One of the hardest steps to starting a new business is choosing a brand name. Many of us would be stuck here for a while because we think a brand name has to be perfect. In many ways, yes, we should take heed of certain things when choosing a brand name but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Take, for instance, Avocadu.com it’s a fitness blog and it’s basically avocado spelled with a ‘u’ instead of an ‘o’. It’s not even a real word! Yet, it’s doing tremendously well.
A brand name sure is important but it’s also important not to overthink it.
Here I list out all the things you should be wary of when choosing a brand name for the company. If you understand everything on the list, it’s hard to go wrong with choosing the right name for your brand.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
1. Get some inspiration
Think about what industry and niche you’re in and check out your competition.
One trick I like to use is to go over to my competitor’s Instagram and see who they follow. They usually follow a lot of similar accounts and I’d take a look at their usernames to see if there’s a trend going on.
You may notice for instance that if you’re starting a cooking brand, a lot of your competitors have the name of a popular food as part of their brand name. You may incorporate that aspect of naming into your own brand name.
2. Make sure it’s easy to spell and remember
A hard-to-spell or hard-to-remember brand name would not be good for your brand as your audience wouldn’t be able to rediscover you if they try to type in your name into the search bar.
Make sure your name is memorable. You can use imagery. For instance, the brand name “purplecupcake” is more memorable than “delishcupcake” because it invokes an image in your mind when you read it. You’d picture a purple cupcake instead of an ordinary cupcake that may be delicious.
3. Make sure it’s less than 17 characters long
You may want to register a website for your brand one day and it’s suggested that your domain name is less than 17 characters long. If your domain name is longer than 17 characters, it may be too long.
This is why when you’re considering what to name your brand, it’s best to have it under 17 characters and make sure it doesn’t contain more than 3 words.
4. Try not to use numbers in your brand name
The reason you should try to avoid numbers in your brand name is that “onecupcake” sounds just like “1cupcake”. Many people would mistype and end up on your competitor’s site.
However, if your brand name has numbers that are hard to spell such as “45” it’d be pretty easy for people to remember that your brand name is “45cupcake” not “fortyfivecupcake”. In which case, it may be fine to include numbers in your brand name.
Use numbers in your brand name as a last resort if you really can’t think of anything else that is also available on major social media sites.
5. Don’t use consecutive words that end and start with the same letters
Take for instance, “mosssafety.com” this domain name invites lots of misspellings because the first word ends with an ‘s’ and the second word starts with an ‘s’.
Try to avoid scenarios like this to prevent any misspellings in the domain name.
6. You could just use your name
If you really can’t think of what to name your brand, you can always just use your name.
AdamEnfroy.com use his own name to start his blog and he’s doing pretty well with his blog. Last I heard, he made $250k per month with his blog in the make money and software review niche.
The good thing about using your name as your brand name is that you may be inclined to invest more effort into it since your name is attached to the brand. It’s not something that you can delete and start over in another niche very easily.
You should also make sure that the niche you picked is one you’ll stick to because say you create a cooking niche using your name, your face and name is now attached to the cooking industry. You can’t just start posting tech review videos because that’s not what you’re known for.
You really only get one shot at how you want to brand your name. Once your name is associated with a niche, you can’t rebrand it in a completely different niche (unless you want to delete everything and start over from scratch).
7. Make your brand name unique
Make sure your username is unique. For instance, “deliciouscupcake” isn’t a unique brand name because every cupcake is expected to be delicious. It doesn’t differentiate your brand from your competitor’s.
A brand name that is unique is something like “EmyCupcake” not everyone is named “Emy” so that brand name is unique to you.
“UnicornChef” is another unique username and adds your own personality to it. Someone who heard the brand name would expect your brand to have a certain color theme (color of the unicorn) and would probably assume that you love unicorns. You’re not just a random chef but a chef who loves unicorn and are most likely a female (although boys can love unicorn too).
8. Don’t pigeonhole yourself
What is a pigeonhole? Well, think about it like this. If your brand name is called “TeslaNerd” you can only really talk about Tesla and not any other kind of car.
Instead, if your brand name is called “CarNerdDude” you can talk about any kind of car on your brand.
It’s important not to dig yourself a hole when choosing a brand name so you leave room for expansion.
There may come a point in which you find yourself struggling to find new topics for your brand because you covered pretty much everything there is to take about. In which case, you’ll want to expand to other sub-niches. Having a domain name that is broad ensures that if you need to cover other sub-niches you can.
9. Make sure no one else has similar brand names as you
You don’t want to create unnecessary tension between you and other creators by having too similar brand names.
This is also to keep your audience from landing on the wrong brand when searching.
10. Ask your friends and family for their opinions
You can also ask your family and friends for their opinions when starting a brand.
I personally don’t like to consult anyone I know from my real life when starting a business because if I fail, I want to fail without anyone knowing. It just makes everything so much less stressful.
However, there are some positives to letting your family and friends know as they can be your very first loyal supporters.
Ask them their opinions on which brand name you should choose to help you narrow down the potential names.
11. Make sure you like it
Of course, all else aside, you should “LOVE” your brand name. You want to say it out loud and like how it sounds, how it’s spelled, how it looks on paper, etc because you’ll have to say it again and again and see it again and again for the duration that you work on your brand.
Make sure you feel proud of it. And that if someone were to find out about your brand, you’d be happy to attach your brand name to yourself.
Last checks before you decide
1. Check to see if the brand name is available on social media
You’ll want to check to see if your brand name of choice is available on major social media sites or any one of those that you want to be on.
- TikTok
- Snapchat
- YouTube
- Patreon
2. Check to see if the domain is taken
You may not be thinking about starting a website in your brand name but if it gets to that point, you want to have a choice so you want to head on over to name.com and type in the domain name you want to see if it’s available.
It’s best for your domain name to have the .com extension as that is the most common. Other extensions can appear more scammy.
Read this article to find out how to choose the best domain name.
3. Do a trademark search
A trademark can be letters, words, logos, pictures, symbols, phrases, or a combination of the above that identifies your company. A trademark has legal differentiation from other kinds.
You may decide to file a trademark for your brand someday and you’ll want to make sure there isn’t an existing trademark on specific phrases, theme color, or name, that is associated with another company.
You can do a search with UPSTO.gov to make sure you can get the trademark for your brand.
4. Do a secretary of state search
When you register your business as an LLC or corporation, you’ll want to consult with a lawyer to do a secretary of state search to make sure your business name won’t be confused with another company’s.
It may cost some money so if you want to save some money, just make sure your brand name is very unique and that it’s almost impossible for anyone else to also have it. Do your own research on Google to make sure there isn’t any other company with a name that remotely resembles your company’s.
Of course, to be 100% sure, you should hire a lawyer to do a secretary of state search with you.
Final thought
I hope I have given you some good ideas on choosing your business name. I would suggest you go with your gut instinct. If you had only 1 second to decide which one to pick, which would it be? Don’t overthink it. Chances are, that’s the best brand name for you.
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Good luck!
