This is a guest post by Jane Sheeba who also writes about autotrader and photos.com discount coupon codes and hence wishes to share the following couple of discount deals with you: auto trader promo code, photos.com coupon code.
Blogging is a platform allowing you to express your opinions and ideas to the world through the web and has become hugely popular today.
As a blogger, you would certainly feel the need to be known to most in the social media to get traffic and visibility. But this is not the case with all the bloggers.
There are bloggers who choose to author their blogs under their pen names or even prefer anonymity, hiding their true identity.
Blogging so, would be known as ‘Anonymous Blogging’ in contrast to the traditional, conventional blogging.
For our multi-author blog that features autotrader and photos.com discount coupons, we had many authors offering to write columns anonymously.
The Cons First…
Authoring a blog anonymously is increasingly catching up, maybe because of the subject of the blog (controversial blogs, I mean) or just for sheer fun or whatever the case maybe.
Hence anonymous authors have many reasons to hide themselves behind the confines of their blog from the online world.
Authoring anonymously though comes with its own benefits and flaws. It does not allow others (audience and readers) to invade the blogger’s privacy to a large extent. But, there is a catch.
- You always will have the threat of being caught or known to people someday, if not today or tomorrow. People can find you with many other resources available online through your IP address and track your whereabouts. So, remember that anonymous blogging cannot be under wraps for a long time. It will reveal itself one day or the other.
- Even though protecting your online identity is not a bad idea at all, it may affect the effectiveness of your blog. You may not be in a position to grab a strong audience, which will invariably affect the profitability of your blog.
- It might become a hard task for you to build trust among your audience. As you are always under a mask, even if you are selling something through your blog, you may not get the required number of people to buy. Trust becomes an important factor when you are online. People may not be ready to share their details with you as they are as well concerned about their privacy.
- All hell breaks loose when they find and easily track who you are as a real person. If you are running a controversial blog or the subject of the blog is too sensitive an issue, needless to say, your reputation is at risk. Anonymous blogging has a flip side to it too since you cannot blog your heart out against the law of enforcement.
- You also run the risk of getting your family in trouble. They may get upset by the posts you write on (For example, if the post contains vulgarity, uncensored topics, against law or something terribly upsetting about your personality)
- And yes, you definitely cannot make friends on the online platform. It may sound almost like an oxymoron, ‘being anonymous’ and a ‘friend’ at the same time.
Now The Pros…
Well, the other side of anonymous blogging is relatively fun as it provides you with high end privacy and the much ‘freedom of speech’. After all, blogging is all about expressing what you think and presenting your thoughts online.
Let’s see what you get out of authoring your blog anonymously…
- You get yourself away from many eyes. In other words, you are in a safer zone to venture into writing something you ‘prefer’ anonymously. Privacy is usually the utmost concern of most of the anonymous writers.
- Hiding your real identity from the online world may save you from a lot of problems in personal/professional life. This may help you to avoid unnecessary attention or painful cribbing at your work (if you are writing about your terrible workplace or on the boss). Since your online image always influences your personal life, it becomes important to maintain privacy.
- You can freely experiment with different topics, ideas and write on them on your blog.
- Some authors like the idea of remaining anonymous as it is alluring and thrilling to be under wraps. People who just prefer fun (as a hobby)and nothing else can happily remain anonymous.
- You can write about your interests (anything, for that matter) with total sincerity and honesty.
Winding Up
As said earlier, authoring a blog anonymously requires caution. Using a Proxy can help you in many ways. Some writers also anonymously promote blog content of their other sites/blogs on the blog too.
It has got two sides to it, however it goes on to show how you take it into your stride and ensure yourself of being an anonymous blog author.
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Real am not a fan of anonymous blogging, i believe in transparency. The only reason i hide my identity is to post from computers that are used by lots of other people just for security reasons.
To gain trust and credibility online you have to be yourself.
Nice post!
In my opinion, the words Anonymous and Blogging just don’t seem to fit together quite right. I feel that to have an effective blog, you must be true to yourself and your audience. You should write without feeling like you have anything to hide. If you have something to say, just say it. Your audience will respect you more for it, you’ll make better, true connections, and who knows your blog just might be that much more interesting!
You should always put your name every time you write a blog. You should be proud of your work with your blog.
This helps you to find friends in your niche. Being an anonymous author, it degrades your online reputation and trust…I feel that to have an effective blog, you must be true to yourself and your audience…
I think whether you use your real name or not is not important. It matters what you do, what you say, what you share on the internet. After all, who cares about a name? Even though it’s your real name, how many people think it your real name?
I don’t have any problem with people remaining anonymous, be there really is no harm in writing your own name surely. Plus you wouldn’t be able to build your online reputation if your left yourself as anonymous!
I used to use MyGuestBlog but too many of them use weird names and I felt a bit silly posting on my blog “the following is a guest post from ‘Antlover1981’. So now I insist on real names or at least sensible ones. 🙂
Hi Jane, nice topic. I’ve ran a couple of controversial blogs and on the last one I used a pen name but wasn’t keeping it from everyone. I didn’t want to ‘turn off’ clients or subscribers of my other blogs with my extreme views on certain controversial topics so I thought it best to keep everything separate. Even though I use/d a pen name on the blog, anyone that’s a Facebook friend, for example, knows that little B is me. 😉 I make sure I don’t cross promote with other sites, some things just don’t mix. What’s inappropriate in business can appeal to many on a personal blog.
As far as it ‘getting out’, I have no worries, it’s not THAT controversial. On the other hand, if I ever want to run for public office I’m in big trouble. 😉 Fat chance on that.
I agree that there is always both sides of the anonymous blog authoring. One should really carefully estimate what is best to do when publishing. Thanks for the useful information.
Using real names is always better. What’s even better is to link the blog to Google+, it does rank well that way.