Let’s face it, internet marketers spend a lot of time online and sometimes we need a few more identities than other people. We have web sites, we have blogs, we have Youtube and Instagram channels – we spread ourselves out across the web because we want to reach more people. We need more ‘likes’ and ‘links’ and those extra little social boosts make the difference to us paying our mortgages or not.
The simple fact is that for most people this is not that important, if no-one likes their Facebook post – big deal. If that last blog post about their experience on the Tube or in the supermarket vanishes without trace – well big deal, their lost. For people who make their living online though it represents an important failure in their business or employment. What’s more you may very well need one to unblock US Netflix !
If you have a YouTube channel, loved by millions then maybe you don’t need this subterfuge. However most of us don’t and it’s very useful to start the ball rolling with a little mild self promotion to get your latest work out heir into the internet ether. It’s not hurting anyone, if your other account shares your story on Facebook, if it likes a few comments on Youtube or just adds it to a few social bookmarking sites under different accounts.
However to do this, you need to keep these identities separate and that means not posting everything using the same, exact IP address. Of course, you can pop down to Starbucks and tour the local coffee shops to use their Wifi (and IP addresses) however this can get pretty time consuming and expensive. So which is why people use proxies, VPNs and online IP changers to alter their addresses and stop getting blocked and banned by overusing their normal ISP assigned address.
It’s simply a fact of life for those who make their living online, we need more IP addresses simply to do our jobs properly. This is also in addition to all the tools and analytic devices we need to use, again most of them limited if you use a single IP address. For example Google will only you perform so many searches per minute which many SEO tools go way over.