As I’ve been working the kinks out of this site, I’ve been learning some interesting things about myself.  I get really embarrassed by what I see as completely avoidable errors; I found six broken links that were broken because I had copied the html code incorrectly. An easy and human kind of mistake and completely fixed within an hour. I’m still struggling with feeling like I should have focused more on those details; never done it in the first place or caught it sooner!

As I was messing around with all the online tools I also solved a mystery.  A handful of people have been putting my name in search engines, going to my photography site which has my name as the domain (www.julietchase.com) and then leaving immediately.  I could tell the latter because the average time on site was around 1 second. Ouch!  It’s hard not to be flattered by strangers googling you, but then for them to leave without even looking at my work?

How would you feel if an adult film actress had recently changed her name to yours?

Quite.  I’d probably be more irritated if I didn’t laugh picturing men with umm, certain expectations suddenly staring at landscapes and flowers! No wonder they left so quickly. But on another level, it made me realize that little mistakes are going to happen and what I’m not doing may actually be more serious. There’s a lot more I could be doing to promote my business and thereby dominate the search results for my own name. Instead of feeling defensive, I’m feeling inspired to go the extra mile and keep working to hit that tipping point.

As part of that I’ve been thinking about how to make this site’s content more meaningful and consistent. I thought I’d start by doing more posts and trying to structure them a little more to the days of the week so Inspiration & Motivation on Mondays, Tools & Exercises on Tuesdays, Humor & Fun on Wednesdays, Books on Thursdays, and continuing my Journal on Fridays.  For now I’ll continue to take the weekends off. However, if there are things you aren’t finding out there in the great wide world of the web, I’d be interested in hearing about them.  Maybe that’s the missing link! I need all the help I can get on this mission:-)

I’m curious to know if something similar has happened to anyone else? Or what you would do if you suddenly found yourself sharing your name like this?

Technorati Tags: challenges, Importance of Motivation, inspiration from unusual sources, tipping point