As part one of my Essential Advice for New Bloggers series we’re talking about branding.  Perhaps the most basic form of branding is what you name your blog, which is what we’ll be discussing today.

Here are some basic guidelines to consider when coming up with a name for your blog.

Make it memorable and unique
If you start paying attention, you’ll notice something about all the famous bloggers; they have interesting and unique names.  Dooce. Finslippy. Bossy. Fluid Pudding. Surrender Dorothy.  These are names that stand out, pique a reader’s curiosity, and stick in your mind.  With some exceptions, it’s best to choose a name that isn’t too long and that isn’t likely to get confused with another blog.  Get creative!  Use your friends and family to help brainstorm, or your friendly thesaurus or wikipedia.  You’ll be stuck with this name for a long time, so make it something you love!

Pick something that can grow with you
It’s easy to choose a blog name that makes sense for you NOW, like ‘I have a three year old’ or ‘Just turned 30′ or ‘Blond-haired Mama’.  But what happens when your three year old turns four or you turn 31 or you dye your hair purple? 

Better to pick a name that is less specific and more scalable.  The best blog names are lasting.  Take Dooce, for example.  Here’s a name that can be used long after the blogger’s child is grown and married.  It doesn’t imply anything and therefore is infinitely scalable.  Any blog with “mom” in the title will always be restricted to mom-type topics, just as a blog with “Seattle” in its name will be hard to work with if you move out of state.  Not to say that you should avoid specificity, but before you go that route, make sure your selection is something you can live with for the foreseeable future.

Ensure that the name is easy to pronounce and spell
Granted this is rather boring, but that doesn’t make it less important.  Ages ago, I worked at a start-up company called isolute.com.  I cannot tell you how many times the company name was misspelled or mispronounced. It became a sore point for the founders.  And yes, the company tanked. I’m not saying it was because of the name, but I really don’t think the name helped. 

Be wary of cutesy spellings of real words (kidz, for example). While this can work, it also can lead to people mistyping your URL and not being able to find your blog. Oh, the horror!

Here are two basic exercises to test the name that you’ve come up with.  First, write it down on a piece of paper and hand it to someone.  Ask them to read it aloud.  Did they pronounce it right? Does it sound ok?

Next, find a different person than the one you just used, and tell them the name of your blog.  Ask them to write it down.  Did they get it?  How far off were they?  To really boost the STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE of this survey you can repeat the exercise with, say, five or ten or 2,000 people.

Buy the domain
Don’t just stick with the yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com that your host gives you for free. First and foremost, owning your own domain makes you look serious.  Professional.  With it.  It also helps ensure that you don’t pick a name that someone else is already blogging under (like I did, when I started my blog ‘Adventures in Parenting’).

Even if you’re thinking, “Oh come on! This is totally just a hobby.  I don’t want to invest the money in buying my own domain.” STOP RIGHT THERE.  Play a little game of pretend with me for a minute.  Imagine that you blog for a while and people recognize the truly brilliant wonder that is YOU and you start getting masses of fans and readers. You start to see possibilities that you never dreamt of. Oprah is calling and people are throwing money at you. (wipe that drool off your chin). Now imagine that you don’t own your domain.  Kicking yourself, aren’t you? 

It’s SO much easier to buy the domain when you’re starting out than it is to try and do this down the road.  Ask anyone who’s had to do it and they’ll tell you that renaming a successful blog is a nightmare and a surefire way to lose a lot of that hard-earned traffic. 

GoDaddy.com is one of many websites where you can buy URLs for dirt cheap ($6.95, last I checked). 

And, one final tip on this topic, your URL should match your blog’s name.  So, if your blog is called ’I Love Fuzzy Wuzzy Puppies’, then you should own www.ilovefuzzywuzzypuppies.com.   

Alright, Seattle Mom Blogs readers, what did I forget here?  What do you love or hate about your blog’s name?  What would you do differently if you could?

© Jenny Blackburn. All Rights Reserved.

Subscribe to ‘On Blogging’ | Subscribe to Seattle Mom Blogs

Catch more of Jenny Blackburn’s humorous anecdotes on being a mom, a woman, and a whole lot crazy at Absolutely Bananas. If you have questions, anecdotes, or topics for “On Blogging,” email jenny[@]seattlemomblogs[dot]com.