Spotlight on Marketing

Please Don’t Make it Hard for Me to Find Your Name

Posted on 11 August 2011

If I recommend an article by you, I really want to credit you as the author. But that’s hard to do if I can’t find your name!

On too many blogs and blog posts, finding the author’s name is a time-consuming and frustrating treasure hunt. I often see blogs where the owner of the blog doesn’t clearly list his/her name at all, or maybe he/she lists a first name but not a surname, even on the “About” page. Or if an article is published on someone else’s site, the author isn’t credited and his/her name isn’t listed in a bio at the end of the article. Grrr!

Sometimes, the only way to find someone’s full name is to go to their twitter page (if there’s a link in the article or somewhere on the blog), and hope they’ve listed their name there. Making me do that is not very helpful.

I’ve also found that, often, the person who posts a blog post isn’t necessarily the person who wrote it. I don’t care who POSTED it; I want to know who WROTE it!

Also, if I tweet about your article, I really want to include your twitter handle. So on your own blog, please show your twitter handle, with a live link. And if you publish someone else’s article on your blog, please include the author’s twitter handle in the bio box.

Please don’t make me go searching! On every blog post, please make it easy for me to find your (or the author’s) name and twitter handle.

By the way, I’m Kay Ross (@kayross).