I’ve been in this world for over 30 years, and people still relate me to the baseball player Randy Johnson.
“Wait, that’s your real name?!?!?”
“Yes.”
“So, I bet your arm is sore from pitching all those years.”
“Ya, I’m actually not the baseball player.”
It’s not a big deal, just annoying when I’m in a conversation with a hardcore sports fanatic. It’s usually an ice-breaker.
“What’s your name, even though I’m bad with names?”
“Well, are you a sports fan?”
“YES! I love baseball and football.”
“Remember Randy Johnson?”
“The pitcher? Hell ya I do! The Big Unit!”
“Well, that’s my name too.”
“NO WAY!!!”
A Few Short, Kind of Funny, Stories
1. Baseball Cards. Most of my friends know that I don’t care much about sports. But most of them don’t know that I used to be crazy about sports. I used to be a big sports card collector, saving up money just so I could ride my bike to the local card shop and buy a new pack of cards. You know, hoping I’d open up a pack in front of the store owner and see the rarest card ever made. In fact, to this day, I bet I have one of the largest Randy Johnson baseball card collections around. I literally have thousands of his cards, many are in hard-plastic cases and graded, and some are autographed. I really have no use for them and they just sit in a box, so I’ll probably wait a couple more years when he gets in the hall of fame and then try and sell them. Should sell for a decent price then.
2. Internet Marketing. One of my skills/services is search engine optimization (SEO). Basically, that fancy terminology means I help my clients rank higher in Google. It’s definitely a time-consuming process. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch and you’re sitting at the top of the first page. It’s a constant effort. Anyways, the more unique your keyword is, the easier it is to rank higher since there is less competition. Take my roommate for example. I setup a site for him and we used his FirstNameLastName.com for the domain name. He has a very unique last name, so it almost doesn’t matter what his first name is, but it’s also not as common. So within a week, he was already ranking number one in Google with pretty much no additional work. So with my name, I’m going to have a tougher time for a couple reasons. One, my last name is very common, and my first name is sort of common. But the biggest reason is, there is a famous person that shares my name. So it’s going to take a ton of work to overcome all of the content on the internet about him. But that’s my goal with this site!
3. Photography. I was doing some research not too long ago regarding the keyword “Randy Johnson” and seeing what sites were showing up after doing a simple search. One stood out for some reason: RJ51Photos.com. I browsed the site for a bit and checked out the Twitter account associated with it. It wasn’t too long after that, I realized after he retired from baseball, he has been focused on photography. Kind of funny since I do some photo and video work. Checking out his about page, I seen he was always into photography and now he had more time for it. I followed him on Twitter and sent him a quick tweet. The next day, I had a new follower… and it was him. I was kind of shocked because he has a ton of followers but only follows like 20-30 people, and I was one of them. Ultimately, he didn’t respond to either of my tweets and eventually unfollowed me, but either way, it was like my 15 minutes of fame. Haha.