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I've been thinking about rebranding my blog, possibly even renaming it.  I've had this thing for close to four years now and I get very little traffic and few comments so I must be doing something wrong.

My number one mistake is that I don't advertise my blog.  I could use Facebook and Twitter but I haven't done that yet.  The main reason is because the blog is too personal for people I know in real life to read it.  Isn't it funny how I'd rather perfect strangers read my most intimate thoughts rather than friends and family and coworkers?  Well, I guess it's not that funny because I talk about most of them.  It makes sense that I wouldn't want them to read it.

I also think about how awkward it is having other people I know reading about my business.  I give the entire world access to my mind but that's only if they can find it.  If people stumble upon my madness, that's fine.  I'm just not handing out invitations.

So, where does that leave me?  I could start another blog that's not as personal, one where I talk about my writing and future books and throw in some sporadic introspection.  Or, I could take this blog and scale back on the personal stuff and focus more on promotion.

I hope to release my first book by the end of the year and inside I'd like to put a link to this blog.  I hope that will bring some traffic here but I just don't know if I want to keep my blog name.  It expires early next month so I have a chance to change it.  If I'm going to, this is the time to do it.

The name of my blog and the blog itself was spawned from my death.  The name was good because to me, it surmised what the blog and my life/death was all about, which was constant decay day after day.  But now that I'm alive again, it feels like time for a change.  And I think I need to change my blog name to something a bit less gloomy.  While I think the everyday entropy concept still applies, I'm not sure of the accessibility of the name.

But there are some problems with changing the name/site.  First of all, I write because I have to get things off my chest.  It's my therapy and if I have to hide things or pull back on certain aspects of my writing to protect the feelings of those who might read it, then the writing wouldn't be as effective to me.  I don't want to have to censor myself because that is too much work.  It's hard enough organizing my thoughts into (hopefully) coherent writings so I couldn't imagine having to take said writings and then edit them for content.  It wouldn't feel genuine.

I write about so many dark things and I just don't want people to think I'm morbid.  Oh wait, I am.  So I guess it doesn't matter what they think 'cause they'd be right. 

There's also the worry that by changing my name and/or content, I might lose the small readership that I do have.  What if people can't find me anymore?  Naturally, I would give ample notice to the changes but what if the casual reader who doesn't come by that often doesn't get that notice?

As I was writing this, I tried researching how easy it would be to change my name and it seems a lot more complicated than I thought.  You've got your dead links and affiliate domains and other cyber language I cannot understand so I'd rather just keep the name until I'm more educated with this whole interwebs thing.

I still have the content to contend with, though.  Should I pull back or push forward?  Should I take a giant leap and put all of myself out there or keep some of the privacy?  Or should I do nothing and not advertise through social networking sites and just let people come to me?