You may have noticed something when it comes to all of the different social media web sites that I’m on.  They all have my name in them.  Twitter.com/JoshRimer, Facebook.com/JoshRimer, YouTube.com/JoshRimer, etc.  I’ve managed to get that name for every site that I’ve wanted to have a profile on so far.  And it’s not like there aren’t other Josh Rimer’s out there.  Just searching in Facebook shows that there are 7 others.  But why do I have the username “JoshRimer” on all of the most popular sites?  Because I make it a priority to get them.

I’m treating my endeavours for getting famous online as a business.  And in any good business you have to brand yourself.  With what I’m doing, I myself, and my name, are my brand.  So I feel it’s important to make efforts to get everything with my name in it before anyone else.  When Facebook allowed people to start picking usernames last month I put it in my calendar and set my alarm to be sure I’d beat out the other 7 guys.  I had thought about choosing something else like “Comedian” or “CanadianActor” or a number of other things, but in the end I think it’s really important to you stay consisent.  Even with this blog I thought about other url’s to use like www.gettingfamousonline.com or www.iamfamousonline.com, but again I decided to keep everything the same.

Today I saw someone tweet about Josh Rimer passing away. I Googled my name and sure enough, a Josh Rimer in Pennsylvania was killed recently while on duty in Afghanistan.  And that may explain why there was a recent spike in people finding my blog through Google using Josh Rimer as their search term.  They were quite possibly looking for news about the Josh Rimer from Pennsylvania and instead found my web site since I’m first on Google for my name.

This is unfortunately a very sad case, but reminds me about why it’s important to have my name connected to everything I do.  If I want to make myself famous online then I need to get my name in front of as many people as I can, in as many different ways as I can, and as often as I can.  And I need to be sure that when they’re looking for me by searching for my name that it’s easy for them to find me.  If you want to be found more often online as well then I recommend you do the same for yourself.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be your own real name that you use, but if you create a distinct username for yourself on one site, try to keep that consistent and use it again on everything else. It will really help get that username into people’s heads and make it easier for them to find you and tell others about you as well.