Your freelance writing name

Part of marketing yourself as a freelance writer is branding yourself. Part of branding yourself is making sure Google can find you.
I recently found that my name in Google comes up as a pizza joint named Courtney's in Latham, New York. Along with a few other Courtney's Facebook profiles (not mine of course), a Myspace profile, a soccer player, some kid who is on honor roll (glad one of us has been) and finally my high school graduation announcement. Ok, so I was on honor roll once or twice...I think. Ok, let's just say I made nothing but A's in a few classes and read books behind my binder in all the others.

So what to do? It's not quite an issue yet, I haven't finished my professional website, I just started the transition into FULL-TIME freelance writing about two months ago (previously it was sporadic freelance) and I just started utilizing blogs and posting to forums, etc. So no worries yet.

Courtney Latham isn't a hugely popular name, but it's popular enough to require a little more effort on my part to get in the top rankings on Google.
OR, another option is choosing a pen name of course, a bit of a romantic notion if you sway that way...OR you can jsut come up with variations of your name. This is especially important if your name is John Smith, there will of course be countless Pocahontas links before yours even remotely comes up unless you are already a celebrity, in which case, why would you be reading this blog in the first place?

Start Googling variations, how does John C. Smith come up? Or even better: John Z. Smith? How many people do you think have a "Z" initial? Plus you have the added bonus of having this mysterious persona...what's their middle name? Zachariah? Zachius? Zeek? Who knows? The world will be on the edge of their seat trying to figure it out. Alright, maybe not so much, but it helps with Google rankings a bit if you have a variation that fewer people have...less competition and easier to move up in rankings.

Also you need to check to see if that name is available as a domain name, if it is buy it asap whether you will use it or not. Then buy up similar names too if you can. You can check your domain names here.

Also you can check how many people in the U.S. have your name and work off of that, check it out at How Many of Me.