Thank you for the kind words 😉

Peter,
Love your story!

I chose the name “Fat Lester”, and used a picture of a gamecock (a rooster bred to fight other roosters – a bloodsport illegal in all 50 U.S. states) as my avatar.

Before anyone knew my real name or had seen an actual photo of me (I’ve been told I’m actually strikingly handsome), I had established myself as the single-most influential user at the social news site Mixx, at which power users in its heyday essentially were given a license to print money (in the form of PR 5,6,7 and even 8 links – followed). I had more than 2.5 times the following of the next closest user, and everything I posted hit the front page.

When I finally revealed my identity, I started to receive solicitations from women, but my oh-so-unflattering alter ego to this day has better name recognition than my real identity. I have a fan page for Fat Lester on Facebook to compliment my actual profile. While my real profile has many more friends/followers, my Fat Lester fan page gets just as many likes and shares per status update.

It took 5 years to achieve my status on Mixx before it was bought out (and shut down) by UberMedia. Mixx had more than 40 million registered users at its peak. Being forced to learn to market without such a massive built-in audience and a ticket to the top-two spots in organic search for whatever terms I chose to target has been quite a struggle, and I doubt I’ll ever achieve such an influential status within any social medial or online community in general ever again.

I wound up launching an entirely separate company completely unrelated to the one through which I made my living during Mixx’s heyday. So far so good on that front…

I wanna be gooey good at keeping my clients happy 😉

Thanks Tiff. 🙂 I appreciate you.
N

Thanks for the post!