Should I Use a Different Name in Internet Marketing?

Exactly what I was thinking. If you're teaching and selling good stuff to people, you don't need to be "Max Power." I think Homer Simpson tried that and it backfired.

Like many affiliate marketers, I've always used a pen-name for each niche, and am very glad I've done that, and will certainly continue to do so.

It's no more difficult to "brand" a pen-name than it is to brand your real-name. Your visitors/subscribers/customers don't know that it isn't your real name (obviously).

Among other advantages, it saves you from the potentially credibility-losing problem of potential customers finding out their "expert information provider" on the subject of desalination technology is also an expert information provider to other people on the subjects of cauliflower soup recipes and Louboutin-shoe collecting. Many people think this makes you look like "just a marketer willing to promote anything" and effectively won't give you credit for your genuine expertise and experience in the subjects you're writing about.

I'm very surprised that your replies in this thread happened to start off with a few people expressing their preference for using their real names.

In most of the (hundreds of) threads here discussing this question, the distribution of preferences is very much "the other way round", with the great majority recommending pen-names.

I don't understand why people think that. I've never understood it. I've never been able to see the advantage of using your own name. I can see many advantages to using pen-names, though.

I made a great mistake using my real name in this forum, and I wish I hadn't done so, now. With hindsight, it was entirely unnecessary, but I was only 18/19 when I joined and I didn't think it through. I certainly wouldn't make the same mistake again now.

It seems to, to many people here, but it doesn't to me.

By using privacy protection services for domain registration, and either a P.O. Box number, an "accommodation address service", or something similar, for those and for outgoing email.

It's no more difficult to brand a pen-name than a real name, Gavin.

Visitors/subscribers/readers don't know that it's a pen-name. To them it's just as much a "person" as your real name would be. That's the point of pen-names.

Using your real name instead doesn't typically help people to "feel that it's a real person and not a computer" any more than a pen-name does.

Using pseudonyms has actually been a rather common marketing practice for many years for example in telemarketing and companies selling to selected demographics. There is a distinct marketing advantage for pseudonyms when promoting a variety of disparate products or brands, and particularly when encountering certain ethnic or special interest groups. A catchy name or something indicating affinity can have profound effects on branding, conversions and sales.

This has been a really useful thread for me the last few days. I need to make certain decisions on how to proceed with a number of things, and identity is a big deal at the moment.

Alexa, thanks for your comments and the link to that other thread.

My biggest issue is that my so called "career", LOL, is based on IM and Online marketing. This is true not only for the clients I support, but the business I plan to launch in the next few months.

HOWEVER, the niche I am building my IM business around is a health related niche, and this leads to a dilemma about keeping my health niche social media "stuff" totally separate from everything I do related to IM and online marketing.

I don't want to use a pen name unless it's for something I do in a niche unrelated to the above 2 that I mention, but keeping my IM/Online efforts apart from my Health Niche efforts is something I am not quite sure how to accomplish.

For example, I am not sure if I should have 2 different twitter accounts, 2 different google+ accounts, and so on..

Ditto. I use both depending on the niche and the media.
Just about all of my social stuff is ME.
All local brand marketing is ME
Affiliate marketing may or may not be a persona
International affiliate marketing is persona until I learn fluent Korean and a few others :-D

Oh phooey... now I don't what to do! lol

I think using a fake name can help, for example, if you start out with several different niches and you don't want your results with one of them to influence your reputation in the other one.

This is something of a dodgy technique though, cause if you expect from the very start to have reputation problems, it's not likely that your strategy will work out in the long run.