In 2008 when I launched my personal blog to share my experiences, I decided to call it Balkhis instead of using my full name (Syed Balkhi).

As time passed on, I regretted that decision because it created a lot of confusion.

People thought that my last name was Balkhis instead of Balkhi. I basically combined my last name with the first letter of my first name.

I was @syedbalkhi across all social media platforms, so the brand wasn’t consistent.

People didn’t know about my personal blog as much because they didn’t relate Balkhis with me.

Well as I focus more on my personal brand in 2015, I made the crucial move of switching domain names.

As you noticed with this change, I got a new site design.

I didn’t want to spend too much time creating a custom theme, so I used my friend Michael Hyatt’s theme which you too can buy if you like: GetNoticed.

I did customize it to give it a bit of personal touch.

The main reason why I chose this theme is because of all the amazing functionality it comes with. I will save the details for another post.

I also made everything SSL which is a move that we’ll be making across all of our websites this year.

This will make a good case study because I can see how much this impacts my SEO traffic both the domain switch and SSL overall. My previous domain was a PR5 and received decent organic traffic.

My goal for 2015 is to start organizing and keeping record of everything that I do online in a central place.

I will be sharing books that I read, events I will be attending/speaking at, share my presentation slides, create videos, and basically share my entire business life with everyone.

The goal is to answer all the business / marketing / blogging related questions that I get through WPBeginner which I don’t feel comfortable writing about at WPBeginner (in fear of losing site’s focus).

I will also be creating a VLOG (subscribe to my YouTube channel). I suck at making videos, so this will be a good hobby for me, and I am sure I will get better with experience.

If you want me to write about something specific, then simply send me a tweet @syedbalkhi