It's official now. The new blogging platform that I am creating is called Blogody. Learn how I came up with that name and what might help you in creating great names for your own product ideas.
When I announced creating a new blogging platform early this year, the name for the new platform was still up in the air. Coming up with a sticky name that gives you an idea about the product's intend is not that easy.
You can pay thousands of dollars for a professional marketing firm just to come up with a single product name. Is it worth that money? Probably yes. Do you need to pay that much? Probably not.
How to find the best product name?
If you ever searched for a good name for a product idea or website, you may have experienced that feeling of unlimited possibilities that make it so hard to pick exactly the right one.
This can be a limiting thought, and that's why I started with a little mind hack:
There is no single best name. You don't pick the best, you just pick the one that best fits your criteria.
While I do think _ Blogody _ is just the perfect name after all, I also know there are hundreds of other names that would fit equally good. With this golden rule, I deliberately shift my focus from the only one to the one that best fits my search criteria.
A trustworthy top level domain name
As the blogging platform needs a dedicated domain name, I want the name to be available on one of the most credible top level domains. You can make your own research about domain credibility, but to cut things short, the number one is still .com. It's also the one most people would search for, if they had forgotten the full domain name.
With the explosion of websites I know it's hard to find a free .com address as so many combinations are already taken. On the other hand, it also helps me eliminating possible choices, which leads to my second rule of thumb:
The name must be available for the .com top level domain. This likely means the name must be an artificial name, because common dictionary words are usually taken already.
Okay, making rules is fun, but how does that bring me closer to a name? I need some name ideas first in order to be able to test if they are available on the .com domain.
Brainstorm for name snippet
As the platform is about creating blogs, it would be cool if the product name includes "blog" in it.
This is the point where I write down a word list with words related to "blog":
- blog
- write
- publish
- text
- ...
A keyword search is also a good tactic at this point. As I know this will be only one part of the final word, I want to go with the most obvious word that is also the shortest possible. Like for .com before, blog sticks out both in terms of being to the point and in terms of shortness. This rule can be summarized as follows:
Find a short word that characterizes your product. Use it as a first step in composing the final name.
Fixing the maximum character length
I would always prefer a shorter name over a longer one, at least if the short one is also easy to memorize. Looking at big tech company names, such as Google, Amazon or Twitter a name with a maximum of 7 characters would be ideal.
I have seen great long names too, but let's be a bit ambitious here:
The final name should be 7 characters or less. No one likes to type long names.
With 4 characters already taken, we are only left with 3 remaining characters. You can do the math, with 26 possible charterers of the English alphabet, you have limited your possibilities to 26 to the power of 3 = 17.576 combinations. Not millions, but still quite a lot of possibilities.
Choose sensible character constraints
Among the 3 possible characters, I want at least one vowel, preferably one that is already in "blog", which would be an "o". Why? because vowel repetition usually leads to nice sounding words.
This choice reduces the number of possibilities to 678.
Narrow your possibilities with some meaningful character constraints.
While you can now write a computer program that generates all 678 words and then limit the ones for which there is a ".com" domain available, I started to make a new word list with ones that came to my mind immediately
- blogost
- blogrod
- blogido
- ...
I usually type those directly in a domain search system, to see if they are available. This last step can be a bit frustrating, because most choices were taken already... until I finally got a satisfactory hit with
blogody.com
Google Search on Blogody
The name is great, but what other websites exist with the same name? I do not want other high ranking blogging platforms to collide with that name.
It turns out that when you type "Blogody" into a Google search, there is not one with an exact match:
This is great, because it is not occupied with similar content.
Falling in love with a name
While the described strategy of choosing a name seems quite technical, there is still a lot of creativity involved when testing the different variants. The system mostly helps in narrowing your possible choices but still leaves you with a large amount of names to choose from.
So, what makes _ Blogody _ the best name of all the variants that I considered? First and foremost, I like the sound of the the name. It rimes with Melody, Rhapsody and a lot of other melodic words.
It is short, easy to pronounce and remember, gives hindsight to the product value and is available on the highest ranking top level domain: Lovely!
Names are likely overrated
After the initial excitement it's important to touch base again. After all, the best name does not make a good product. So, it's important to focus on the product again, such that it fills the great sounding name with a resonating product.
Interested to learn more about Blogody? Just sign-up to get notified.
This post was originally published at jamify.org on March 13, 2021.
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