Changing Author Name after 8 years. Bad idea?

Hey everyone - just wanted to run something past you in case your thoughts and opinions helped me with my decision.

After 7-8 years of using audiojungle as ‘alkis’, I’m thinking of changing my author name and rebranding my portfolio. Main reason is to have a more unique and google-friendly author name, and build more strong social media presence (mainly youtube uploads that redirect here, and a website with SEO).

Is this a horrible idea? Would it affect my traffic negatively and maybe become a huge risk? I’ve had 100-250 sales a month for years now and it’s not something I want to sabotage - but I’m looking at ways to build a bigger, stronger and more identifiable portfolio.

Thanks

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maybe you are answering yourself… maybe it’s worth to do some changes if you want to build a “more identifiable portfolio”…
anyway, good luck!

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Hello @musotone
My opinion is that you already have an identifiable name which is also quite easy to remember and catchy (and works well with your most successful items here). Why not try to take this to another level? Maybe design a new visual brand for your author name and see how you feel about these kind of changes.
Long story short: keep the name, change the visual branding :slight_smile: my two cents.
Good luck!

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Or if you do change the name, keep the visual branding!

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I always thought you had cool branding, but I know that “alkis” means “alcoholic” in Swedish, haha. :grin:

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Your nick is ok for me! And it’s very identifiable. I would change it ONLY if you have some rare fancy selling model based on the nick = nick can describe genre etc. I would not change it.

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Didn’t you start a thread like this a few years ago? :stuck_out_tongue:

For what it’s worth, I quite like your branding and username. Maybe there is a better name out there for you, but I don’t see a problem with Alkis - it’s short, sweet and memorable enough, and it’s unique. That’s my opinion though.

If you do decide to change your username, you don’t have to worry about drops in sales or views. As far as I’m aware and from my own experience, buyers don’t often search for a specific author (and if they do like a particular author chances are they’ve already followed them), but instead rely on the search results to find their music; and changing your username won’t have any effect on your track’s positions.

Bottom line is, if you do decide to take the plunge, it won’t be disastrous, but at the same time I don’t think your current username or branding is any sort of bottleneck for your sales. I think it works quite well :slight_smile:

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It does indeed! Always getting funny reactions from Sweden whenever I introduce myself.

I did hehe, but since then I thought I’d get some new perspective from people, especially since I’ve been seeing more and more authors changing their names since then.

Something I didn’t mention is it sometimes bugs me to use my real name, and holds me back from using outside traffic generation (YouTube, social media, etc), and that’s another reason I’m always thinking of this change.

Thanks for the advice and thoughts everyone, I really appreciate it!

My opinion, and these are just my 2 cents :stuck_out_tongue:

  • Your username is easy to read and pronounce.
  • Your username has a nice ring to it.
  • Your username is old on the marketplaces.
  • You have a “branding” made for your followers.

Due to these, I wouldn’t touch it! :stuck_out_tongue:

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And what about to open a new account here and explore with this?

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Thanks for pointing it out. That was my next exact thought, glad to see I’m not the only one! :slight_smile:

It’s very important to hear all the above opinions and thoughts. Cheers everybody :smiley:

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fwiw i like the username/branding and as established as your account is, i wouldn’t touch a thing!

On a side note you do have a bunch of broken images in your videohives featuring your music section, easy fix!

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I can share my opinion, as an author who already made this (mistake :slight_smile: )

In 2013, when I signed up on Envato, I had to choose a username. I had no idea what to choose, I never thought the usename would help me one way or another. I was, at that time, in a difficult moment of my life and I wanted to choose a username to express positivity and things that can be done. My choice was “greenline”, meaning a line that can be crossed, a green that means “go ahead, it’s your turn, it’s a line you can cross, it’s a new start”.

I love green, I love nature and trees, my eyes are green, my favorite color is green … and this username was so easy to pronounce.

Soon, I was able to publish a plugin, many people started to know me by this username. The sales were good for a single plugin at that time, $500-$1000 per month. I worked also as a freelancer, so this was quite a good income addition per month.

But… in 2016, I started to think to a better branding. My mistake. Looking for a better branding, I was soon to find out on WIPO global database branding website that “greenline” was a trademark owned by different companies around the world.

So I decided to change the name, the website, everything. I wanted to avoid legal problems related to branding. So I decided to have another Envato username, I re-created from scratch a personal website…

I must admit that I had a hard time finding a username that doesn’t have a trademark on it and has the .com domain available.

Very soon, the results appeared. People (angry people) started to ask me in private messages why I changed my username. Very soon too, the sales to that plugin started to go low.

At this moment I have for that plugin a few loyal customers (I thank them a lot) but this is it. I saw a decrease of visits in analytics, immediately after changing my username. The sales are still low now.

So my vote is for: no, don’t change your 8 years username! You will loose your loyal customers!

I know a lot of other authors who changed their usernames, maybe they can share their opinion too!

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I recently did this… but I keep my old profile and … so I build a new one. :slight_smile:

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Hi. Alkis is a living legend for many years for a lots a lots of people. Should there be any reason weightful enough to close down such strong brand?

When I google Alkis, it shows you on the sixth position. (First are placed with paid adverts of samenamed clothes webshop, google.ru sector, logged in). To find the reports of Scandinavian alkis barflies it needs to dig much much farther :laughing:

By the way yes, last summer the links to VH thumbnailes were changed from https://thumb-vh.s3.envato.com/files/.../image_adress to https://s3.envato.com/files/.../image_adress . To turn them back visible it’s needed to change all the links by same way.:scream:

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I agree. I wouldn’t change it.

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