Hate the Game, Not the Player
I set out to create a new “Home” brand of technology consulting so that I could offer Indianapolis computer repair in homes without damaging the brand I was establishing with business customers. I came up with “Professional Technology Consulting at Home,” but the domain was taken so I started looking around and trying different keywords. I found that “codageek.com – The last geek you’ll ever need,” was available, but I kept looking. I eventually stumbled upon “geekhand.com” after looking up synonyms for ‘friendly’ (handy).
I liked “Geek Hand” enough to consider grabbing it, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the name and domain first. I found that it had been used prior by another person for personal use and had since been abandoned. I liked that there were already a lot of backlinks to it from other sites, but because much of the links were from sites about gaming, I wondered if it was the right fit for my in-home computer repair business product I was developing for Indianapolis business consulting firm, Watershawl, Inc., where I was CEO. It seemed like it might be better off as a part of my blog network at Cost Publishing Media Group as a board game micro-site.
I went ahead and picked up the domain, setup WordPress, the theme, the plugins, and the SEO. I created a logo for it which consisted of a 0 and 1 which has both game and binary code meanings. I used this logo as a background on Twitter and as it’s icon. By the way, I don’t hardly purchase domains unless the username is also available on Twitter. In this case, both were available and I took that as a sign before purchasing the domain. While all of this setup is going on I’m thinking about content and products to sell or promote. I did a quick search on Amazon and determine that board games, video games, and card games would be my primary products with the “news” of the site being centered around the geek culture of movies, television, and conventions like Comic-Con.
To promote the site automatically I did two things: I setup a Tumblr account to pull in WordPress posts automatically push tweets out to Twitter and a Facebook page to push out to Twitter anything I post there. So I only really have to post in WordPress, then copy the link to the post to Facebook to post on what is now the ‘Settler’s League’ page there in order to have coverage to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter all at once. Sometimes I’ll bounce those around on my Facebook wall and on other Twitter accounts I manage for different brands.
The next step was to add content and put the promotional procedure into place, which I did. I had a minor problem with links overflowing in the footer, but a quick CSS tweak fixed that. I have a WordPress theme that I use as a base for most of my Cost Pub sites. I also make custom WordPress themes and do web design and SEO for the Indianapolis area using Watershawl’s Growmotion marketing where we Growmote web sites–first we build them then we promote them; don’t just promote your business, grow your business with Growmotion.
Update: I have since converted Geek Hand into more of it’s original role of personal computer repair, but with a slant towards mobile phones – a play on the ‘hand’ in the title. Here’s the link to the new Geek Hand Facebook page in case you’re interested and a link to Settler’s League’s home page.