Who is the real Corey Smith?

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You can use a traditional RSS Feedreader with this fancy-dancy link. I think this approach is harder but if you want to do it the hard way, who am I to say otherwise?

Who is the real Corey Smith?

posted this on Tuesday, June 11, 2013 at about 1pm.
Corey Smith

When I was a junior in high school, I was called to the office quite unceremoniously. It was a little strange for me because, until that point, I had not ever been called to the office for anything bad. (Until that point.)

When I got to the office I told them that I was Corey Smith. They looked at me and said, “You’re not Corey Smith.”

I asked them if they had a mirror for me to check.

Come to find out there was another Corey Smith in my high school that was about ready to be suspended and so they were going to give me a “what-for” when I got to the office. I think they were disappointed they couldn’t.

Since I was born in 1974, there have been another 151,555 baby boys and 7,323 baby girls that have been born with the name of Corey in the United States. You add the surname of Smith to that mix and I have a reasonably common name.

Being identifiable as the only Corey Smith that you should care about has been a challenge for me. You couple that with the popularity of a couple of key people that have my name including the person that owns my domain name of coreysmith.com you can imagine it’s a bit difficult to get found at the top of the search engines if you are looking for Corey Smith the businessman from Meridian, Idaho instead of Corey Smith the musician, Corey Smith the accountant, Corey Smith the football player (who died in a boating accident) or Corey Smith the other football player (who is still alive).

Since I found my way to the web about six years ago, I’ve worked hard to develop my online presence to be meaningful. I wanted to make sure that if you do a Google search for “Corey Smith” that I have at least one link on the first page of results that point people to me. As domain names are a part of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) mix, it’s a challenge since I don’t own my own dot com. (Too bad I didn’t pick it up in 1997 when I was thinking about it.)

One of the interesting challenges that I face is the quantity of fan email I get because I’m so good at performing music. I get at least one request per week from people asking me to come give them a private performance.

I’m not sure there is anything in my bio or blog that indicates I am any good at singing. I’m certainly not any good at playing the guitar. Yet, I get confused with “him” so often. Maybe my new website with more pictures of “me” will “help.” (How about that for too many “quotes?”)

As of the writing of this post, I did a search on Google for “Corey Smith” and found that you could find me in 4 of the 10 listings. The other guy (I won’t name his name because I won’t want him to get credit) is listed 6 times. Plus he has images and is in the sidebar on Google's listing page. I feel sorry for every other Corey Smith out there.

So, I’m the real Corey Smith. I’m the one you’ll want to talk to. Unless I’m not. Then you’ll want to look for the other one (or the others).

Corey Smith and his wife are the proud parents of five wonderful children and live in Meridian, Idaho. He is the president of Tribute Media, a Meridian based Web Design & Marketing Agency.

He is the author of two books, "Do It Right: A CEO's Guide to Web Strategy" and "Tweet It Right: A CEO's Guide to Twitter." You can learn more about his books here.

Interested in having Corey speak for your organization? Need help building or marketing your organization? Want to tell Corey how cool you think he is?