Great steep for bloggers: naming Considerations

Great steep for bloggers: naming Considerations

There are many considerations that should go into your choice of name. It is good practice to begin examining other brands in the commercial world to consider why they work (or don’t). Here are some issues you should look at when devising a brand name:

1. Is the Name Short?

Brand names work best when they are not too long. You can use a few words, but often they wind up being abbreviated by users. An example of this evolution is the fast food brand Kentucky Fried Chicken, which everyone abbreviated to KFC, which subsequently became the official name.

2. Is the Name Pronounceable?

If your readers aren’t sure how to say your brand name, then it’s going to hold them back from recommending you verbally to their friends. It’s also going to be harder for them to say the name in their head, which in turn makes it less memorable.

3. Is it Memorable?

Whether your blog is memorable, or not, is related to both the previous points, but even with a short, pronounceable name you can still run into problems. A great example is the bookmarking service Delicious. Initially the domain name it used was Del.icio.us so that while the name was pronounceable and short and the word itself was memorable, it was hard to remember where to put the dots when writing it. Unsurprisingly, the service soon acquired the delicious.com domain name.

4. Is the Name Unique?

Uniqueness is so important that there is a whole set of laws about it called trademark law. For readers it’s important in making your name distinct and memorable, and avoiding confusion with competing brand names.

To avoid businesses trading off each other’s brand reputation, trademark laws state that your name must be unique enough that it won’t confuse readers. So you couldn’t start a tech blog called “TechyCrunch”!

Not only would this land you in a pile of legal troubles from TechCrunch’s founder, who is in fact a lawyer, it would also have your readers confused. Worse still, your readers could wind up forgetting your name and just remembering the original and presumably much more famous TechCrunch.

5. What Does the Name Say About You?

A well-chosen name can communicate what a site is going to be about.

A great example of this is Gawker (http://gawker.com); it’s not only short, memorable, and catchy, but it also instantly communicates that the site is going to be about observation and gossip.

Conversely if you choose badly, a name can work against you. So give careful consideration to what the name communicates. You might want to ask others what they get from the name to make sure you have a range of views and don’t miss something obvious purely because you personally don’t hear the connotations.

6. Generic, Personalized or Descriptive?

Brand names come in many shapes and varieties. On the one hand you have completely generic words, often even completely made-up ones, that could be about anything. Take for example Google. Today you might look at the word and think “search,” but in fact it has no inherent meaning. If you could jump back into the past before Google rose to prominence, the name could have been used on pretty much any business. Some examples of blogs with such generic names are Gizmodo, Kotaku, and BoingBoing.

Some brands are based on the founders’ names, for example John Chow and JohnChow.com, Om Malik and GigaOm, Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post, or Steve Pavlina and StevePavlina.com. These can be almost as generic as made-up words.

If like John Chow and Steve Pavlina you are using only your name, you should keep in mind that readers are likely to expect John and Steve to at least be the main writer for their respective blogs, if not the only writer. If you are assembling a team of writers and approaching blogging as a publication business, you may wish to steer away from this route.

Descriptive brand names are perhaps the most common variety. These are brands where the name is simply a combination of real words, for example LifeHacker, CuteOverload, PopSugar, ZenHabits, or the Business Insider. The benefits of names like these are that they tend to communicate a lot about what the site is going to be about, and in some cases, have keywords that can help with search ranking.

The drawback is names with common words can be harder to protect and keep unique.

For example although LifeHacker (http://lifehacker.com) is the original blog on the subject, there is a reasonably large blog confusingly called LifeHack.org (http://lifehack.org ).

Finally, there are plenty of combinations and variants. The best variants are made-up words that sound like they mean something: Engadget, Mashable, or Consumerist. You could also try misspellings, for example Joystiq, but keep in mind that you may inadvertently get readers typing the correct spelling and ending up somewhere else!

7. Can it be Sub-branded?

It’s always good to plan ahead in business and consider what future products, services, and blogs you might want to launch as related or sub-brands. Earlier we saw how TechCrunch has used the “Crunch” part of their brand to extend the family while keeping a clear naming link. Another example of sub-branding is with the AppStorm blogs; the original Mac apps blog being Mac.AppStorm, followed by iPhone.

AppStorm and Web.AppStorm. Using subdomains, the brand name extends out so that new sites are easy to add to the family.