Confession: For a long while I wasn’t happy with the name of my blog. Carina’s Craftblog. Ack. So boring. It didn’t feel very memorable or like a brand that people associate with this thing or the other. I felt like a blog name should be something descriptive or evocative of some feeling of..well, who knows what.
But I had an aha moment the other day. Yes! A real light bulb over your head moment.
This quote by Cathy Callahan (on While She Naps) really struck a cord with me:
Also at that time it seemed like everyone had their ‘craft name.’ Here’s the thing: that name will now forever be associated with a ‘vintage’ and that is limiting to me in terms of how I’m growing my business. Going by my own name makes much more sense and gives me more options.
Bloody hell! I’d never thought about it like that. But it makes so much sense. After a while your blog becomes your brand/craft identity. Some people might not even know your real name. So imagine I had given my blog a fancy name. Like… Pears & Roses (I just made that up, I wonder if there is a blog by that name?).. what would that have been like? Would I forever have been known as ‘Pears & Roses’ girl/lady/woman/person?
What if my interests changed? Because, you know what? They have. When I first started my blog, I was into sewing bags and softies, with a little bit of embroidery thrown in for good measure. Then it was all about crochet because I finally learnt to crochet and I just couldn’t get enough of it. To this day, some of my most popular posts are still about crochet, although I wrote those posts in like 2009. Now I do embroidery, but I also dabble in quilting and there’s some cooking as well.
If I had become the Pears & Roses crochet girl, it might not have been so easy to move forward/change interests. Or maybe it would have, I don’t know.
What I do know is that when I read that quote from Cathy, I was suddenly really happy that I hadn’t picked a fancy evocative name for my blog. My blog name tells you exactly what my blog is. It’s my blog, my name is Carina and I write about crafts. And to be honest, I am not any kind of fancy, I’m just me.
So I hope you know me as Carina from Carina’s Craftblog*, or maybe Carina from Polka & Bloom. That is good enough for me.
I guess the thing to take away from this is: if you’re starting a blog, don’t worry about thinking up a fancy name. Keep it simple. Use your own name. Or a name that you won’t mind being associated with in years to come even if your focus changes.
*Yes, yes, Craftblog should be in two words, but I’m Danish and we write compound words in one word in stead of splitting them up. It’s ‘misspelled’ on purpose. ;-)