The struggle to find a good concept for my blog (Part 1)

I started out writing this blog thinking that I would do a site about the wonders of the Internet and all the new useful tools at the disposal of the average web surfer. I read some cool blogs online, and they all had something useful that they offer to their readership, whether it’s good financial advice, advice about how to blog well, advice to make your life easier, whatever. So I thought, cool, I love finding useful stuff on the Web. I could gain a good following by post about new things every day, put some advertising on this blog, and develop a gradually increasing income. Cool idea, eh?

Yeah, pretty cool, sure. It’s doable.

When it came to choosing a domain name, I made a list of available domain names I had found that fit key words like ‘future’, ‘knowledge’, ‘time’, ‘now’, ‘life’, ‘know’, ‘easy’, etc. Here are some domain names I came up with that were available at the time:

futurekeyknowledge.com
life411online.com
knowtime.net
timeknow.com
futuretechknowledgey.com
now-and-future.com
makeyourlifeeasier.com

I especially liked the word “knowledge” because it also contains the words ‘know’, ‘no’, ‘now’, ‘led’, ‘edge’, ‘ledge’, and even ‘owl’. I thought that would be cool to get Googlers to my site.

However, even as I was choosing these keywords, I wasn’t yet decided: what was my blog really going to be about? How was it going to be unique, different from all the other great blogs out there on how to make your life easier with new technology? I didn’t want to be in a situation where my blog’s name would be mismatched with the theme of the blog if I decided to expand it. That’s why I chose “You Learn Something New Every Day.” It’s a nice expression that is broad and vague enough to accomodate my situation of not having my concept fully formed yet.

I eventually found that youlearnsomethingneweveryday.com was taken, and I preferred not to go with a .net extension. So I chose Ulearnsomethingneweveryday.com, with the intention of branding that first letter U as my site’s logo so people will remember not to spell out “you.”

Yes, it’s quite long–but I am not counting on the 0.0001% of people who randomly type a word in the address bar to find me. I am focusing on my blog’s content and being linked to. Clicking a link requires no typing. Plus, I figure, if anyone really likes what I write, they’ll take the extra minute to spell it correctly. That’s who I want reading my blog most of all.

(Continue to next section)

June 9th, 2007 Posted by Michaell at 10:56am | History of this blog | one comment