In most situations that would be okay, but for the pen names that deal with personal topics, are difficult work related stories, or anything else that might get me in trouble, I want to make sure that no one can find out who the man behind the curtain is.

Imagine that you have a successful blog, which you feed with traffic generated through online article directories, you have a wonderful author profile, and you start to become well read. The reader traffic is providing your internet business nice revenue. Unfortunately, this popularity does not automatically translate into protection from the consequences of sensitive information and tales you might write about. It would be bad to have a successful blog but get fired, divorced, disowned, and even have your pet cat leave you.

So, how do you make sure that you hide your true identity? Well, you certainly have to do all the basics. This means in your blog your login with your pen name, as opposed to your real name, or at least make sure your posting is done with your pen name. You have to also certainly make sure your footer has your pen name, and a link back to your pen name blog. Furthermore, if you expose your e-mail address anywhere, make sure that your e-mail address is consistent with your pen name and blog domain name.

Even though it seems like a good idea to create web-links between all your blogs in order to promote SEO, and showcase your wide range of erudition, you would for sure be better off not linking them together. Someone who has a lot of free time, or is curious about you, may follow them and put all the pieces together.

Okay, it looks like all the tracks are covered, so where’s theissue?

There’s still a large security hole called the whois record. The domain name is most likely registered to you, and in some cases the default account information is entered into the whois fields. You can check what the whois information of your domain is by going to Google and typing in “whois check”, going to the one of the websites that offer the whois look up, and entering your domain name.

If you don’t see any of your private information there, that’s good. It means you chose private registration when you registered your domain name. Private registration is the best way to prevent this information leak because it hides your contact information from people that regularly search the whois records. The extra expense, however, can add up if you buy boatloads of domains in pursuit of your niche marketing or search engine optimization strategy.

You might want to consider forgoing private registration, and instead planning out what information you are going to put into the whois records in order to minimize your exposure on the Internet. This is easy to do. Createa different name that is only used for domain name registrations, and put that in the name field. Then, for the email address, use a generic name like admin@domainname.com, where the domainname.com part is the specific domain you are registering. Tradeoffs like this are necessary to make when you start a business!

Then, back in your hosting administration area, forward all the admin@ email addresses to your main admin@ email address, and just set up that one account in your email client.

To change the whois records, do the following (it is common at all domain registration sites):

1. Go to the domain manager.

2. Choose the domain you want to change.

3. Select the Contact box on the toolbar above the list of domains.

4. The “update contact information” box will pop up.

5. Check the box that says “copy to all contact types” (there are likely four, the registrant, administrator, technical, and billing).

6. Change the name and email address to the ones you set up, and the contact address to your post office box (not your home!).

Now that you have made sure the domain name registration information does not point back to you, you can go out and write some more horrible content using your pen names without worry!

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