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Back in 2004, I was on the phone with my publisher and he told me I should start a blog. "It\u2019s what authors are doing," he said.\n\nSo, I tried to figure it out.\n\nI started learning about blogs and paid particular attention to the sub-category of mom-bloggers because my first book was for moms and it felt like the right world to run around in.\n\nRather than using the mom\u2019s name in association with the website, these mom-blogs would often be named things like, "Patience and Pacifiers,\u201d or \u201cSomewhere Under the Laundry Heap\u201d\u2014creative names that said something about what the website would contain and communicate.\n\nThey were focused. I liked the idea, so I thought for a long time about what to name my blog.\n\nFor a brief time I used the name of my book, The Contemplative Mom, but before long I realized the adjective \u201ccontemplative\u201d felt too limiting or confusing, because while I was contemplative, I was also downright goofy sometimes. I dropped that name and generated a long list of alternative ideas, debated with myself which one fit best, and finally gave up and just went with my name.\n\nI don\u2019t think I even had a tagline or subtitle. In a world of clever, creative, specific, branded blog names\u2014even though we didn\u2019t think of as branding at the time\u2014I was just\u2026me. Ann Kroeker.\nName Association\nWhat was the name Ann Kroeker associated with back then? What was the focus of her website? What would a visitor expect? What would AnnKroeker.com contain and communicate?\n\nI don\u2019t think anyone could tell you. I don\u2019t think I could tell you. My blog needed focus. And for my blog to have focus, I needed focus.\n\nI had none.\n\nI decided to find out what I would write, by writing. That was my strategy. And I learned, in time, it was not the savviest strategy, nor the most efficient.\n\nFor years, I wrote about whatever came into my mind, and being a curious lifelong learner, just about anything could pop into my mind, including fascinating facts about katydids and the Byzantine Empire. If we looked back in my archives, I would not be surprised to see a reference to Constantinople. I was all over the map. I was a Russian roulette of content with no niche, no clear brand, no focus.\n\nI\u2019d have been better off with a narrow tagline, like Ann Kroeker: Somewhere Under the Laundry Heap. But as I said, I wasn\u2019t savvy. I just wrote about whatever.\nThe Oatmeal Connection\nOne day, I wrote about steel cut oats.\n\nI wanted to make them and eat them, but I didn\u2019t want to cook them for 20-30 minutes on the stove, which is what\u2019s required, so I dug around the internet and found, deep in a discussion thread somewhere, a method for cooking them overnight in a crock pot using a water bath. And it worked. The oats were delicious\u2014ready and waiting for me in the morning.\n\nI was so excited to share this with readers, I snapped photos to show the bowl of oats sitting in the crock, surrounded by water. I included a blurry image of the steel cut oats container\u2014in other words, this was not the staged, high-end, natural-light presentation you\u2019d find in a foodie blogger\u2019s post. It was just unfocused Ann, sharing another random tidbit.\n\nWell, I must have hit the right moment in the wave of interest in steel cut oats. Because before long, this post became the most visited post on my website. I\u2019d peek at the stats and see that hundreds clicked through from referral sites. Then thousands. Then ten thousand. A hundred thousand. I switched my website to another host at some point and lost my stats, but based on current information, I would not be surprised if that post has hit a million views.\n\nAnn Kroeker was finally associated with something: Oatmeal.\n\nThis is not what my publisher had in mind when he told me to start a blog.\n\nI needed focus. Something intentional.\n\nSo do you.\nName It and Claim It\nNow, I did accidentally do one thing right, and that is snag my name as my domain name: annkroeker.com. Over the years,