Using my name for personal branding?

[AndySolo]

AndrewSolomon and AndySolomon are both taken as domain names. I use the alias "andymisiu" for all of my social accounts.

I'm thinking of buying AndrewJSolomon as my domain name as James is my middle name. Should I be concerned with using my middle initial in my domain name?

I'm going to include "andymisiu" in the site title for recognition and branding.

What do you think? any advice?

[EGOL]

I think that it will be hard for some people to remember the middle initial.  As a result some will type the domain without the initial and your traffic will go to someone else.

I could remember AJSolomon easily if you like that.

andymisiu is kind of hard to remember and spell

...This isn't advice... just what I think.

[AndySolo]

Should I consider changing "andymisiu" as my social profile name? or is it ok?

[EGOL]

I don't know.

My problem is that I have a mental disorder that makes it very difficult to remember things.

[RyanKent]

As a fyi, DrewSolomon.net is available at this moment. If you have the slightest interest you might want to pick it up as many others can read this Q&A.

I also checked and facebook.com/drewsolomon is not taken.

How do you like the name Drew? xD

[AndySolo]

Yea, I read an article about personal branding that said to use your name when available. Issue is that my name is so common it's not available anywhere.

I'm still early in the branding stages but need to make a decision soon.

[donford]

Congratulations! andysolomon.info is available!

.INFO is a great extension for personal sites if you ask me.

I own my name .info

[AndySolo]

Will it rank as well as .com or .net? when people Google "who is Andrew Solomon"? will it appear?

as a side note, I know an SEO who purchased www.whois(his name).com

[Adam.Whittles]

Just as a side,

have you considered purchasing either andrewsolomon.com or andysolomon.com?

Depending on how valuable the domain is to you it might be worth contacting the owners of the domains to see if they might want to sell. More often than not, people are interested in selling their domain and you may be able to get them for a bargain. A simple check on whois will give you the contact details or if they have a site you may be able to find contact details on there.

If you don't ask, you don't get.

[EGOL]

I would go after it.

None of the domains that I am using were domains that I was the original registrant.

[donford]

.INFO is not a great  SEO extension, according to Rand.

REF...Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this one. However, if you're at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that's out there - don't make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks.

But you are not competing with very competitive keywords, while of course you should look at the SEO value but if you're branding yourself I would think YOURNAME.INFO is a very good use of the that extension. I would imagine it wouldn't be too terrible hard to rank well for your own name with a .info unless you happen to be in a group of people who share their name with somebody famous.