In the early stages of starting up an enterprise, branding your new business is one of the biggest tasks that you have. You will pour so much time and money into your new company that you cannot afford not to take it very seriously. The good news is that brainstorming ideas with friends can be a lot of fun, and settling on a business name will focus your sense of purpose and even firmly define the direction in which you’re heading.

But there is one thing to keep in mind, something that won’t be covered in business textbooks more than five or 10 years old, the filter through which you must run any prospective catchy brand name that you are contemplating. I’ll share this with you in this short article.

I will also convey a new idea for making a final choice once you’ve narrowed your list of brand names down to two or three very good prospects. This is a marketing test that you can perform for $100 or so, that will expose you to a worldwide potential market that will give you input as to how responsive people are to your name, and maybe a very brief tagline.

Brainstorming Your List Of Catchy Business Names

Here’s the fun part. Bounce ideas for names off some of your sharpest friends, focusing on concepts and abstractions that describe what this new business of yours will do. The Net has many excellent tools to help you get started. Also use random name generators, available for free on the Internet, as a starting point and don’t be afraid to write down dozens of names that have something special about them. Don’t be too critical at this stage. Also remember that short business names are preferable, all else being equal. Use strong verbs and vivid nouns. When you have several that you like, run them by people, even strangers, to gauge their first impression. The function of your business name is to open the door to your market, to put you in position to close the sale. Grab first, educate second. The product of this brainstorming stage should be a list of dozens of prospective catchy business names.

The Secret To Free Marketing Through Search Engines

I promised you a “secret filter” through which you should pass all the names on your initial list. First, here’s a quick review of how search engines determine placement of webpages in the search engine results pages for a given keyword. Along with the age of the domain upon which the webpage is located, as well as the number and quality of so called “backlinks” from other sites to that page and domain, there are literally a couple hundred things at which a search engine looks to determine SERPs placement. The higher the placement, the more visitors you’ll have to the website you will be building for your business, even if it is brick-and-mortar.

Another enormously important criterion for webpage strength for a given keyword is whether the keyword is contained in the URL for that page, or better yet as the domain name itself. It stands to reason that (again, all else being equal) a domain called redleatherbookbinding.com will concern itself largely with binding books in red leather. For this reason, not surprisingly, most search engines would give an authority boost to this hypothetical domain for that keyword. Assuming this described your business, you would want to give very serious consideration to it as a business name for your brand.

If you buy that domain can you expect your business to automatically be number one in the search engine results pages for that term? Absolutely not! You can assume nothing, even if you build a nice looking, informative site on it. However, if you will do the work of creating a quality site on the domain, it will most likely be better off by some amount for that keyword than if it did not contain it at all. The takeaway for you, as you sift through your long list of business name ideas, is to make sure that any name that you pick is available as a domain name, preferably a “dot-com”.

Ideally it will also contain a keyword that describes very well what your business will do, that you expect people to type in to search engines when they search for the product or service that you are selling. An additional tip, if at standalone keyword is not available as a URL, is to include the city in which your business is based, especially if you have a brick-and-mortar location. Very often people do include the name of the city in which they live in the search that they perform, not surprisingly. Can you see how much science there is (or should be) in determining the best name for your new brand from a long list of catchy business names?

Business Name Marketing Test: The Final Decision

So you have narrowed your list down to two or three names, all of which are available as domain names, or at least with your city name inserted after each name that you have chosen. What you need now is some hard data to support your final name selection. Consider running a Google ad words campaign, with three different text ads, each of which features one of the names you have selected as well as just a few words to elaborate on your product. Keep the elaboration portion short, and identical through the ads. In one week or less and probably with no more than $100 spent towards this cheap marketing campaign, you will most likely find that ads containing one of your choices was quite a bit better than the others. You should think very carefully about choosing the name that got the most clicks from the enormous unbiased sample size that this basic campaign can involve. (If you would like to test responses only for the country in which you live or even the city in which your business will be located, it’s simple to construct through Adwords)

There is so much at stake in choosing a suitable name for your new brand that you shouldn’t rely on intuition alone. I have isolated three stages for choosing business names using the internet, names that are catchy and worthy of the enterprise in which you will sink a lot of money and maybe years of your life. Once you have chosen wisely, you can proceed with confidence that the business into which you will pour everything will also have a name that works for it, rather than against it.

Catchy business names can make or break fledgling startups. What an investor’s first impression is will certainly be affected by what a business plans to call itself. Not only do memorable names for a business appeal to customers, they help to draw the attention of investors as well. In this way a catchy business name for a new company might be the difference between success and failure. A critical first step is to make a list of quality names using tools on the internet, which can be immensely helpful in the early stages of planning and development. Also, as you immerse yourself in this task you’ll save time and money by checking the United States Patent and Trademark Office website, to see if a name is taken before you go about registering it as a domain name or creating marketing campaigns.

While most small business owners have some general idea of how they want to brand themselves, choosing a name is never easy, and carries with it the weight of the entire enterprise. After all, a name is the one part of a business that tends to stay the same over the years. As a business grows, modernizes, and makes changes to its business model, the one consistent aspect of that business is its name.

This is how customers know a company; this is how they relate to a company and its culture, and how they begin to build brand loyalty. With a random name generator, easily found on the Internet, one can compile a list of catchy business names from which it’s possible to simply choose a name that fits, get ideas from existing names, or develop a combination of the names that suit the needs of any business. Don’t ignore input that friends and family provide, as their reactions to business names that you run by them, favorable or not, will most likely mirror that of your potential customers.

The benefit of choosing a business name that is easy to remember is the element of branding that it helps to establish. Building a brand is one of the most important aspects of growing a business because it transforms new customers into repeat customers who have a subtle psychological attachment to the company name, and the company it represents. As customers are easily able to distinguish one brand from another they begin to make conscious choices and develop a comfort zone.

All in all, business names are not magic keys to success, but they are a calling card to potential customers, and new business owners must choose it carefully. You get one chance to make a first impression, and leveraging catchy business names can establish a momentum that is invaluable, exactly when a new business needs it most.

Most creative business names function to redirect our attention, from whatever we’re doing to a company name that we suddenly cannot ignore, for whatever reason. Whether it is a minor pun on words or a hilarious business name concept that has us doubled over with laughter, the element of distraction (over and above a name that is simply descriptive or catchy) can serve to garner attention and possibly create customers from people who otherwise might never have been aware of our business.

It is true that generating a business name that is truly memorable and creative will imbue it with an additional stickiness in the minds of people who hear it. It is also true that for any new business fighting so hard to get established in the first six months to one year of its existence, catchy business names that really “work” can make all the difference vis-à-vis the general visibility of the company, compared to names that fall flat. However, there is a limit to just how far you should go in getting creative with a business name, and at least two constraints that you would do well to observe as you try so hard to come up with a business name worthy of your efforts. By the way, are you familiar with the convenient business name generation tools you’ll find all over the Net? These are often semi-automated tools and they are handy for coming up with cool business names that work for you.

The first caveat that you as a business owner should keep in mind is that creating business names should not be an exercise in delving into obscurity. There is a limit to how creative you want to get with your business name because if there are complex allusions to abstract concepts, ancient Greek or Latin roots, or literary or historical figures, etc. then your name risks going completely over the heads of people who might otherwise take an interest in the product or service you are offering. If you look at creative business names that have successfully gain a foothold in the general public consciousness, such as Apple, Nike, Volkswagen or Visa you will find names that work on different levels both superficially as well as on some deeper-or even profound-manner.

The second constraint that will affect the way you come up with an initial selection or list of creative business names boils down to simple economics. As critical as a business name will be to every advertising campaign you ever undertake in whatever medium, spending too much money on a creative company name can be a mistake if it leaves your new business strapped for cash. Even a cursory search on the Internet will reveal dozens of companies touting their services as branding geniuses who can easily supply you with a name that perfectly fits your business. The problem is that the cost of purchasing creative branding services like this can run into the thousands of dollars quite easily, possibly leaving your new business hobbled in terms of cash flow and being unable to meet unforeseen expenses.

With regard to the second point, you must keep in mind that you cannot simply rely on a marketing firm to come up with examples of creative business names from which you can simply select. You’ll have to be involved in this process, and in fact you should be involved, because naming any business is a subjective exercise and no one has a clearer idea of the brand you are in the process of creating-and putting so much time and money into-than you do.

The best business names will always strike a balance between being overtly catchy on one hand while still “working” if one reflects on the deeper meaning of the name. In fact, the more successful your business gets the more likely it is that you’re customers as well as the general public will “get” the slightly hidden meaning that usually exists with creative business names, and this can work for you, almost as though your name is an inside joke of which people are privileged to be a part.

If you’re trying to dream up catchy brand names for your new business idea, the Internet is probably the best tool that you have. Simple brainstorming and making use of random name generators and tools you can find all over the Internet, makes it easy to quickly build a suitable list of names that you can consider as branding possibilities.

Compiling a catchy business names list may be less of a challenge than finally settling on a name for your business. I’d like to share with you today a relatively cheap, though very scientific, method of determining just how responsive people will be to your new business name, or whether it tends to fall flat. Before you commit your time and resources to the enterprise you will build, you have only one chance to move forward with an business identity that memorably describes what you do.

Ideally you would conduct a marketing study to get real-life opinions from as many people as possible as to just how memorable different names from your initial list are. The larger and more varied this group is in terms of the individuals whose opinions you solicit, the more reliable your test will be as an indicator of stimulating interest in your new brand name. So how would a new, small-scale business engage in a marketing study like this whose cost is appropriate or in-line with the amount of revenue its owner can expect to generate? Excellent question.

There are many ways to conduct a brand marketing study, but Google Adwords offers easy-to-set-up campaigns for which your spending is easily controlled. Through the straightforward interface, you can feature each of your short-list of names in the small text ads that Google serves up its search results, the Gmail sidebar and other places, then quickly get an indication of just how ‘catchy’ each one is, as measured by the number of clicks that each receives. There are endless options for targeting potential customers in any geographical area that you specify. The learning curve is manageable, if your purpose is to simply determine the viability of catchy business names.

Use of this method is by no means limited to discovering excellent names for your business. Product names, titles or any sort of brand can be assessed with a scientific marketing campaign that is a necessary complement to brainstorming, inspiration and “feel”, that you’ll use to compile your original list of names.

In the book The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss memorably describes how he actually came up with the name for his bestselling book using this method. He and his publisher had settled on a small pool of working titles when Ferriss, knowing full well the enormity of this choice, took the bull by the horns and ran a small Adwords campaign himself to get some hard data regarding a catchy name. It turned out that the name that they eventually chose was far and away the name that got the best response, and has no doubt contributed to the huge success of the book: talk about return on investment!

Don’t leave the final selection of an easy to remember name for your business to gut feeling, or nothing but your own opinion. Apply some good data on what actually works to your initial list of catchy business names by analyzing what names people actually respond to, and one smart way to do this is by running a small Adwords campaign.

When you make the decision to start your own business, one of the first things you need to do is to come up with a great name that will draw clients and potential customers alike. This name should of course not be offensive to anyone, as you could be unknowingly driving away sales. There are other factors you might use to filter out inferior business names from good business names, but for most people, dreaming up a name to start with is initially the biggest challenge. If you are serious about this new business idea, and you had better be, spending a nominal amount of money on a business name generator might be all the solution you need.

If you have the time to invest what are other ways come up with catchy business names? Naturally the internet is a great place to go for a list of memorable branding possibilities: appeal to your favorite search engine! One advantage we have nowadays in determining whether a thing is original or not is that the web is international, so you’ll also be able to find out if a name you like has already been taken by a company no matter where they are located in the world.

You will also find catchy names for businesses that are already making waves. When you do your name search, go into it as a simple consumer. Look and search for companies within your chosen industry or sector and make notes of what speak to you or what names entice you to want to look further or follow the link to go to the company’s website.

You can spend a lot of time brainstorming for catchy brand names, but the challenge is to eventually commit and move forward to the actual building of your business. Good business names are necessary for establishing your company’s momentum, so vital in the early stages particularly, but a compelling moniker constitutes little more than a viable foundation. If you find a brandable name you like, do more research to make sure it isn’t already taken, and then you can start to register your name as a domain. Remember too not to neglect the informal, though extremely vital places to tell the world about your new name and brand, such as on social networking sites. Even if you do not want to use them now, it would be a shame if when you’re ready to get started with social networking your exciting business name has already been snatched up by someone else on Facebook or Twitter. Remember, your business name might be the key element of your brand as a means of promoting your product or services. As time goes on, ‘new media’ like Twitter and Facebook stand to absorb a lot of people’s attention, and that very probably includes your customers as well. Connecting your name to those online destinations is utterly essential, the earlier the better.

In any case, ask the opinion of everyone you trust about your new name, because sifting through your initial list of catchy business names is a perfect example of harnessing the ‘wisdom of crowds’. Better to make an impression of some kind on people you’re actually trying to target, rather than desperately trying for the ‘perfect’ brand and name.

You can find plenty of suggestions on the Internet for ways to come up with a list of catchy business names. Random name generators work well, and they’re free and easy to find online. Brainstorming is fun, though gathering your ideas for catchy names and brands can become a time-sink, and if you’re not careful it can be a distraction to actually developing your business!

To save time I’d strongly suggest looking at a few of the plethora of business name generators easily found in search engines like Google as a one-stop branding solution that’s remarkable effective.

Obviously you need a name that is unique and memorable, and you’ll get only one chance to choose it. But there is another consideration as to business names, one that has arisen in the last 10 years or so, and I would contend that it outweighs almost any other definition of what a “good” business name is.

Ask yourself how, as we move forward, your business will be found. It will not be through the Yellow Pages. As people consume a variety of media today, traditional television, newspaper and radio advertising becomes less relevant. We actively search for information we need nowadays. What did you do when you were looking for ways to find a business name, just now?

You went to a search engine. From there, sooner or later, you clicked through to this site. This is the way that we will find most of our information in the future. For speed and efficiency, nothing else approaches this simple act of typing in a short description of what we are looking for. Business owners will naturally have to have advertising budgets to overtly target potential customers in places in which these customers might look as well. However, when you are choosing your business name and deciding on a brand into which you will pour countless hours, you cannot ignore the potential it has — I’m talking about the domain name itself — for helping you acquire customers within this new dynamic of internet search.

When dreaming up catchy business name ideas you can help customers and potential customers find you via the search engines by choosing a name that is available as a domain name, as a URL. The fact is that for a given subject or keyword, search engines give more credit/place more weight on sites whose domain name contains the keyword that was searched for to begin with. Put differently: a site, or even a page on a site, is considered to have more authority for a term, all else being equal, if it’s title contains the term. There are dozens of other factors as to page or site importance, but the title is probably the biggest single factor. Search engine robots don’t understand “catchy” or notably creative business names (at least not yet!), but they can certainly match a search term with a domain name.

When you are choosing your business name, include words that describe your business right in the domain name of the website that will represent your business online. This will help search engines, and in turn your customers, find you. It is absolutely not some sneaky workaround devised to game the search engines. On the contrary, it is the best way to help the search engines connect your customers with you. Once connected, you do what you do best: making your brand memorable.

So does this mean that a creative, catchy name is not important for your business, or that you cannot use something memorable in your business name and your URL? Chances are that a short URL containing a couple of words to describe your business is already taken anyway, so you’ll need an additional term or two to arrive at a domain name that is actually available. While a domain that contains the exact search that people will perform to find you is very desirable, the fact is that there will be an endless variety of terms that people type into search engines that lead them to you anyway. This enables you to combine descriptive terms that are very relevant to your business with a little something extra that distinguishes you from your competitors.

For instance, the domain organicvegetables.com is certainly taken, but maybe you could name your organic vegetable farm organicvegetablelovers.com, a domain name which has a better chance of being available for you to buy, contains terms very relevant to your business, and is also memorable and descriptive, catchy even. With it, you establish yourself in the search engines as a website that is strongly related to organic vegetables by virtue of the first two words in your title, then use the third word, a positive, descriptive and friendly term to personalize your name. A functional and aesthetically pleasing brand is born.

The proper way to look at high placement in search engine results pages is as advertising, because for your commercial endeavors that’s exactly what it is. If the most important single thing you can do to place well in the non-paid portion of search results is also free, you can see the critical importance of choosing your domain name wisely. There is no reason why catchy business names cannot be combined with terms relevant to your business, right in the title. More than ever before, it is imperative that a business owner looks at his business name and brand in this way.

Once you have decided to take the plunge and turn that idea that you’ve had for a business into a real moneymaking enterprise, the first thing you need to do is come up with a list of catchy business names from which to pick a name that is worthy of all the money and hours that you’re about to invest. Fortunately tools available to you on the Internet make branding your business yourself a lot easier than it used to be. We can recommend the Names & Brands business name generator as a spectacularly effective and easy to use set of tools. There is a new rule you need to remember though, because in the last ten years there has been a change in the criteria as to what constitutes a strong business name that’s going to be the cornerstone of your marketing efforts.

Certainly you will use random name generators, easily found for free on the Internet, for your initial list of catchy company names. Also, enlist the aid of friends and relatives who will gladly help you with naming your new business. But as you consider name candidates, here’s a basic rule for creating catchy company names that will also help you be found by potential customers via search engines:

Every thing else being equal, you should make sure the product or service that you offer is included as a word or words in the URL of the new website that you will have to create around your business. It’s not to say that this URL has to be your entire business name, but you should make it easier for searchers who are looking for what you are offering to end up on search engine results pages that feature your new company. Having terms relevant to your business in your URL makes your new brand a catchy domain name in the eyes of search engines, and this is vital!

For example, if you are brainstorming catchy cleaning business names for your new cleaning services business in Miami, consider putting your location as well as your primary business right in the URL. This will match your site to search terms that people will enter in if they are interested in cleaning services in Miami. It’s very simple, but a quick search around the Internet shows that many business owners have not done this when they chose a domain name to house their web presence. If the name of your cleaning service business is ‘Joe’s Cleaning’, putting the words ‘services’ and ‘Miami’ after those two words in the domain name would be an excellent way to position yourself well in the search results page right off the bat. That domain name costs nothing more than other, less search-engine-friendly domain names! And you can still call yourself Joe’s Cleaning, while helping yourself to free marketing help in the search engines.

Choosing a catchy name for your new business doesn’t have to be difficult, and you don’t need to hire a branding consultant to help you choose one. Simply remember that in this age of online commerce you’ll be found increasingly through Google, Bing, etc. Just as a good physical location will always aid your business relative to physical traffic, a prominent presence in search engines is absolutely necessary to to being found online.