Naming Your Business & Choosing a Domain Name

Today brands are more important than there were 20 or 30 years ago. While brands and names have always been important today people need to know the name of your brand to find it online.

With a much bigger market it is hard to find a name that will represent your brand as well as be unique and something eligible for trademark protection so you can prevent others from using it.

With small businesses many people chose to use their name which would be fine, but it may be too common to protect. "Joe's Plumbing" would not be something you could ever trademark because it is commonly used by so many companies.

So what are the basic guidelines should you follow in naming your business?

• Simple, short and easy to spell.

• Use something people will immediately recognize.

• Find a name that makes sense with your brand.

• What emotions does it invoke?

• How will it look in a logo or on a website?

• Do a Trademark Search.

• Make sure the web domain is available.

Simple, short and easy to spell.

As you are thinking of the new name for your business remember that it should be simple, short as possible and easy to spell. Using words that are confusing or hard to spell might keep visitors from recognizing your brand. Even common words like "Vacuum" almost never get spelled correctly, so even if your business involved Vacuum forming plastic you might want to avoid names like "Joe's Vacuum Molding" and use something like "Joe's Plastic Forming".

Also avoid long names like "Joe's Industrial Supply Corp of New Jersey" because people will never remember it all and they will just know you as "Joe's Plastic Place".

When people look online, they wont find "Joe's Plastic Place" since you are registered as "Joe's Industrial Supply Corp of New Jersey".

Names with one word are better than two and two is better than three. The less you have the easier it is to build a brand.

Of course you can create brands under one company name as well, so if you don't need the business name to be your brand, the actual name of your business is not as important.

Take out company for example "The Cyber Web, Inc" which has no relation to our biggest brand "pageBuzz". Since we don't really have a need to get people to our company website, that name is not very important and it is our individual brands that we have to address.

Use something people will immediately recognize.

Having a brand and a name people understand is just so important I can't even begin to tell you how important. So you need something that when people buy from you and they need something 2 years later they remember who you are.

That could be because of the rubber chicken in your logo and the name "Crazy Ed's Dead Chickens".

A name needs to have some impact, stay with the customers. Names like "Jersey Plumbing" will not have much impact over "New York Plumbing" or "Philadelphia Plumbing" but names like "Broken Pipe Plumbing" or "Leaky Plumbing" ming do the trick.

Domain names like leakyplumbing.com are easy to remember and spell. They resonate with people and paired with great logos of leaky pipes it will have a positive impact on customers with leaky pipes. Chances are, they will remember the name and it will be easier to build a brand.

Find a name that makes sense with your brand

It goes without saying, the name should say something about what you do, for example pageBuzz uses the term "page" as in webpage or homepage and "Buzz" as in the sound bees make establishing our brand as well as being the ultimate BuzzWord.

But in the case of "Joe's Industrial Supply Corp of New Jersey" it does not tell me what he does or give me any reason to remember the name.

One mistake people make is trying to shorten names to "JISCONJ" short for "Joe's Industrial Supply Corp of New Jersey".

Now that might work as "Jisco NJ" but nobody is going to remember it for anything other than a strange sounding name that did not mean anything.

I see this all the time, people at the company think it is cool. They say it all day everyday, but the people looking in, they have no clue what Jisco is.

Where if they used "Joe's Plastic Place" and shortened it to JPP, then people might relate to that, at least when they say JPP people will understand they are shortening "Joe's Plastic Place".

What emotions does the name invoke?

Names and brands are very emotional. People will relate to it or just forget it and touching an emotion can be critical to building a brand.

Names like "The Devils Advocate" would be positive in most cases where as 'The Devil Worshipers" would not be positive.

It is important that a name does not offend anyone like "The Washington Redskins". Now that billion dollar brand has everyone screaming and yelling it is racist and needs to be changed.

So you don't want to use a name that might offended anyone or cause any backlash with any activist group.

How will it look in a logo or on a website?

Another issue to consider is how the name will look on a logo, artwork or a website.

It does not seem like something most people think about, but sometimes symmetry in the letters and balance are important. A name that is too heavy on one end might make it hard for an artist to create a balanced logo.

Obviously, shorter names are easier to build logos around, but consider 2 or 3 words in a name, how will that be integrated?

It might seem like a ridiculous thing, but it will be very important when you start designing your art for your brand.

Do a Trademark Search

Don't ever skip this most important step.

If someone else is already using the name, you can't use it.

We had a webmaster tell us we were stupid because we did not have pageBuzz.net and he bought it and was going to open a site to compete with pageBuzz.com. He said we were dumb for not buying every instance of our domain and he was going to teach us a lesson.

Well, guess what. We have registered trademarks for pageBuzz and pageBuzz.com so anyone that does use it will instantly be facing legal action and end up paying us a bunch of money as well as hiring expensive lawyers to defend them.

Just because we don't have the domain names registered, does not mean anyone can use them anymore than trying to use, pagebuzzhosting.com or pagebuzzwebsites.com.

There is no way a company can or should buy every imaginable domain with every extension to protect their name. It is just not possible.

It reminds me of when every company went out and bought theirnameSUCKS.com to prevent anyone from making a website about how bad they are. Then people went out and bought theirnameREALLYSUCKS.com and id it anyway. You just can't buy every domain in the world.

While most people don't understand how serious it is you can look at all the law suites initiated by Facebook for anyone doing business with even the word "book" in their name. They might be a little over aggressive but the point is, if you don't check, you will never know.

Using someone else's Trademark is a serious issue and could put you out of business, so make sure that nobody else is using the name.

Now, consider that a name does not have to be registered for a company to claim trademark rights, so doing a search in the USPTO database wont be enough. You will need to do research and probably consult an attorney.

The best course of action is to actually register the name so there is no question about who the owner is. That can usually be done by a trademark attorney for under $1000 and is well worth the investment.

Make sure the web domain is available

Of course before you do all of this, make sure the domain is available. If you can't get a web domain or too many people are using similar domains then the business name is kind of useless.

Simple domain searches will let you determine if a name is available. Then spend the $15 or so to register the name before anyone else gets it.

The worst thing you could do is spend money on the trademark and not register the domain name.

If someone else buys it, you won't have it. And I know you are thinking that if you own the trademark, nobody else can use it, but that is not true.

Trademarks can be issued for multiple industries so "Joe's Instruments" could be held simultaneously by a musical instrument builder and a "Medical Instrument" manufacturer. But only one of them can have the domain since there is only one.

So don't take it for granted that a domain will be available.

I get calls every week from people thinking they own their business name and they can just get the domain whenever they want it. They might be a corporation and even have a trademark, but that in no way reserves any domain use rights.

So make sure you secure everything at the same time.

It is not as hard as it seems, but there is a lot to consider. If you are careful make good decisions you will have a great name for your business. Just use some common sense and when you narrow down the list of possible names, get some professional help to make sure it is legal.