Branding and the Turtle

Once upon a time, I learned about branding. It preceded the birth of this blog by perhaps one week. If you cared to do so, you could go back in the archives and look up my first post about it.

Thanks to Yvonne Anderson of the Lost Genre Guild, I just read a refresher course on blogging and branding that led to a few rearranges here in the Swamp. Hope you like the pics.

When I started blogging, I wanted to be somewhat anonymous. "Baby steps" was my motto and the Turtle inched her way onto the thin ice of the bitter lake of the Internet publishing world. I didn't want my name "out there" necessarily. What if I messed up? What if I changed my mind? Far better to have an alias I could ditch.

Enter the Turtle. Ranunculus Turtle. I do love her, and I'm not abandoning her, but she isn't easy to look up, is she? She is my face and voice. My avatar. She is more a part of me than I suspected. As we've journeyed together, I see she should have been a snapping turtle.

I am the Turtle. Yes, yes, perhaps it should have been Tortoise, but that doesn't go as well with "ranunculus," does it? And snapping turtles do live in ponds. 

Since I'm finally getting friends with cell phones who also use FB, I'm finally getting some photos of me to replace my turtle sketch, so I've added a few at "The Real Turtle" page. I also need to practice this "maximizing searchability" skill good marketers speak of. It involves using common key words likely to show up on searches.

Yeah. Like "common" is my goal. (Ooo, that was a bit elitist, wasn't it?)

Anyway, here's to new determination to make myself more visible to those who might want to meet me. I haven't bombed out, I haven't given up, and my mistakes are as much a part of my story as my successes. I will share them all.

Happy Friday, dear readers.

I gotta say, Fridays don't mean as much as they used to because I'm starting to love my new job. It's hard, somewhat thankless and silly, but I believe I can do it. Kinda like writing novels.