The Name is the Thing

Yesterday technically was the first day of the Blapril event, but traditionally I don’t really make posts on the weekend apart from advertising podcasts. As a result today is my first day of Blapril celebrations. For those who have not been reading regularly and are curious what the hell Blapril is, then I direct you to the original announcement post as it has all of the relevant links and such. Over the weekend a bunch of folks signed up and the numbers are looking a bit better than they were. So lets get the business type stuff out of the way and here is the updated participants list. If I were smart I would throw this on the media kit page or something so I don’t have to keep re-posting it every single day like I have in the past.

• Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
• Cali – Diary of a Guildleader
• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Discgrace – Daily Creative Thing
• Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Elio – The Path They Walk
• Everwake – Everwake’s Internet Adventures
• Graphiya – Graphiya’s Garden
• Jen Thorpe – Book of Jen
• Joar – WoW Alt Addiction
• Kanter – MMO One Night a Week
• Kluwes – I’m Not Squishy
• Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
• Magen – Magen Tales
• MagiWasTaken – indiecator.home.blog
• Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• Naithin – Time to Loot
• Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs
• Panda Steve – Panda Steve Types Stuff
• Rambling Redshirt – Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• Redbeard – Parallel Context
• Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
• rumorsmatrix – rumorsmatrix, a blog
• SDWeasel – Unidentified Signal Source
• Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming
• Solarayo – Ace Asunder
• Shintar
  • Going Commando
  • Priest with a Cause
  • Neverwinter Thoughts
• Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers Eh!
• Syp – Bio Break
• Telwyn – GamingSF
• Tessa/Endalia
  • Narratess
  • Princess in a Castle
• Wilhelm – TAGN
• unwiseowl – leaflocker

As of the time of writing this we have 33 Participants, which is pretty great for just something that got announced last week. I am always super thankful to the level of support that I get each time I venture forth into madness. Like so much of this blog is me talking to myself and a form of therapy, but it is heartening to know that I have this community that is willing to help out and support me whenever I need it. Since we are living in a time where you should tell the people you care about that you love them and do so often, I am telling all of you in the Blaugust and now Blapril community that I love you dearly for your willingness to go down this rabbit hole each year.

The Most Important Decision

Now we get to the heart of today’s post. When you are thinking about starting a blog, you are confronted with so many different decisions that need to be made. It is very easy to go about this in the wrong order and start by setting up a website and going through the nuts and bolts of technically creating the blog. However of all of the decisions that you are going to be asked there is one that rises to the top of the heap. You need to know what to name your en devour because at least on some level this will ultimately dictate the type of audience you draw in from that point forward. Without maybe meaning to, your name is broadcasting a lot of things to people who come across in in a list of blogs or hopefully in organic google search results.

It goes so much further than just naming a thing however, you also need to make sure that you have a clear runway for whatever vision you are creating. Social Media right or wrong is inexplicably linked to blogging, and unless you have been around since a time before Twitter you are going to likely need an account on that platform as well as pretty much everything else that might someday rise to the realm of broad social relevance. So in choosing your name you not only want to try and pick something that you can easily get a meaningful domain name for, but also a Twitter account, a YouTube channel, an Instagram, a Twitch account or anything else that happens to become important at a later date. There is a reason why I am an early adopter of social media platforms, it isn’t necessarily because I LOVE social media… it is because I am effectively planting my flag in the ground and claiming a chunk of real estate for future usage.

Similarly you are not always going to get there first. So for me when I can’t get Belghast on whatever platform I am targeting I go for BelghastStern which is my consolation prize. So I think it is equally important to put some thought into your escape clause for when you can’t get your brand on a specific platform. I loathe the word “Brand” but sometimes you have to call things what they are because you are effectively building a brand for your blog, something that will ultimately make it recognizable and stand out from the crowd.

I Did This All Wrong

I’ve written a version of this post so many times now, but effectively I consider myself to have failed miserably at branding. Tales of the Aggronaut is so rarely what my blog is actually called. It is called Aggronaut.com or Belghast’s Blog by the vast majority of my readers or when someone from the media talks about it. Belghast is a brand that seemingly has worked because “it me” and I have landed on a name that is relatively uncommon. Tales of the Aggronaut was a thought experiment that served its purpose well until that purpose was no longer what I wanted to be writing about. Aggronaut was at the time what I thought to be a clever name for one who navigates or explores Aggro, aka the threat we are all trying to hold while tanking in an MMORPG.

So since this blog started it’s life as most specifically a Warrior tanking blog for World of Warcraft, the name made a lot of sense. However “Aggro” has another context, as someone who is aggressive or one who is being angered. I like to think I am a fairly chill and even keel sort of person, and in that context the name doesn’t really fit the sort of content that I create. We doubled down making it even worse when we started a podcast loosely connected to this blog and decided to call it AggroChat. Again the name gives the absolute wrong impression about the sort of content you are going to be consuming, but we stuck with it because this blog’s name was already established.

The name you choose will ultimately live with you for the life of your blog and will shape and dictate how people interact with it. Fortunately for me… Belghast became the bigger brand and while I should have probably gone with Belghast.com or Belgha.st but at the time of creating this blog I didn’t realize I would be the key factor in the equation. Coincidentally I own both of those addresses because like I said above I took the time to stake out that real estate for if I ever wanted to change my mind at a later date. There is part of you that needs to be thinking through all of the possible things that might impact you and coming up with a bit of a plan of how to deal with it. For every Ello that turns out to be nothing there is going to be an Instagram that ultimately blows up.

Your Exit Strategy

I’ve talked about this before, but I think it is extremely important to give yourself a way to shift things up as you yourself change as a person and as a writer. On April 17th, this blog will be 11 years old and during the last decade I have changed a lot as a person and most definitely as a writer. Like I said this blog started as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, something that I felt deep passion for at the time. While I am back in game right now, the last time I had played Retail WoW prior to that was November of 2018. Your tastes will change and with it you need to give yourself a way to change the blog to fit your new tastes without burning down all of your work and traction you have made in both the community and in google’s search engine nonsense.

I’ve pivoted a bunch of times throughout the course of this blog’s history, because while I don’t exactly think my name is great it is fairly non-descriptive and is not specifically focused on a particular game. This allowed me to stay a float and relevant until I finally reached the point where I became the brand and this thing I do just became another bit of data associated with it. You are going to outgrow whatever name you create for yourself. You are going to outgrow it more quickly however if you focus on being too specific. The best blog names are fairly general and can be highly malleable to fit whatever the writer wants to be talking about.

I’ve always particularly liked Wilhelm’s “The Ancient Gaming Noob” because it is evocative without actually pinning the writer down to it being a blog about a specific thing. Similarly I’ve always like names like Bhagpuss’s “Inventory Full” because it speaks to a conundrum that every gamer is familiar with and again allows for so much room to pivot freely between subjects. Another great name is Roger and his “Contains Moderate Peril“, because while sure it sounds “gamey” it absolutely does not have to be because so many things we engage with have a bit of peril in them. The idea being that all three of those names are memorable but have the sort of wiggle room in them that allows the author to shift them to what they need to be at that moment.

Check Availability

As I said before, it is important that you can adapt the brand you are building towards a bunch of different platforms. When coming up with a new name, make sure that someone else that you don’t want to be associated with is not already using it on the internet. You also do not want to go down the road of ending up with a copyright fight on your hands, so make sure it isn’t actually used in anything that could bring forth legal woes. Next see if the a domain is available, because even if you start on one of the free services with WordPress.com or Blogger.com, it is likely at some point that you may want to register a proper domain name. Lastly run down through the various social media services and see if you can get this name you are crafting or some reasonable facsimile at least.

Once you have found a name that resonates on all of the levels I have talked about today, then you probably do have something that will stand the test of time. Then you go about actually creating the site and getting it up and running. The name will serve as a guidepost as you create a logo, choose a theme, pick a color scheme, and all of the other assorted tasks that come with setting up a website for the first time. However all of this said… it isn’t the end of the world if you wind up with a name that doesn’t exactly suit your tastes years down the line. I have survived with what I feel is a lousy name for a blog just fine.