Well, hello, world.
I’ve been hesitant about getting started on blogging again. I wasn’t sure where to start. These days I find myself in the middle of so many things that to just plop down and start pontificating about small business web dev & marketing seemed too abrupt, too out-of-context. I wanted to good, solid introduction.
But.
Oh, but.
I just spent 2 hours dealing with a hacking situation on a client’s web site. I’d never dealt with a site being hacked before, and I got a crash course over the past 48 hours. I spent about 2 hours tonight doing nothing but searching through site files, changing passwords, and desperately googling to soothe my paranoia. It was way less fun than my planned evening of logging a few hours as a search engine evaluation monkey, but I think it was good for me, cracking my knuckles and digging into a new problem.
And as I decided to give the fight a rest for now (waiting on an answer to a support ticket from the hosting company, AISO.net, who have been frankly nothing less than spectacular at every step), I thought “Why not just start here in the middle?”
My good friend and soon-to-be business partner, Jennifer Casale (who just recently started kicking out post after post at her Twelve Weeks to Thirty blog), is the client of which I speak and at least 50% of my inspiration for this next iteration of my blah-ging.
Where I want to start is here: I want to merge my personal and professional brand. I, me, D’nelle Throneberry, is my brand (Feeling skeeved out yet? Feeling a little like you’re caught in a Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising meme? Yeah. Me, too. I doubt it’ll pass.)
Yes, I’ve got this nifty little corporation, Berry Interesting Productions, Inc. It’s a great asset to me and has helped me through some hard times, especially over the past 2 years. When I started it in 2006, I never imagined that less than 5 years later I would be working to take my BIPI activities full time. But what all the work of the past 2 years has taught me is that, more than anything, I’ve got to be my own brand.
I can promise you that I have a lot more to say on this topic than is appropriate to delve into in a first blog post. For now, suffice it to say that what I expect to fill this blog with are posts, links and media that help people get to know the brand that is me, and not just some silly, faceless raspberry logo. I hope that, along the way, this blog helps me to hone and improve my professional skills as well as provides me with a pressure-release valve.
So, here I am. Right in the middle – in the middle of learning something new, in the middle of developing my personal brand… and right at the beginning of something, too. Because even in the middle, I think, it’s okay to pause and declare a new start, to take a deep breath and renew my sense of commitment to moving forward, moving upward, out of the middle and into what lies ahead.
