Tag: naming

Y Combinator’s Demo Day started as a chance for recent college graduates to present their work, but now looking back on the eleventh annual event it is clear they are now including entrepreneurs with experience. Growing in size and popularity every year, Demo Day has become not only a place to get word out about your business, but to also hook up with angel investors. From the large list of presenters the ones that caught my eye were the businesses with names that have brand potential, creativity, or memorability - both good and bad.

Entrepreneur Rob Emrich, Co-Founder of BULX.com came to BrandBucket with the existing business, Fast Fire Places. They were looking to venture past that niche. Going back and forth for some time on what domain name was best for them and their new venture, the decision was made months later in June. They chose the brandable domain name BULX.com.

Photo By: Lingaraj G J

When buying a domain name for a new business many people like to look at the traffic the name is already getting. This is not an indication of how successful your online business will be. It’s true that the perfect keyword domain like Blogger.com will get get more automatic traffic because it is the simplest domain but anything past that number one keyword domain is not ideal for business naming. The domain becomes just a description of your business rather than a business brand.

Photo taken NASA March 10, 2010

When choosing your business name it is good to know who your initial marketing efforts are geared towards, but it is crucial to leave your business the opportunity to expand. Choosing a keyword domain is great if your business functions only in one region but if you do any work online where the world has access to your business you need to have a catchy brand name to be said in several languages rather than a keyword description in just one language.

Businesses often get bogged down with branding their image to please their audience and forget that the best brands are not just a good image but knowledgeable, valuable, assets to their industry. Knowledge and quality sets the top brands levels above the rest. To position yourself among the top quality brand names you have to inform your audience of the advice and insight that makes your brand valuable, and writing is an important part of sharing what you know.