When you first decide that you want to start a blog, then choosing what you want to name it can be a difficult decision. Once you start blogging, then you may find that your original name choice doesn’t really suit your blog anymore. Perhaps you called it “Betty’s Beauty Bonanza Blog” but now you want to focus less on beauty and more on local events.
Having a blog name and layout that you don’t love can put you off from blogging – it’s better to change things up to make them feel more like you instead of halfheartedly working through it.
Talk it through with some friends whether a name change would be good, and bounce your ideas off them for names. They could help you come up with an even better name for your site!
You’ll probably want to rename your social media accounts – it’s worth taking a little time to make sure that you’ll be able to get the same name that you want on most of the networks you use (or if you can’t, making sure your Twitter and Instagram names are the same is probably the most important thing – it can be quite confusing for others if you go by one name on one network and a different one elsewhere). This post over on moz.com is pretty useful at explaining how to switch names over all the platforms!
If you want to make sure you don’t lose your Bloglovin’ followers, then get in contact with Bloglovin’ and they’ll be able to amend your feed location so your readers will get the posts from your new blog. Your stats may look a little off for a few weeks, but they should fix themselves. You can also tell Google that you’ve changed your name and they’ll be able to pick that up in the next crawl.
Once you’ve renamed your blog, then you’ll want to write a post about the name change so people don’t get confused why there’s this new blog in their feed reader. You could do things like include a screenshot of your old blog, and your new one in the post so even people who subscribe by email to your posts will know about the change. You might also want to tweet a little more than usual to let people know – set up something like Buffer to do it and you won’t have to do much more than the initial set up!
Have you considered changing your name?
I have considered it, am considering it. The name of my food blog is supposed to be humorous but I think it goes over a lot of people’s heads. But, I’m three years in so I hate to change it now.