Article Marketing – Should You Use A Pen Name When You’re Writing Articles?

It’s a fact that you can make money with article marketing in so many ways. And the other night, I talked with a friend about this intriguing subject, when I introduced the concept “pen names”. The conversation went like this:

Me: “If you write articles about several different topics, you should use a pen name for each topic. Readers cannot understand that somebody could be able to write about different topics like ‘the law of attraction’, ‘making money online’, ‘world of warcraft’, etc.”

Friend: “Why not? Does that mean that they put you in a little box?” (he used a better expression that I’ve forgotten.)

Me: “Yes, sort of. They don’t believe you can have knowledge about several different subjects.”

Friend: “But how do people, who read my articles about topic 1, get to read my articles about topic 2, if they are not written under the same name?”

I began my explanation, but it was late, and I promised to finish this talk in a blog post. As you continue to read this blog post, you’ll learn, why it might be a good idea for you to use a pen name.

Only Few Readers Follow an Author

In my (humble) experience, only a few readers actually follow an author on Ezine Articles. So whether or not your write all your articles under the same name, has only very little influence on whether or not the reader will see your different articles.

You don’t lose readers by using a pen name.

But If the Reader Isn’t Aware of Who the Author Is, Why Bother With a Pen Name?

Many readers click on the author name to see his profile.

If your author #1 writes article about, say, World of Warcraft, he can have information about that in his profile: “Author #1 is an eager WoW player, and has been bla bla bla for several years…”

But if there is only an author #1, who writes all the articles, you’ll have to include much information about yourself: “Author is an eager WoW player, and in his spare time, he also makes money online, knows how to get a date, is a faithful husband, loves a good cup of coffee, polishes his finger nails with B-polish every day, plays poker online, walks the dog that doesn’t bark, because he’s trained it so well, and -“

Feeling the urge to breathe in deeply now?

The reader can have much more confidence in your knowledge, when your article topics are followed up by a strong author profile around that same topic.

That’s one reason why, you should pick a pen name, if you write about several topics.

Profiling Yourself Through Your Articles

If you want to make yourself a bit of a name, writing articles about a specific topic like ‘how to play poker’, showing all your knowledge about it, you would ruin that picture, if you all of a sudden started to write articles, whose sole purpose is to make people buy hair stylers from Amazon.

Be two persons for that. You can even be a man, writing about poker, and a woman, writing about hair stylers.

Creating Your Pen Name

Ezine Articles allows the use of pen names. You just set up a second author profile, and remember to make it credible. Add a picture (perhaps yourself from another angle, or another age), write about this author, you could even go as far as creating a Twitter account for this pen name. I did that with one of mine, and I suddenly found myself being more daring, than my real self. I wrote about that in another blog post:

Do You Have Personality? If You Don’t Dare to Be Yourself, Be Somebody Else First

So that might be yet another advantage to using a pen name.