I’ve set up a couple of blogs before and all the stuff I’ve read about picking a blog name says to do keyword research first and to include your best keyword or words in the title. Then along comes coach Alex, (I know he gets a kick out of being called that). Forget about keywords, he says. Set up your blog in your own name and tell your story. Make it about your journey into internet marketing and how to make money on the internet.

At first I was taken aback. Do I really want to do that? Do I really want to tell my story and bare my soul online? My mind was racing thinking of how I could do it without letting on that I was on Alex’s coaching course.

But as the coaching session went on and he explained all the ins and outs of it,  it began to make a lot of sense. OK, I thought, Alex knows what he is doing. It’s worked for others so why wouldn’t it work for me?  I’ll just have to be brave and reveal a bit of myself.

So, after making the decision to go for it lock, stock and barrel, I went to register my name as a dot com domain name only to find that someone has already got it. Drat. A guy from the Virgin Islands has beaten me to it!

OK,  next best thing then is to go for the hyphenated version. Not quite the same though is it? It doesn’t have quite the same look to it. But then I notice that GoDaddy gives you other suggestions if the domain you choose is not available. One suggestion that jumped out at me was sandyhallidayonline dot com That sounded quite good to me. Should I go for that?

I posted the question in Alex’s forum and I got a couple of replies that pointed out that a number of well known internet marketers were doing very well with a hyphenated name for their blogs. Well that’s true. I had never really noticed the hyphens before. You just remember the name.

One drawback of the hypenated name is that if you happen to tell someone your URL they may forget about the hyphen but most of the people who are going to find your blog are going to be online and they will just click a link to it so it is not really a problem.

Another replied that if this was going to be my business blog then sandyhallidayonline might be good but if it was going to be my personal blog then I should just stick to my own name. Decision made. I’ll go for my name with a hyphen.

So here’s the Silver Surfer with her blog set up and writing her first post. What are your thoughts about blog names? Did you have the same dilemma? Have I done the right thing? Leave your comments below.