Well you might ask, what’s in a name?

But it’s one of those little things (or not so little, when you look at potential consequences, which I probably do way too much) that can hold you up, in online marketing and elsewhere.

In this particular case, I’m referring to my name, and the name of this blog.

For a number of years it has been at paulchilversgrierson.com – although I always sign “Paul D. Chilvers-Grierson” and over the years have kind of branded myself with that “D.” in the middle.

Along with the tag line “Kiwi in South West Scotland”.

Because I am.

A “kiwi” (i.e. someone born and raised in New Zealand).

In South West Scotland.

A while back I also acquired the domain with the “D” in the middle, but have only used it to host a podcast (yes, one lonely podcast, waiting for company to join it…).

Anyway, when I joined John Thornhill’s Partnership To Success coaching and mentoring program, the first thing was to set up a blog with your name in a subfolder called “blog”, and to use the theme you see now, in the meantime redirecting from the main index page and saving it for different use later.

Now I could have just stuck with the blog I already had in the root folder of the existing domain and carried on from there (as some others in the course have done).

But that would have been an uncomfortable mixture of the theme, layout, sign up forms etc. already in place, and the new things John is teaching, and I wanted to follow his instructions to the letter if possible because he and previous students have obviously done very well with his methods.

In short, it didn’t seem a good idea.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to lose the existing virtual real estate already indexed in the search engines, not to mention various redirects that would no longer work if I just closed it down, some of which seem to have actually made me money.

It then occurred to me as an alternative that I could set up the new blog in a subfolder of the aforementioned domain with the “D” where the podcast lives.

That would, however, probably have ended up being somewhat schizophrenic, maintaining two blogs with “almost but not quite the same” names.

So in the end, after a delay compounded by “life getting in the way”, I opted for the solution you see now.

That is, I set up the blog exactly as John teaches, imported the existing posts and left the original articles where they were but replaced the text with a link to the new location of each piece while retaining all the links and banners in the sidebars.

This means anyone following a link from the search engines will still find a real page (or post, technically) when they get there, and can either click the link to the new location or, if they choose – and I don’t mind if they do! – click a banner or a link to one of my other sites or an affiliate link.

Or if they are directed to the home page of the original blog, they will be redirected to the new home page.

Now I’m finally catching up on the time lost as a result of this little dilemma, with its potentially far reaching consequences.

Which leads me to a question for you:

What’s holding YOU up?

Something seemingly small, but big enough to be a spanner in the works for your progress?

Or was there something like that, but you’ve meanwhile overcome it?

Let me know with a comment if either scenario is something that resonates with you, and either how you overcame it or how you are looking to overcome it if it’s still an issue for you.

What’s your story in this respect?