashdot is spike traffic. Search engine traffic is (often) not spike traffic. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but if Jason wants to speak in generalities then so can I!

Conclusion

I’m sorry for this long rant of a post. This is the main reason why I didn’t want to blog about this topic. It’s a battle that will never end – there will always be people out there saying that SEO is worthless and then there will be the people who see it work daily. In the end, SEO will not work alone. Jason argues that content rules over SEO, but the way I see it they go hand in hand. If you have amazing content it may often be overlooked if it isn’t properly optimized for search engines. On the other hand you can SEO the hell out of a lame article, but it will still be lame when you’re done.

Three life lessons I’ve learned through all of this:

1) Work on content.
2) Work on SEO.
3) Ignore Jason Calacanis.

Continue Reading

How Cost-Effective is SEO?

Posted on 27. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

So a few days (weeks?) ago I asked Is SEO Easy? You guys responded by saying basically yes it’s mostly easy. I’m not willing to get back into the “how easy is SEO?” debate, especially since it’s been beaten to death. What I would like to offer, however, is my opinion on how cost-effective SEO is versus buying traffic through PPC, text-links, etc. So basically instead of asking “how hard is SEO?” I’m asking “how expensive is SEO?”

Money buys everything. Hearing so many people talk about how difficult SEO is confuses me sometimes. From my experience in SEO it’s not so much how hard it is as how expensive it is. If you have the money you can easily buy your way into a high ranking. Think I’m exaggerating? A good friend of mine just got page 1 on Google (and top 5 Yahoo & MSN) for a one word search term with an estimated 155,000+ searches per month and over 305,000,000 search results in Google. Are there more popular terms? Yes, but trust me when I say if you can rank top 5-10 for a term with 155,000+ searches a month you’ll definitely see the benefits. This is a term that will never become unpopular and is extremely saturated with competition. Guess how much this guy knew about SEO before tackling this extremely “hard” to rank term? Little to nothing. A month of work got him top rankings for the term. He asked me not to give out his website or targeted term to protect all of the effort he put in. But you can trust me, I’m being 100% honest when I say this guy knew hardly anything about SEO and now ranks top 10 for a 1 word, high volume term.

How did he do it? He spent money. The last time I talked to him he had spent about $2,000 to rank in this term. Now that money also netted him thousands of initial uniques but the long-term goal of that investment was to rank in this term. He bought text links, directory submissions, and paid reviews. That’s it. No tricks. No magical SEO solutions. No black hat. Paid links.

Okay so SEO isn’t rocket science, but now the question of is it cost-effective?

The biggest response I get from my friends in PPC (arbi mostly) is that why should one spend countless hours and dollars optimizing for search engines with no guarantee on reward? When you purchase traffic you can spend very little to determine which traffic converts best, which traffic is too expensive, etc. With SEO you pretty much just have to find a well-searched term and work and work until you get into the rankings – then just wait and see how it works out.

Although these are realistic reservations, I think they can be easily set aside. Going back to my example above lets assume that for $2,000 (a 1 time investment) my friend gets at least 1% of the total search traffic – granted with this term he is likely to get much more than that. But just to be conservative, we’ll say 1%. That’s roughly 1,550 uniques per month for this single term in search engines alone. So for the first month after this investment he will be paying roughly $1.30 per visitor. That’s outrageous! Especially when you can get targeted PPC traffic for $.50 (you can pay less, but it gets more and more untargeted the lower you go). And if you want to target this specific keyword, good luck getting the top Adwords results for anything less than $3.00 CPC.

So how is $1.30 per visitor for the first month of SEO justified? Because that’s just for one month. That investment of $2,000 can easily retain the top position for this term (which is popular but not so popular that the top rankings shift around daily) for at least a couple of months and more likely up to a year. That’s with no more investment. So if you assume that he is able to retain the top 10 position and receive 1% of search traffic for the next 6 months, he will end up paying about $.20 per visitor. That’s more like it eh? Continuing with this he will probably be able to retain that position indefinitely by investing a small amount more every month just to keep his relative incoming links fresh.

The cost of PPC traffic never goes down. If you are paying $.50 for barely targeted traffic (which typically converts worse than SE traffic) then chances are you will always pay $.50. It’s even fairly safe to say that you will eventually be paying more as PPC becomes the weapon of choice over SEO due to how easy it is to do. I’m not saying that SEO is hard, but that is what popular opinion is becoming.

I know none of these numbers are extremely accurate, and quite honestly I’m sure there is some error in them. But I think they prove fairly conclusively that SEO is very cost-effective. The targeted traffic you get from proper SEO is uncomparable to anything else, and the recurring benefits for fairly small investments are amazing. Sure you can get the same amount of traffic from PPC while probably spending less, but you will never get the same quality of traffic from PPC as you can from SEO without paying a lot more.

Is SEO easy? That’s subjective. Is SEO cost-effective? You bet your ass it is.

Continue Reading

Second Life Blows

Posted on 26. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

I apologize if this post offends anyone. It is very biased and mostly opinion. If you play Second Life actively, however, I reserve the right to laugh at you and call you names.

I’ve been on a tirade this month voicing my hate for some of the more popular services on the web. I explained why the new “Digg-like” startup Spotplex sucks. I also talked about why Technorati is a joke. Now I’m attacking Second Life – probably the king of overhyped money-making bullshit.

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a Sims knockoff that allows users to live a virtual “second life” through the game. The video game acts as just that – a second life. You do things you could normally do in real life if you weren’t such an antisocial jackass. At least in real online games you get to smash dragons. This one you just buy a house, get a job, and visit a prostitute or two.

I would go into a whole rant about why Second Life is an extremely lame and boring game but Tyler has already done a fairly good job of that.

So Why is Second Life Popular?

If you read Tyler’s article up there then you probably understand why Second Life is so boring. If you are still wondering about it, then please go sign up and play it for an hour. You’ll see. So that leaves us with the question “Why is Second Life so popular?” There is one reason and one reason only why Second Life is popular at all.

(Mostly) Old people think it’s the “next big thing” and hope it will make them rich(er).

There you have it. I blew the whole thing wide open. Old farts who barely understand the internet or online culture have deemed that Second Life is going to revolutionize the world and become the ultimate portal of internet (and eventually all social) activity. They see it as simply a new “world” to capitalize on. If Second Life consists of imaginary land that people want, there must be a market for selling imaginary land. If Second Life involves activities such as soliciting prostitutes, there must be a market for pimping.

Many believe that Second Life is only going to get more and more popular, and that eventually ones online presence in the game will become extremely valuable. They could be true. But they’re probably wrong.

Why Second Life Blows And Will (Most Likely) Fail

1) The game sucks – okay so I’ve already gone over this. The game itself sucks. It’s a dumbed down hybrid of the Sims and GTA. It’s worthless and lame. If the gameplay entertains you then you really need to go outside and experience **something** – anything!

2) The economy is false – at the moment there are people making a ton of money from Second Life. Don’t be fooled by my pessimism, there is a lot of actual cash being thrown around in the game. But who do you think is doing the spending? The fools who think the game will eventually pay off. Virtual real estate is worth actual money right now because there are a ton of dummies trying to buy up as much as they can hoping to sell it for a profit later. It’s warriors selling to warriors. Get rich quickers selling to get rich quickers. The bulk of the people playing Second Life right now are in it for the money. They’re playing because they read about it in Business Week. They’re playing because they read about it in Forbes. They’re not playing because they want to or because the game is any good. They’re playing to get rich. Some are – but it’s an inflated economy that will last only as long as the hype does.

I’m obviously speaking in general here, I’m sure there are a couple super super dorky people who play this game for the sheer enjoyment. Then again there are still people playing text-based RPG’s, so I guess anything can have a natural following.

3) It’s still just a game – at the end of the day Second Life is **still** just a video game. Eventually the hype will wear off and people will have to choose whether or not they want to play it based on how entertaining it is. The problem with that is it’s not entertaining. It is only being played because of the hype. That’s it. Period. When the hype dies, so will the game.

I’m sorry for this rantish post. I’m just so tired of hearing people talk about Second Life like it’s worth a damn. It sucks. It will go nowhere. It does and will blow for years to come. People are playing it now because they want to get rich. Once all of the get rich quickers have paid for their property and there’s no more (or far too few) people to sell to then the economy will crash, a ton of people will lose money, and people will flock away from the game onto the next cool eBook, report, or program.

In my personal opinion, if you are playing Second Life hoping to get rich, you’re wasting your time. You’d be better off gold farming.

Update: After all this I can’t believe I forgot to include the original link that got me thinking about this: Coldwell Banker’s Second Life.

Continue Reading

Case Study Update 2 – More Building and Planning

Posted on 25. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Sorry I didn’t get this post out yesterday fellas, but the weather was awesome and the fish were biting. An early morning fishing trip turned into an all day event. Hope you don’t mind getting the case study update a day late!

Still Building

I spent most of this week still building the foundation of the site. I installed the new WordPress skin as well as a ton of widgets. WordPress really is boring as hell unless you install a few widgets and add-ons to add to the site. Here are a few of my favorite must-have WP add-ons:

I’m not going to give you guys a breakdown of what each of these plugins are or what they do, I think you’re all smart enough to figure it out for yourself! But these are my favorite widgets, and I am using them all on this blog as well as my new rock and roll blog.

Preparing Content & Promotion

I’ve only made one post on the blog at the moment, and that is really just to have an early contextual post up for applying to PPP and RM later on. I’m not entirely concerned about updating the content at the moment since the only visitors the blog has right now are my readers who have managed to find the URL! However, when I begin promoting the site I will definitely be posting at least once per day. At the moment I plan for the blog to “launch” next week or so.

I have been brainstorming about a lot of ways to get the initial promotion of the blog going. One thing I’ve already mentioned was of course Digg. I’ve written down 10 headlines/stories that I think I could get to the frontpage of Digg without getting buried. I’m hoping that will get it a bit of an initial surge of traffic. I am not, however, going to be publishing these Diggy stories early on. I plan to run the blog at full speed writing my normal content for at least 3-4 weeks before submitting it to Digg for the first time. NBB was able to take off early on with Digg, but I’ve never used Digg for a non-business niche so I’d rather be safe than sorry in this instance by making sure the blog is full of delicious content before promoting it through Digg.

I also have a Myspace profile that I haven’t touched in *months* but has about 1,000 local bands and a couple thousand other rock-oriented friends on it. I would say about 90% of these friend requests came to me so hopefully the users will be active and actually interested in the niche. I will be sending some bulletins and messages to my Myspace “friends” when the blog officially launches to muster up a little interest in it. I also have another promotional idea for Myspace that I think will really work, but I’ll talk about that a little more next week.

I have been working on some offline techniques as well, all of which I want to actually *do* before I write about, so sorry to leave you guys with yet another teaser, but that will have to hold off for another week or so as well.

Overall there isn’t a whole whole lot that went on this week with the case study. Just boring dev work for the most part, but she’s getting closer to launch – that’s when the case study will really get interesting!

Continue Reading

Review Roundup #2

Posted on 23. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

Alright fellas it’s time for another set of NBB reviews from some of my fellow bloggers. Remember, you can get a backlink to your site (as well as the chance at a review of your blog here) by simply doing a quick review of my blog on yours. It doesn’t have to be anything amazing, just a simple little write-up will do.

Latest reviews:

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to do a review of my blog, I really appreciate it. And as promised, I’ve picked one out of this group to do a review on myself!

Jakowenko dot Com (review)

Jakowenko.com is the blog of Dave Jakowenko, a young internet entrepreneur. I have “known” Dave for quite a while now. The first time I saw him was about a year ago over at TalkFreelance.com. Here’s a little about Dave from his About page:

I am currently 19 years old and a freshman at Michigan State University in East Lansing. My hometown is Troy, Michigan, which is about 15 miles outside of Detroit. I enjoy playing many sports, football, pickup basketball games, and baseball.

Dave runs a few very successful websites. One is Coupon Source which is a great place to find the newest hosting and registrar coupons. Why pay full price when you can get a quick discount code from Coupon Source and save some green? Dave also runs Brius with his business partner Bryan Le. Together they’ve recently launched a new project Survive Digg which looks to have a ton of potential.

Dave’s blog is his personal/business blog where he talks about whatever is on his mind, gives out business advice, and discusses his own projects. It has been on my bookmark list (I don’t like feed readers) for a while now and is usually updated often with good reads. I suggest you guys take a look at it and browse through his archive.

Well that does it for the latest review roundup. If you want to be included in the next roundup read the original post here. In short, just post a review of my blog on yours with a linkback. Then contact me with the URL. That’s it. Easy right? So do it.

Continue Reading

Some Changes Around the Blog

Posted on 22. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

I have a bit of an administrative update for you guys today. I’ve changed around a couple things here on the blog and am going to see how they work out. Most of the changes aren’t written in stone and may be reverted or altered to make this blog an overall better place for the readers.

I have removed MyBlogLog from the sidebar due to the extremely slow load time it had. I’ve been told by more than one person that the blog loads extremely slow, so I am taking measures to improve the loading time among other things. From what I saw MyBlogLog was the slowest loading element of this blog. In addition it seems to be hardly bringing in any visitors, so I’m starting to question its usefulness. It was nice having an updated block of photos on the sidebar to check every now and then but if it adds an extra 2-3 seconds on the page’s load time I just don’t think it’s worth it. I’ve also taken BUMPzee off of the main page due to the loading time. You can still bump posts from the single post pages, however.

I removed the top Adsense block to reinstate the Adbrite block. Originally the top Adbrite block was slowing down the load time too much, but after I removed MyBlogLog it seems that the load time is bearable. Adsense just has not been performing in this position – almost all of my clicks come from the in-line ads. This is a prime position so I would like to see it generate more revenue than it is currently. I believe selling top ads through Adbrite will bring in more revenue overall for that position. I see no reason why it should be earning significantly less than the top banner.

I have added a 125×125 sponsor block to the sidebar, and it is currently available for purchase. I believe I have one of the least cluttered sidebars of all of the business blogs around, so adding a small ad block here is not a big deal in my opinion. This block is in a great position with no rotation (meaning it gets about 100,000 impressions per month).

Speaking of rotation, starting as soon as the current banner advertiser runs out I’m going to be switching the top banner to a 5 banner rotation at $100/mo per banner. I decided on this price change after looking at my CPM for my ad positions a little bit. Right now the top banner costs $150 but receives over 100,000 page views per month. That is an insanely low CPM especially for such targeted traffic. I do, however, want to keep advertising on this site affordable, which is why I decided to go for the 5 banner rotation rather than the no rotation, high cost option.

If you are interested in purchasing or preordering any ad positions, feel free to contact me.

And one last thing, I’ve updated my About page with a lot more information on the blog and myself for those of you who are interested.

Continue Reading

Fight Against Click Fraud Actually Moving Forward

Posted on 22. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

I’ve never had much faith in Google’s ability (or willingness) to actively pursue and snuff out “click fraud”. I put “click fraud” in quotes because I’m using this term with a somewhat unordinary definition. Google, YPN, and others have typically viewed click fraud as when a publisher clicks his or her own ads or if ads are clicked excessively in an attempt to boost revenue. An alternative definition of click fraud, and one that I definitely agree with, is using ad placement to trick or confuse visitors in order to receive more ad clicks. These clicks generate revenue for the site owner but absolutely no value to the advertiser.

I’m not talking about well blended ads, in-line ads, or anything like that. What I’m talking about is people who use, for instance, a text ad string and put it off as navigation. That to me is click fraud.

Recently Google has taken measures to alleviate this form of click fraud. We saw a month or so ago how they put their foot down on the problem of images being placed next to ad blocks. Publishers were placing images next to their ad blocks to not only simply draw attention to the ads but to confuse visitors into thinking that the images were related to the link – thus increasing their CTR but adding no real value to the advertiser’s conversions.

Arrington has a very nice write-up about Google’s new PPA (pay-per-action) advertising system that is currently in testing.

PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud. Now the advertiser pays only if a customer has been delivered to a website and takes a further action, such as buying a product or filling out a web form.

This is definitely a sign that Google may finally be doing something about the serious problem of click fraud. Will they continue with this method as they slowly realize that worthless clicks account for a large part of their revenue? Who knows? The point is, however, that this is at least a step in the right direction. When advertisers buy space on a site they should at least have some sort of guarantee that their ads not only target the right demographic but are only engaged when the user is interested, not when they were trying to click a link and clicked an ad instead due to shady placement.

I’ve also just read news on CNN Money that Yahoo! is now taking measures to combat click fraud more directly:

Yahoo Inc. has named a senior executive to lead the company’s efforts to combat click fraud in its Web search advertising business, the company said, in a bid to reassure advertisers.

Yahoo, the No. 2 provider of pay-per-click ads behind rival Google Inc., said Wednesday that attorney Reggie Davis, a seven-year veteran of the company, will take on the newly created post of vice president of marketplace quality.

The article also claims that the amount of fraudulent clicks in the Yahoo! Publisher Network is somewhere between 12 and 15 percent. I doubt this number was deduced using the broad definition of click fraud, but perhaps that will also be something addressed by the new “marketplace quality” executive.

I also believe this position is a good sign that YPN! will be coming out of beta before too long. With more and more questions being raised about Google’s marketplace quality, hopefully YPN! will make that one of their biggest concerns (and ultimate selling points over Google) when they take their service public. At the end of the day, however, these are both good steps for contextual advertising. Click fraud is a serious issue that few really seem to actually be taking seriously.

Continue Reading

Increasing Your Other

Posted on 21. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

When trying to build popularity for your website, new webmasters (including me) are happy to get traffic from wherever they can. As long as the numbers are going up most people don’t really care where it comes from. As your site grows, however, you really want to start paying more attention to where your users are coming from.

I wrote about analyzing effect referrals a little while ago by analyzing page views per visitor by source. Today I’m going to talk about something else using analytics – increasing your other.

What is Your Other?

In most referral tracking programs you get a chart that displays the top referrers. In Google Analytics, for example, you can see this chart at the bottom right of the default page displayed as a delicious pie. In these charts they will show the top few referrers and then group all other referrers into the group of “Other” (usually). The other is all of the sources of traffic that are not significant enough individually to make it to the main chart themselves.

Increase your other

I’m sure at this point a lot of you guys are thinking “why increase my other?”. That’s a legitimate question. Why would you want to receive a few hits from a ton of different sources rather than a ton of hits from a few individual sources? Because diversity is good.

As a webmaster you never want to rely on a single sources of traffic or even a couple sources of traffic. Does that mean that getting 40k uniques from a Digg is bad? No, but if Digg is your only referral for an entire month then you definitely have a problem. One potential problem is that if you lose your single massive source of traffic (say if your site was banned from Digg or if you were de-indexed from Google) then you are pretty much screwed. If you have a lot of “other”, however, you can rely on a constant stream of traffic because if one small site stops referring visitors to you that isn’t going to cripple your traffic – you still have a ton of other smaller sites referring to you. Another problem with one single source of traffic is that it really limits your reach. If all of your visitors found your page from the same site then you are really just piggybacking on their readership and limiting the amount of potential users you can reach out to.

By increasing your “other” you are increasing the range of people who link to your site and refer visitors. I just want to reiterate that I’m not saying you should never try to get Dugg, Stumbled, or ranked well in Google, but if you rely 100% on one of those then you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

How Do I Increase My Other?

You can increase your other by reading all of the posts on this blog! There is no trick to increasing your other, you just have to write good content, provide a quality service, and have a website that people actually want to visit and read. There’s no other way around it.

Diversity is always the key in the web world. Never rely on one source for anything whether it’s traffic, revenue, or content.

Continue Reading

I Asked, You Answered – Are Handles Unprofessional?

Posted on 20. Mar, 2007 by Dave.

I’ve never really done a followup posted based entirely on reader feedback, but a post I did yesterday really got a good amount of not just responses in general but very good ones. I asked are handles unprofessional? Here’s what some of the readers had to say.

Rehuel says:
I think it’s important to chose 1 handle and stick to it. Make it a unique handle, one of which people will know that there is only one person going by that handle. I think what you have to say is far more important than the handle you use to say it, but being consistent in using the same handle will give authority to that handle.

I think Rehuel makes a great point about branding. The point of using your own name isn’t entirely just for the professionalism but also for the personal branding. Maybe the same can be said for using a handle. As long as it’s consistent I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t turn your handle into a brand.

Leftblank says:
I’m nearly always using this handle, unless its really personal or professional (business related), simply because I don’t want my name all over the web. Combine that with having a horrible long and very un-English last name and I think I’ve got enough reason not to do so

Another awesome point, especially when he mentions the “un-English” last name. What is the point of using your real name to brand yourself if (no offense) most people won’t be able to remember it? I have no idea what Leftblank’s name is, but if it’s very “un-English” I can see myself struggling with it unfortunately.

Jack says:
I am definitely one to quickly judge a person based on their name. Anything anime related, more than 2 numbers, has the word gamer, leet, 1337 or an “s” replaced by a “z” is pretty much an immediate write off. Simply using your name, or a slight variant, or a catchy one word name is usually most effective.

It seems like Jack represents the other end of the spectrum of people who do think handles are unprofessional. He brings up a good point (and one that I actually touched on a bit on my original post) that many people with handles are either young guys, gaming nerds, or were at least involved in that community at one point in their life and just held onto the handle. Is this group necessarily professional or unprofessional? I’m certainly a gaming nerd, and I post with a handle, so my opinion might be biased. I’ll let you be the judge!

Thanks everyone for your great comments I really enjoyed reading them all. There was a lot of good feedback that I hope I’ll keep getting from you guys!