Choosing The Best Blog Name

We’ve all had those email addresses we made in school as teenagers that we’re embarrassed by now when looking back.

Whether juvenile, silly or just plain rude, we don’t use them anymore as they don’t reflect who we are as professional grown-ups. Your blog name is representative of you online, acting as a digital extension of your personal identity. Pick a long-lasting, credible name that you will be proud to stand by for years to come and one you could possibly build a business from.

You don’t want to be swimming in a pool of blogs with similar names – thousands of these pools exist online. When choosing the right blog name, don’t blend in with the crowd, you want a name that’s going to be unique, easy to recall and sticks in the mind of whoever hears or sees it.

Here are some characteristics of great titles that may help in choosing your blog name:

• Short, simple and succinct
• Catchy and memorable
• Easy to spell (and type) without a need to be spelled out
• Simple to pronounce
• Eye-pleasing, it has to look and flow nicely
• Appropriate to your topic, but still unique
• Descriptive but not obscure
• No dashes, numbers or hyphens
• Readily available (i.e. not trademarked or copyrighted elsewhere)

For ideas on choosing a domain name for your blog, here’s some steps you can go through.

Brainstorm: Write down a list of words, phrases or character names you like, there’s no bad ideas in a brainstorm and it will help you slowly eliminate words so you can zone in on choosing the best blog name. ICanBuildABlog shares a nice infographic example following the thought process through choosing the perfect blog name.

Fundamental Questions: Answer important questions to choose a specific blog name relevant to the content you’re going to produce. Who are you and what do you do? What is your blog going to be about? Who is your audience? What is your tone going to be?

Try the Thesaurus: If you’re drawing a blank and lacking imagination, type some descriptive words into an online Thesaurus (for example, Thesaurus.com) to give you synonyms that you might not have considered.

Alliteration: Choosing a great blog name means something that rolls off the tongue and is nice to hear and say, choosing the same letters or sounds repeatedly – alliteration – usually works well, e.g. Baker Boys Blog; Musical Memories; Sun, Sand, Seashells.

Your Name: Are you choosing a personal blog name? What’s better than your own? It’s uniquely you. A firstname(dot com) will almost always be already taken, but it’s worth weighing up whether your full name might work perfectly. Lots of successful bloggers, influencers and YouTubers have built empires on their names alone – Zanita Whittington, Marcus Butler, Nicolette Mason.

Go off piste: use a different language or even invent a word! There’s countless blogs, domains, influencers and brands that have made-up names or titles that don’t make sense. Mix words (YouTube), skew or misspell (Tumblr), blend (Pinterest) or just make them up. Have fun with it, your chosen blog name should be something you’ll never get tired of saying.

Now For The Practical Stuff

• Make sure your chosen domain name is easily to spell, especially when you introduce the name in spoken conversation. You don’t want to confuse anyone. Will a person in a meeting, conference or mixer be able to recall the title the day after? Make it unforgettable and memorable.
• No one likes a copycat, but sometimes if a domain name you’re considering is already taken it might inspire you to create a riff on it or something similar. Do your research and make sure that your title is not too close to blogs or brands you will be competing directly against. In fact, in doing your research you may just stumble upon a stroke of genius, spotting a gap to find the perfect blog name you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Always consider Brandability – can you really market this to the public and build a far-reaching brand with a long and rambling or confusing blog title or domain name that doesn’t perfectly describe who you are and what you do? It’s worth considering the long-term prospect of your blog name.
• Once you’ve settled on the name, make sure you claim the username of your new blog across as many social media platforms as you can, even if you don’t plan on using them. It’s important to have consistency and you want to give yourself the option of using that specific brand name in as many places as possible.