How To Find The Perfect Business Name

There are a million ways to come up with a name for your business. Some of the most creative businesses these days have completely random, often funny and always memorable names.

Some of my current favorite clever name choices include:

A Pinch of Yum – a food blog.

Baby Rabies – adorbs.

Archer & Hound – a marketing company.

Little Peckers – a hatchery.

Maid So Fresh –  a cleaning company.

Some of those are popular companies and some aren’t, but you’ll remember their names, won’t you?

I have owned some businesses in the past that had stupid names. Not joking. I literally found myself embarrassed to say the name of the company when people asked. I have owned other businesses where I found myself super proud of the name and the branding. My goal with this post is to tell you what you can do to avoid those “oh crap, my business name sucks” moments.

Let’s get started….

Get out a pen and paper and write the answers to these down as you go.

Ask Yourself These Questions:

What are you doing with the business?

Are you a blogger, coach, ecommerce store?

How will people know what you offer?

Who is your target market?

What are they looking for or expect to see?

Things You Love:

Next I want you to consider the things you love about your business or life in general. Pinch of Yum is a super cute name for a food blog, Baby Rabies is brandable and memorable. What twist can you put on your passions, products or services that would make them easy to remember?

Words You Love or Cherish:

I love the word Heartland and try to wrap it into projects all of the time. I started (and then closed when we had a baby who hated to travel) a travel blog called Heartland Goes West back in 2015. I wanted to catalog our travels around California and the West. I loved that name and still own it. I also created Dear Gracelynn, a website built with my daughter in mind.

So now, what comes to mind? What is authentically YOU and your product or service?

If you’re still stuck, consider going to BrandBucket.com and browsing for name ideas.

What NOT to do….

Don’t name your business something you’ll outgrow. For example, a friend built a pregnancy empire and while she could have kept it going, when she outgrew that stage in her life, her passion for that project dried up.

Don’t go for a name that takes forever to explain.

Don’t use misspelled words.

Do not.

I repeat.

Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES do you EVER….

Post your “name choices” in a fb group.

Why? Well, here’s what will happen. You’ll post your name in a group. Someone savvy enough to see that it’s a quick buck will quickly buy all of those name options. I have seen people do this and then want hundreds or even thousands of dollars for that domain.

Checking to See If You Can Use That Name…

Give yourself some wiggle room on the name. If you think it’s great, others might too which means it may not be available.

Check trademarks. This is serious. A friend of mine was making a mint with a blog and was shut down in the middle of her busiest time of year because she didn’t check trademarks and another well-known blogger had already grabbed the marks and pursued enforcing them.

Check namechk.com to see if the domain you want and all of the social is available. If the domain is available, you’ll get the green light. If not, it’s dark purple.

Likewise with social media accounts:

Check ExpiredDomains.net to see if there are any valuable domains you can pick up in your niche. I personally love this tool for collecting domains. I post a few of them here.

You can search by keywords, remove unavailable domains (recently purchased or listed for sale other places), only show those with .com, hide domains with characters like hyphens and numbers, sort by if they have an alexa rank (Alexa button), backlinks (the BL button), the number of monthly searches for that keyword (the SG Button) and the value of the ad clicks in google adsense (the CPC button).

 

Once you’ve complete all of these steps, you’ll probably have a list of business names and domains that you’d like to consider. You can head over to Siteground and purchase your domain. I recommend snagging the .net too while you’re at it.

 

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