Don’t get a bad name!

If you are starting a new business or launching a new product or service, it’s really important to get the name right.  Sadly, it’s very easy to get it wrong and end up wasting a lot of time and money trying to unpick the mess!

So, here are 3 tips to help you get it right first time:

Choose a name that’s attractive and positive

The name should create an attractive, positive image in the mind of those who hear or read it.  This is because people think in pictures.  We hear a word and BOOM – We build a mental picture.  For example, it’s hard to think of the word elephant, without seeing the image of an elephant in our mind.

So, pick a name that creates the kind of image that your target market will be attracted to.

Choose a name that’s easy to spell

If you give your business a name that’s hard to spell and people go looking for it on a search engine, there’s a real possibility they will not find you.

Famously, a search engine launched last year with 33 million dollars of investment behind it, which was called cool dot com (but spelt cuil.com.)  One of the many reasons given for its failure, is that people were hearing all the buzz about cool.com, when they should have been going to cuil.com.

The bottom line here, is that a tricky to spell name creates unnecessary additional barriers between you and people looking for your services.

Think about the URL

It makes sense to pick a name, which has a version of it’s URL available – so you end up with a relevant website address.  There are also some huge SEO benefits from picking your name / URL wisely.

Here’s a quote from a post I wrote about the importance of getting the right URL for your business:

“By including the words marketing blog in the URL of this blog, almost every link that points here also includes those 2 words.  This means there are thousands of links, which point here and tell Google that this is a marketing blog.  As a result, anyone searching for marketing blog or marketing blogs etc on Google, will find this blog on page one; even though there are over 100 MILLION results listed.“