Dennis Kennedy

Believe it or not, I get teased a lot about the name of my blog.

However, I've regularly found myself in situations where people will be talking to me and I'll introduce them to another blogger. I'll notice that they ignore the other blogger until I say that, for example, Matt writes the Nonbillable Hour blog and then they fall all over themselves saying what huge fans they are of Matt's blog, but they didn't associate the name with the blog.

However, the name of your blog is not the issue I want to talk about. The bigger issue is how many bloggers, including those who seem to have blogs designed to market their businesses, make it so difficult or even impossible to find the name of the blogger or any way to contact the blogger.

James Robertson at the Column Two blog has a great post called Your Blog, Your Name that spells out some of the best reasons for making this information readily available.

I can't even count the number of times last year I wanted to send a blogger an email about how much I liked what he or she wrote, only to find no way to get in touch.

I also like to give the name of the person who writes a post when I link to a post. There have been many times when it took me more time to find a blogger's name than it did to write my post that linked to them. In several cases, I ended up not writing a post because I could not find out who wrote it.

My running joke is that legal blogs cannot be marketing tools because so many legal blogs make it so hard to contact the bloggers. The hardest job we had in organizing BlawgThink was finding the names and email addresses of legal bloggers. You'd be surprised at how difficult that is.

I'm not sure why bloggers hide this information. I'd rather risk a few extra spam messages than discourage someone who likes what I've written from telling me about that or starting a conversation with me. What if an editor wants to reprint your post as an article or a journalist wants to interview you for a story?

In my case, I'll deal with the occasional ribbing or charge of egomania because I have a definite purpose to making my name clear on my posts and my contact info available. By the way, once you consistently find your posts appearing without your permission on splogs, you'll be much more understanding of the reason my blog name and URL appears on each of my posts these days.

Think about it this way - if people like what you write on your blog, do they want to meet and talk to your blog . . . or to you?

By the way, I easily passed James Roberton's 60-second test that you will want to take - but you probably already guessed that.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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