When you set up a blog or website you naturally pick a domain name which ends with .com, mainly because it’s become the de facto standard on the internet. I run a few blogs and they all end with .com with the notable exception of this blog, which is jorgensundberg dot net.

Why did I go with .net?

First of all, the reason for setting up this blog was to claim my personal brand on search engines once and for all. There is nothing that gives you more link juice than running your own blog on your own name. And nothing that can steal more Google ranking than your namesake doing it first!

When I did set it up it was natural to go for jorgensundberg.com. This was unfortunately taken already, I was only about 7 years late apparently. After many weeks and months on the fence I had to go with another one out of .net, .info, .org etc. In the end the .net was the best option. More on this terrible ordeal in this post over at Ryan Rancatore’s blog Personal Branding 101.

How's that .net working out for you?

The good news is that blogging on a .net domain name has worked absolutely fine and I haven't encountered any users getting lost looking for me. The only person that got a bit confused in the beginning was myself, I sometimes entered my URL here and there with the .com suffix just out of habit I suppose. So all in all, it’s worked out really well and I forgot about the domain suffix question altogether, until…

Do you remember sending your first email? It was a pretty cool feeling. I am sure you remember receiving your first email as well, an even better feeling. Emails were one of the keys to the success of the internet I would say. Some providers tried to charge their customers for every email sent but in the end it became completely free and it's heavily reduced our reliance on sending post (or snail mail if you will). So far so good, for a while (well 10 years or so) email marketing was the future of the web and building an email list of subscribers was a top priority for savvy online operators.

Then social came along

A few years later we started using social media channels to communicate. It started with blogs (and comments), moved on to social bookmarking and finally social networks like Facebook and thousands of others. Marketeers jumped on the bandwaggon and we now have branded Pages, feeds, profiles and what have you. I must admit that Facebook have done very well in terms of driving traffic, activity and repeat visitors to their social network. They seem to be faring well on social. But what about the others...?

Google Plus (or was it Gmail)

Have you signed up for Google Plus yet? If not, I'm sure you have received numerous emails about it. Do you have a Gmail account? You are probably bombarded with Google Plus messages from your contacts and Google themselves. The big G's whole business model here is built around pimping their email service, and then emailing everyone ad nauseum about it. You could ask whether this is social media or email media. Hopefully Google Plus will grow in to something with a life of its own and not having to rely on 20 year old technology (emails) to promote a cutting edge social network.

Last year was a very successful year in terms of my own brand and the brands that I represent. Because I have got to a stage where the brands are known (at least to my target audience), I will shake things up a bit and change how I go about the online marketing. This includes how my blogs will run in the next 12 months.

jorgensundberg.net (that would be this blog!)

Last year, I put a lot of effort into writing useful and practical blog posts about personal branding, social media, LinkedIn and some other stuff. This paid off and I had just shy of 100,000 pageviews on this blog from Jan 2011 - Dec 2011. This blog has some 1,700 subscribers and gets a fair bit of commenters.

In terms of content for this year I will be shifting away from just social media and branding topics and write go a bit more genreal. Hang on you say, no more social media and branding content coming our way? Yes there will be, but not exclusively. Instead I will use this blog to publish more personal content, the things that I would like to read and the things that really interest me. I realise that from a marketing perspective this might just alienate some of the readers here. I hope some will find the new content of interest, and other people will find the blog through search and social media and hopefully engage with me.

July is over and done with, it was the month of my birthday (as well as France & the US I suppose) and now that I am older and wiser I thought I'd test something new. Instead of sending out emails every time a new blog post goes up I thought I’d do it once per month and list all the posts. The thing is that I write for a couple of blogs so also wanted to share some of the posts from the other blogs that will hopefully be of interest to you.

George Emsden is an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) based in north London, England. I met him at a networking event and we connected online. After noticing how prolific he is on social media and how well he has branded himself in a very competitive market I thought it would be interesting to share his tips on personal branding here on the blog.