Changing my personal brand in 3 hours.

My previous (current?) brand is northeastmagic.com. I do coding for a living, so the brand was based on coding as "magic" as I was not good at explaining how exactly I "solve problems" or enhance online applications with my work, so I called it magic.

Its been that way for 10 years. This afternoon I decided to eat my own dogfood so to speak, and begin opening up my brand to conversation, rather than just having a scaled down resume/me and my opinions and ramblings.

So first thing I did was sit down and ask myself, what exactly do you do? See, I read this book called "what would google do" by Jeff Jarvis, and in it he says that a fatal mistake of many businesses is not knowing what they do, what their core value proposition is.

So, I thought about what I do. I build little flash apps to enhance or customize existing back end internet based applications. A quick recent example is my "RSS headline display" widget built for www.southshoreclipper.com.

I also help people figure out what technology they need, and how to spend as little money as possible to get the job done effectively.

So in realizing that, I tried to think of an analogy. Handyman popped into my head. A person who comes into a situation, makes an assessment, then applies his skill, and if they are smart, hires out or recommends purchasing the stuff he or she isnt the best at. They don't reinvent the wheel, and they make clever use of existing resources and whatever else is around.

So code handyman is the brand. Next step was to quickly register the domain names. Code handyman doesnt exactly spill off the tongue, but it is easy to spell and relatively short, so for a domain name, its pretty decent. There is a common mispelling of it, handiman. So I registered both spellings even though one is wrong. How did I know it was common? A google search of the word handiman returned over 80,000 results, even though it did ask me if I meant "handyman".

Another advantage of the name is "code handyman" in quotes on google returned only 119 results, so its clearly a brand that I can take over and own in relatively short order without fear of confusion with another brand.

So I have my domain names. Next stop is to use blogger and grab the blog title for myself. I like blogger because it's associated with Google, and I want that "google juice" as Jeff Jarvis would say.

I think the time consuming parts will come next, like designing a sharp, trendy looking logo, deciding what drapes and slip covers to buy...but the decisions that needed to be made quickly have been made, and Im well on my way to establishing a new brand, a new successful brand I hope.

So by using blogger to drive my content, I open it up to a conversation rather than me me me me. I hope to see your comments and look forward to talking to you.

Sincerely,
The Code Handyman.

PS watch for changes to the following sites over the next few days:
codehandyman.com
codehandiman.com
northeastmagic.com
treekyomoon.com
secondskeleton.com
genericise.com
autoplayer.com
iruntheweb.com
iruntheuniverse.com
iruntheplanet.com