Should You Use a Pen Name Online?
In my case, the answer is yes.
I have a very unusual last name, and anyone with this last name is related to my husband. The name was misspelled as his great-grandfather immigrated and came through Ellis Island. Doing a Google search of our last name shows nothing but relatives, and the last time I had to ask a store to look up my rewards card number, the cashier used my last name. She listed 5 other relatives in another state, uncles, cousins and in-laws. If I want to maintain any privacy at all online, I have to use a pen name.
There are benefits to using your real name online. Certainly you want to use your real name if you want to built your reputation in a community or industry. Many bloggers have built brand recognition around their name. A good example would be John Chow of johnchow.com. His blog is extremely popular in the making money online industry. Problogger, however, is even more popular, but unless you are a regular reader you may not even know that Darren Rowse is the owner.
Obviously privacy is the key issue in the choice to use a pen name online. However, with that is the freedom to express yourself online without bringing controversy into your life. For example, if I wanted to create a blog ranting about the frustrations of my job and its industry, I would want to be extremely cautious of using my real name. Needless to say if I did , I would not want to name specific companies in my rants.
Another reason is differentiating yourself for specific niches. If I have a blog on romance writing and another on mathematics, the two don’t seem to go together. I might create a pen name for one or both of those sites. Some bloggers will use variations of their names for different blogs. For example, you might use Christopher Smith for one blog and Chris Smith for another.
By now you probably have figured out that Faith Perry is not my real name. It’s a pen name based on a variation of my name and a family name. As much as I might share from my life online, I still prefer to keep it private.
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