Many people use Pen Names and Pseudonym online to promote niche sites or affiliate products. But how do you keep all the personas totally separate and compartmentalize the niche sites from the other blogs where you would like to “brand” your name.
Adsense: According to Google ToS, you can only have one account. But based on the Adsense number from a Publisher you can trace all the website from the same person. What do you do?
Analytics: Same for Analytics, you can also trace all the website using the same Google Analytics number. Do you use separate accounts?
Affiliates: How do you keep separate the affiliate products that you promote with your Real Identity and the ones with the Pen Names?
Hosting: Do you host all of your websites, niche sites with Pen Names and blogs with real identity in the same account?
Email lists: You are supposed to use your real identity when sending an email to a list, even if it’s a niche site. What do you do?
Are you using a company name so that you are not associated with products, etc.?
Thanks for your replies!
There is a difference between using pseudonames to have multiple writing/public persona and actually trying to effectively hide your identity. It’s easy to keep very separate identities, but if you are going for full confidentiality it’s going to be tough.
Thanks Sage and I agree with you. If I may ask, do you personally use different pseudonames on different niche sites and if so, are all the ads or affiliate links on those sites pointing back to the same account?
I don’t, no. I’ve found it hard to promote anything through writing/posting/contributing to any sites so I’ve always fallen back to paid advertising. But, that’s just me!
I agree with your analysis and Sagewing’s comment, jpdeanadams.
I do use a pen name because I have some sites, as a hobby, that have nothing to do with my main business. I decided early on that if someone is searching for my name in a search engine, I didn’t want the other sites, or articles I write to promote those sites, showing up intermingled with sites relating to my business. If someone wants to find my ties to those sites, it would be a simple matter, both for the reasons you list and a few others. For example, I don’t generally pay extra to use privacy features at registrars, so the address of the registrant is my own address. But 99.99% of the people looking for me on the internet have no interest in whether I have a site on toenail fungus and would not take the time or effort to find that information.
In many ways, it is just like authors who use a pen name when they write in a different genre. It is generally easy to find the author’s real name if you look, but most people don’t care. For most people, John le Carré is John le Carré, not David Cornwall.