How important is a name?

Very.

A name can express and WILL represent everything you do and stand for. Multi-national companies spend millions on developing the right name for products. It’s that important guys. If the big guys are paying attention to it, you need to as well. Which is why your blog name is not something you want to rush through. Starting a blog from scratch is already a sizeable undertaking. The last thing you want is to create a bunch of great content and have the beginning stages of a readership to find out your blog name is slowing down people’s adoption to you.

Because that can actually happen. A bad name slows down your progress, it’s not a do all and end all but you don’t need to be creating anymore challenges for yourself. So if you haven’t started your blog yet or if you’re still at the early stages and can painlessly transfer what you already have under a different name.

This post is for you!

I’m going to share with you the easiest way to get a good name for your blog with these tips. Save this to Pinterest so you can easily come back to it when you’re ready to start your blog.

Is your blog personal or not?

If your blog is personal and you are an essential part of the blog then your name should always be part of the url. It can be your full name if your name is a simple first and last format, or it can be a derivative of your name, such as initials. Additionally you can use a nickname you use online to represent yourself or a combination of your name and words.

I opted for the last option with my own name. I already explained on my about page why it’s Million Dollar Winnie, but just to give you a quick summary. Every kind of derivative of my name was already taken and thus I was forced into a corner to get creative. So the next step was to incorporate words that accurately represented the theme of my blog with my name. Which was to share my journey to making, feeling and looking like a million bucks in hopes it helps others to do the same.

And that’s the origin story of Million Dollar Winnie.

But if your blog isn’t personal then forget about trying to add your name in. Start brainstorming words that can effectively communicate what your blog is about.

Don’t make it too long

Ok, so I sound a bit hypocritical on this point. Since Million Dollar Winnie has a whopping 7 syllables, but bare with me. The general rule for having a name that’s easy to remember is to keep it short and snappy. You want that casual internet browser to remember the name and easily come back if they didn’t subscribe, sign-up or press the RSS feed during the first visit.

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. You visit a site for the first time and it was only moderately interesting so you didn’t do anything to bookmark it or save it. Fast forward a few months and for some reason you REALLY want to find the site back, but you cannot be bothered to go through several months worth of history to find it. Bye bye potential reader.

You don’t want that. You want to minimise the above scenario as much as possible and an easy preventative measure is to have an easily memorable name. A.K. A a short name.

Does it roll off the tongue?

This point is the only reason why my blog name gets away with having 7 syllables. But regardless on whether your name is short or long, it should roll off the tongue comfortably. A comfortable name like milliondollarwinnie.com is a lot better than something like freedomwinnie.com. The former is catchy and incorporates an already infamous phrase in the English language, while the later makes no lasting impression.

Still using my own blog name to explain further, my name ends in an “ee” sound which is more comfortable than other sounds in English. And I shorten Million Dollar Winnie into Winnie MD a lot, which also rolls off the tongue comfortably because of the “ee” sound at the end of my name as well as the “ee” sound for the letter D.

Little things like this makes a name catchy. So try to keep this in mind when you’re brainstorming name ideas.

Do you need .com?

The general rule would be to have a .com url but that’s not always the case and you may be able to get away with a less popular url extension. A great example I can think of is lookbook.nu. It’s a social media website for people to share their outfit photos. I remember when this was a really small site and lookbook.com was taken by another site.

The name lookbook was the PERFECT name for their site and they took the gamble to keep it by not using .com and use .nu instead. It paid off. It’s the first site that comes up if you type in “look book” into Google. They’ve also bought the other url extensions, so no matter what you type in, it’ll redirect you back to lookbook.nu. Genius.

If you have the perfect name for your blog but the common extensions are taken. Take a gamble and use a less popular extension.

Is it available?

By now you should have a whole list of preliminary ideas. Now it’s the time to run through all these ideas into a URL checker to see if any are available.

https://instantdomainsearch.com/ is a great website to check domain name availability. It’ll show you which extensions are available and even give suggestions based off your initial search.

If for whatever reason all of your initial ideas are unavailable. Then it’s time to use your initial ideas and expand on them with domain name suggestion sites. Here are a few I recommend you using:

https://www.namemesh.com/ 

http://www.domainpuzzler.com/

http://www.namestall.com/domain-name-generator

Time to register!

Congratulations Million Dollar Hustlers! If you followed all of the above and didn’t rush through, you now have an awesome blog name that will help make an impression to every reader.

So before someone snaps it up, register it!

I use namecheap as my domain name register and I recommend anyone to use their service since the customer service is excellent. The whole sign up process is painless and easy. The best part is the price, namecheap has great offers. I currently pay $9.99 usd a year which is a bargain for a .com site. But even better is that they have offers for less popular extensions for as low as $0.88/ per year! It’s not even a dollar guys! *screams in hysteria* You have no excuse not to buy the domain name. Even if you’re not planning to start working on the blog right away, get the name now before someone else gets it.

Or you can sign-up to my newsletter where I share the latest discounts for domain name registrar and hosting plans. I also share other stuff related to building the perfect life you want. Scroll up to find my sign-up form on the right.

Other resources you should check out:

• Learn how to get more done in a day and ultimately create your blog faster.
• Make your blog your full time income by learning from one of the smartest bloggers in Making sense of cents Affiliate marketing course.
• Achieve your goals more easily by following this trick
• Learn this and you’ll succeed faster in blogging
• If you’re serious about blogging as a career then read my post on email marketing