How to Name a Blog: The Detailed and Easy To Use Guide
Picking the right name for your blog is very important. The name of your blog is your first point of contact with your readers.Your readers either type your domain name or the name of your blog when they want to access it. Most importantly, the name of your blog is what first attracts your potential readers to your blog.
It would be wise if your blog name conveys what the content of your blog is. However, you don’t want to limit the scope of your blog due to your blog name. Also, you have to consider if your blog name would rank well on search engines.
Also, you might accidentally choose a blog name that could be subject to copyright restrictions or does not blend well with social media content. This article would guide you on how to generate a good blog name:
How to Name a Blog: The Detailed and Easy To Use Guide Summary:
Blog Naming ConsiderationsWhat Is a Good Blog Name?
Blog Name Check List
Blog Naming Ideas:
1. Your Own Name
2. Competitors’ Names
3. Keywords
4. Thesaurus and/or Dictionary
5. Alliteration
6. Acronyms or Abbreviations
7. Common Saying
8. Portmanteau
9. Unrelated Words
10. Humor or Pun
11. Words in a Different Language
12. Made up Words
Online Blog Name Generators
Final Words
The Details:
Blog Naming Considerations
There are a few questions you need to consider when naming your blog:
- What is the purpose of your blog?
What is your blog about? Are you writing a food blog, travel blog, business blog, fashion blog, and so on?
If for example you’re blogging about food, will you highlight the best food in your area, home cooked meals, and so on? Your actual subject matter is a good guide in naming your blog.
- Who would read your blog?
A good rule of business is this: follow the market. It is the readers who brings in revenue to your blog. This is the reason why your blog name must resonate with the readers of your blog.
For example, if you want to market to bloggers, it would be a wise move to name your blog into something that bloggers can relate to.
For example, the real-life website “ProBlogger.com" is easily recognizable as a blog/website for bloggers.
- What is your business plan?
The name of your blog has a lot to do with your business plan for your blog. For example, if you want to build a brand around yourself, it would be wise to name your blog after your name.
If your plan is to build a specialist reputation after a product or anything, it would be wise to name your blog into something that relates to what your trying to specialize in.
For example, the real-life blog/website "MacWorld.com" is easily identifiable as a blog/website that specializes in Mac computers.
- What is your writing style?
Will your blog be humorous, serious, analytical, and so on? Whatever is your writing style, you blog name should at least give a clue to your readers about your writing style.
- What is your blog’s scope?
Naming your blog to using a narrow scope can hurt your blog if you want to expand your scope later on.
- What is your blog name’s length?
Having a too short or overtly long blog name can hurt the visual appeal of your blog name. Remember also that online naming formats have varying limitations which could seriously affect the appearance and appeal of your blog’s name.
Back To Summary List
What Is a Good Blog Name?
Just like choosing the right domain name for your website, selecting your blog requires careful thought: A good blog name should be:
- Memorable,
- Stands out,
- Offers branding opportunities,
- Related to the blog content,
- Distinct from competitor blogs.
Selecting the wrong blog name can be costly in the long run. If you later on decide to change your blog name, you would lose the branding opportunities and traction that you could have been building up until that point.
Also, you have to alter the visual appearance of your blog like putting on new logos. If you have already built a considerable blog volume, this might be a very tiring and irritating chore.
Blogging is a very competitive business, a good blog name can help you to stand out from the more than 600 million blogs already online. Getting your blog name right on the first try should always be your goal.
Back To Summary List
Blog Name Check List
These important checks would help you determine if you are in the right path in naming your blog:
- Use a domain extension that fits your blog:
There is a domain name extension naming convention being followed today: Domain extensions guide — What you need to know before you pick a domain name
By using a domain name extension that is appropriate for your blog, you build credibility among your readers.
However, if you want to be on the safe side, you can use the “.com” extension which is the most universally recognized and remembered domain name extension.
- Avoid copyrighted domain names:
If your domain name could be easily confused with a higher-level website, you may run the risk of legal action.
If there’s an available blog name and you want to use it, don’t hesitate to snatch it up quickly. These days, good domain names are being bought up quickly.
There are even domain name investors who buy domain names in bulk, hoping to sell them at a much higher price later. These investors track the market for emerging companies and trends and buy up related domain names in the hopes of making windfall profits later.
- Is the blog name readable and easy to spell in domain format?
There are blog names that sound weird or awkward to read and/or spell. For example, using hyphens could be a troublesome proposition in naming your blog.
For example, your potential readers might type “indemand.com” when the actual name of your blog is actually “in-demand.com".
Back To Summary List
Blog Naming Ideas
1. Your Own Name
Many bloggers today are tying to build a brand around their persona, that is why right at the onset they are already using their real names as their blog name. This is especially a good strategy if you want to be an influencer or a celebrity.
Having a blog under your name is already a good move against any other party who may want to use your name in the future.
If you are a company or any other organization, naming your blog after your organization or something similar would go a long way into preserving your organization’s online name copyright.
Also, by naming your organization after your organization’s name or something similar, your readers won’t make a mistake in identifying your blog when they search for it.
Back To Summary List
2. Competitors’ Names
Before you select a blog name, be sure to check out the blog names being used by your competitors and by your industry. Blogging is a business and a blog name is an essential marketing and advertising tool for bloggers.
By knowing which type of blog names are popular among your industry and which of your competitor’s blog name are popular among readers, you can use this information to name your blog so it has a high chance of being popular too.
You could also solicit advise from your intended readers to see which of your intended blog names resonate with them.
You could also ask experts in the industry for help in naming your blog. These experts may give you the edge against your competitors in naming your blog.
Back To Summary List
3. Keywords
If your main priority is to optimize for SEO, then you should also consider popular keywords in naming your blog.
For example, you can use Google Trends, to identify which keywords are popular in your particular blog subject.
You can type particular keywords and Google Trends would let you know how popular the keywords are and in which country they are popular in.
Google Trends would even let you know similar keywords which are trending and by how much.
But most importantly, since your blog lives online, it must be as much as possible at the top of search results for all search engines.
Although it is still a mystery if a domain name is used by search engines for ranking factor, it is a prudent move to consider as SEO rules might indeed be implemented that would consider SEO friendly domain names.
Back To Summary List
4. Thesaurus and/or Dictionary
Are you having difficulty finding a word or words that you could associate with your blog and be used in your blog name?
You can actually use a thesaurus and/or dictionary for such a problem. You can use a thesaurus to find a suitable other word for your intended word and then also use a dictionary to further check if you are using the correct word.
There are many free online thesaurus and dictionaries available online, you don’t need to buy a printed book for your needs.
There are actual websites that are named thesaurus.com and dictionary.com. These two websites are proof that a website name can lead to high search rankings in search engines.
Back To Summary List
5. Alliteration
Alliterations are phrases that use words starting with the same letter with the intent of being catchy and/or memorable.
Alliteration is not only used in blog names but in company names as well. For example, the company names “All Asia” and “Advanced Automation Access” use the letter “A” as the first letter in the words of their company name.
People who might have trouble remembering the name of these two companies need only to remember that the first letter of each word of the company name begins with an “A”.
These two companies might not be household names but when mentioned, are very catchy. For a big company using alliteration to name their blog, an example would be Starbucks with their blog titled: "Starbucks’ Stories".
As you can see, their blog name is composed of two words that both begin with the letter “S”. This is a simple but very effective blog name that has a high chance of staying in the minds of its readers.
Back To Summary List
6. Acronyms or Abbreviations
Let’s use one of the previous example. The full company name of “All Asia Capital” is “All Asia Capital and Trust, Inc.”
As you can see, this is quite a long company name to pronounce and especially to write. Imagine how frustrated a reader would be if they have to key in this long company name in search engines.
But the actual domain name of this company is “AACTC.com" which is a very easy to pronounce and key in term. It even begins with two “A”s which further makes remembering the acronym of the company even easier.
This is also a good strategy to use if the domain name you intend to use already belongs to someone else.
Another good example would be the blog of NASA which is simply named NASA. Readers don’t have to write the full name of the organization which ”National Aeronautics and Space Administration”.
Back To Summary List
7. Common Saying
There are many sayings that are popular and are very catchy that you can use. For example, there is a website with the domain name ”letitflow.org".
You don’t have to think hard where this website/blog got its inspiration, it’s from the term: “let it flow”.
If you took the time to check the website, you would see that a large part of its subject is all about water.
Besides being catchy and popular, common sayings as website/blog/company names can be used as rallying advertising tools by companies and individuals.
For example, our example, letitflow.org use “let it flow” as a rallying cry to pursue its mission of providing clean water to remote areas of the world.
Back To Summary List
8. Portmanteau
Portmanteau is a process where two words are combined to create a brand new word. This is an effective blog naming strategy if your blog is about the combination of two subjects.
Also, if the domain name you are interested in is already taken, you can use this strategy to create a similar domain name by extending the name of the original domain name you’re interested in.
For example, you might be an email software company and wanted to use the word “mail” as your domain name, but it is already taken. You can name your company/website/blog as “mailchimp” as what the real-world Mailchimp company has done.
However, you need to be careful when using this strategy. If your portmanteau name is confusing, it might fail to interest and even irritate your potential readers.
Back To Summary List
9. Unrelated Words
There are blog names that are so catchy and memorable even though they are just made up words.
One way to pique your potential reader’s interest is to use conflicting words as your blog name. Probably, the first words that would come out of the mouth of your potential readers would be: “What the…?” and “How come?”
For example, the blog name ”Fat Healthy” or ”Ugly Beauty” would surely generate interest among readers because these conflicting words seemingly make no sense or are controversial.
But these are tried and true naming techniques used in the marketing and advertising industry. This technique is even used in the journalism industry to spice up interest in seemingly mundane news.
But don’t depend only on your blog name to generate interest and/or controversy, your blog content should also prove to your readers that your blog name is worth it, otherwise, this could potentially turn off your readers from further reading your blog.
Back To Summary List
10. Humor or Pun
Nothing brightens up someone’s day than something funny. This is because a lot of people want to be happy, and something funny is one of the things that make people happy.
For example, the blog name “crappy vacations” would surely elicit interest and even a smile to someone reading the blog name.
There are a lot of people who have had crappy vacation experiences and there would be those who would sympathize even with your blog name alone.
I’m sure that there would be those who would be already smiling as they read your blog name even though they haven’t read your blog contents yet.
Some more blog name examples are: “people are crazy” for a social commentary blog, “dumb shopper” for a retail management blog, and so on. But remember, your funny blog name must fit the theme of your blog contents.
Back To Summary List
11. Words in a Different Language
English is the most popular language in the internet. Although search engines like Google have capabilities of translating the contents of a website, many people still prefer reading website content using the English language.
Although you run the risk of alienating your potential readers with a foreign sounding blog name, it might work in certain instances.
For example, French and Italian sounding blog names would give out an impression of fashionable chic or sophistication which especially works if you are blogging about luxury items.
For example, “Dérive” is a french word which means “a spontaneous and unplanned trip or journey.” This word would be an excellent name for a blog which specializes in European tourism or vacations.
It could even be a good company or magazine name for businesses and media which specialize in tourism or vacations.
Back To Summary List
12. Made up Words
Finally, you can make up your own blog name, even something that doesn’t exist yet. The beauty of this strategy is that you won’t have copyright problems later on.
Just take a look at some very successful companies who’s company name is totally made up:
- Häagen-Dazs
- Kodak
- Sony
- Xerox
This is why it’s true that your blog name is what firstly attracts your potential readers to your blog, but it’s the content of your blog which ultimately makes them stay to be your long term readers.
But you should remember that even though your blog names are just made up, they should still be catchy and memorable.
A good test to see if you have a good blog name even though it is just made up, is to recite your blog name to yourself and as well to other people. If you like how your blog name feels and sounds, it probably is.
Back To Summary List
Online Blog Name Generators
If in spite of all the helpful information and tips previously discussed you still have difficulty naming your blog, you can seek the aid of some online blog name generators.
For example, you could simply type these search keywords in Google or any search engines:
- “blog name generator”
- “website name generator”
- “business name generator”
Additionally, you can even seek the assistance of online blog ideas generators. All you have to do for example, is to type the keywords: “blog ideas generator” in any search engine.
Back To Summary List
Final Words
Although optimizing your blog for SEO is probably the most important action you need to do to make your blogging business profitable, a catchy and memorable blog name also helps a lot.
This is because besides the title and a snippet of your blog content which shows up in the search results, your blog name is prominently displayed as well.
A catchy blog name helps your blog to stand out from the rest of the other articles listed in the search results.
Also, your blog name is the one your readers key in whenever they want to repeat accessing your blog, so it should be memorable.
But remember, your blog name is your brand, it should be something that you can be proud to advertise and speak about to people.
Back To Summary List
You Might Be Interested To Read This Article:
What Should The Length Of My Blog Be?
It’s pretty obvious that the reason why you’re asking this question is because you want to know the number of words you need to have in your blog to rank highly in online search engines like Google which dominates the market in search engines...