Choosing a Name for Your Blog – Get Blogging Basics

This new series, Get Blogging Basics, is focused on how to get your business blogging. Hopefully you’re already clear on your business strategy and organization’s purpose and message. If not, we’ll be offering some tips on how to get clear on that. We’re calling it Get Blogging Basics because the goal is to share not only the theory, but also some tips on how you can actually implement the theory.

Choosing a Name for Your Blog

Before you even get started writing, you need to decide on a name for your blog.

1) Your name – If you’re a one person company, or a company where the founder is the main face of business, your name may be the best option. Even if you don’t use your name, I’d still encourage you to buy your name as a .com so nobody else can own it and pretend to be you. Example: My company website used to be at my name http://philgerbyshak.com and I ran all business out of there.

2) Your nickname – If you’ve got a recognizable nickname, and you want to be more personally branded, you may want to use it for your blog name. An example of this is Amber Osborne who uses her nickname of Miss Destructo as her name.

3) Your mantra/tagline – If you’ve got something you believe in for your company and your customers recognize you for it (or you want your customers to recognize you for it), that may be the way to go. Mark Waltz does this with his website of Because People Matter.

4) Your company name – If you have a name already for your company, choosing your company name is a no brainer. That’s what we use here at Turning Minds.

5) Your city and your company name – If you’re a predominantly local company, or the city is important to your business, you may want to include your city in your company’s name. A great example of this is Milwaukee Food.

6) Some combination of the above – Mix it up and pick some combination of the above.

Considerations for choosing your blog’s name

1) Is it available as a .com – If your domain isn’t available as a .com, then you may want to look at another name, as it won’t be as memorable if you don’t have a .com for type in results. It’s not super critical you get this as long as you write on topic, but I’ll talk about that later.

2) Is it available on Twitter – Twitter is becoming more and more important to your brand, so make sure you can snag the handle on Twitter in addition to your blog name. Sign up right away on Twitter at the same time you buy the domain. Try to get as much of the full name as you can for a handle, though abbreviating a city with a 3 character abbreviation is acceptable. Buckley’s Restaurant in Milwaukee has BuckleysMKE as a Twitter handle, with their domain of http://buckleysmilwaukee.com

3) Who else is already using your name – Do a Google search for the name you’re planning to use. If you’re going to be stuck on page 6 for your blog’s name, it’s going to take a LONG time to overcome that much stuff.

4) What feels good -  If you can’t stand behind it, and it doesn’t feel right, then you probably don’t want to use it. Go with your guts on this one!

Now go out and buy the domain! Use Network Solutions or Outstanda Hosting or any other reputable domain reseller to buy your domain name for your blog.

Next week we’ll talk about hosting and setting up your blog.