So what's with the name of your blog?

So I've been asked why I selected "Digital Marketing Rucksack" as the name of my blog. Here's the thought behind it:

First of all, as I wrote in the description at the top, this blog is meant to be a "wide assortment of thoughts and tidbits for your eMarketing journey." I'm not planning to blog specifically on one focused area -- I want to jump around and write a little bit about what's on my mind as it pertains to eMarketing. One day I might be thinking about Google, the next might be email marketing, and who knows what will come after that. So that's one of the reasons for the "rucksack" part of the name -- because when you're backpacking or on a journey, you carry a wide set of tools and items in that bag, just like this blog will be a wide assortment of marketing tools. (Honestly, one of the names on my rejected list was "Digital Marketing Junk Drawer." I love junk drawers because there's always a variety of handy but often unrelated items in there. But the name just sounded too...junky. And I probably keep the junk drawers in my house neater than most people.)

Another reason is quite simply because I like the word rucksack. It just has a nice sound to it. It's memorable. It stands out. And most importantly, it's likely to be pretty darn easy to Google. With two ubiquitous words like "digital" and "marketing" in the blog's title, I wanted a word that wouldn't get buried on page 3 of the Google results.

But the true inspiration was probably one of my colleagues, Jon. A couple years ago, he and I were in a conference room with another coworker, trying to brainstorm new names for the Marketplace section at the back of our magazine. The Marketplace section was a collection of classified ads that included several wildly different kinds of products or services. I don't even remember why we were trying to come up with a new name for it. At first we thought of simple names like briefcase, portfolio, or attaché. But just like with all brainstorming, eventually the suggestions got more and more strange. At one point Jon shouted out rucksack and we all liked the word, but we knew it wasn't a realistic option. Ever since that day, whenever I heard someone say rucksack (which wasn't too often), I'd think back to that brainstorming session. So I owe Jon some of the credit for planting the seed that became this blog's name.