Hey,
There are 2 sides to this fence. On one side, are the group who say “You should never brand your business and website around your name because you should always build a business to sell” and then the (equally loud) group on the either side of the fence will chant “but your personal brand is what attracts your ideal clients and sets you apart from every one else in your space”.
The truth is, BOTH are right. But, and here’s the important part, they are only right for the RIGHT business models.
So, when should you NEVER brand under your name and when is this the most powerful thing you can do?
Cheers!
Janet
P.S. Next week I’ll be talking about personality driven businesses. But for now, I’d love to hear your experiences and opinions on this topic.
Transcript

Janet: Hello and welcome. Janet Beckers here with your wonderful web TV tip of the week. Today we’re going talk about the URLs for your website. When should you use your own name? When should you never use your name in the URL of your website? Let’s going to have a look at that.
This is a really, really common question that I get, and I tell you what, you can procrastinate on this for month and months, possibly years. It’s a really, really common one. Let’s have a look at the situations where you absolutely should not use your name for your URL in the business. A great way to think about this is if I sold my business today, somebody came in and said, “Yeah, I’m going to give you whatever it is that you wanted in return for your business.” Could you walk away and it wasn’t going to be any kind of incongruency? I’m not talking about is the business systemized and easy? Branding wise, are your customers going to go, “Hey, where’s Janet? I want Janet, I want contact with her.” Can your business be completely separated from you or you’re a core part of the delivery of everything that you’re doing through your programs and through your website?
If you can be separate, that’s great. Don’t do it underneath your name, okay? You can have your own name, domain name and it’s just about you and whatever your speaker role, for whatever it is that you’re going to do, but for your main business, make it so that it could either be targeted or a name that goes around your signature system or a name that goes around the name of your business or the solution that you provide or the demographic, the niche that you target. That’s when it’s crazy to put it underneath your own name, because people … I’m not going to be able to buy.
When could you put it underneath your own name and why would you want to anyway? This is something that’s come up recently in a discussion in the Wonderful Web leaders program, where if your business has evolved that it was really a product to start with, but you’ve actually expanded how much more you can offer to your clients and your coaching … This is particularly for people who are a coach or a consultant, the expert, is it just whatever you had originally was too limiting, it restricted you. You look at and you go, “You know, I’m more than that now.”
In this case, it makes really good sense to brand it underneath your name. It may be difficult to get your name. I was lucky to get JanetBeckers.com, but you could have something like TeamJanetBeckers, TheJanetBeckers, CoachJanetBeckers, MentorJanetBeckers, LegendJanetBeckers, whatever it is, you can find combinations. It makes perfectly good sense to put it underneath your name. In that case, you’re branding you. People are being drawn to you.