Choosing A Blog Name For Your WordPress Blog

Choosing A blog name can be a royal pain the ass. Some people even go to great lengths to avoid doing it themselves and outsource the job to naming companies. Yes, there are companies that exist out there specifically to come up with names for your business, products, and services and make sure it doesn’t mean “smelly balls” in some other language.

That being said, I don’t think it’s that hard to come up with a decent name for yourself. I came up with Code My Own Road over a couple of days of hardcore mulling. For me it was important to convey some meaning in the name while making something memorable and really easy to remember (rhyming is fun and easier for people to remember).

Adding A Blog To An Existing Site?

With existing sites just adding a blog it can be quite simple. Most companies that add a blog to their site just call it “Blog”. How creative.

While I’m guilty of this (the company’s name was very descriptive, gimme a break!), I would actually suggest trying to convey something about what the blog is going to be about. If it’s the CEO’s blog try calling it “CEO’s Musings On Telco Company Shares” or something equally descriptive.

Naming A New Blog

This is where the fun begins. I do a number of things including brainstorming keywords and key phrases that relate directly to the content on the blog.

Think About Your Niche

Say my niche is indoor plants. I would start my writing down my focus’ on a piece of paper. Pruning Indoor Plants, Watering Indoor Plants, Edible Indoor Plants. If my blog was directly about edible indoor plants then I could either choose one of these phrases if the domain is available, or use these phrases to brainstorm more ideas.

Using Keywords In Your Name

This can be overdone, but naturally for a reason. Keywords in your domain name can be a favourable attribute for ranking in the search engines. So continuing with the indoor plant example, it would great if we could work “indoor plants” into the domain name. That would cover many variations of long-tail phrases that could lead to your blog, as well as what you might call your different blog posts. Ie. “Watering Your Indoor Ficus Plant“.

Domain Availability

I just check this with one of the registrars like BlueHost. I personally use and recommend BlueHost as it’s nice and fast and you can register the domain and hosting in one (it’s quite cheap!), on the spot, in a few seconds. Don’t be afraid to pounce on your domain as it can be registered in a few seconds by someone else too.

Domain Name Generators

Nameboy is the main domain generator that I use, though it has some limitations in that you can only search with two keywords. This would probably be to keep the possible permutations down and the domain names deliberately short. It also works on a dictionary database for the main part, so it’s quite effective and fast. Has a handy interface for quickly checking when a .com is taken, what others are available.

Here are a few others you can try: Bust A Name, Webmaster Toolkit’s Domain Name Generator, Domain Fellow, Make Words. I can’t vouch for their goodness, but they seem okay on the surface.

The Power Of The Thesaurus

By far the most used tool in my naming tool box is the Thesaurus! Sounds basic, I know, but sometimes name generators just don’t quite cut it when your looking for that specific word. I usually start my looking up the meaning of a similar word and view all the thesaurus entries for this. Anything that I find interesting, and would expect people in my niche to know straight up, I follow up and try to work it into a phrase including my keywords.

Build A List And Be Brutal

Write everything down! I can’t stress that enough. When you’ve got a list of 10, be brutal, cut out the crap and shortlist 2 or 3. You want to end up with a list that is really hard to shortlist then go out seeking feedback from people in your industry, family, and friends. Family and friends will probably lay on the praise. Make it extremely clear to them that you’re after honest opinions and not fairy dust coated encouragement. Save that brand of goofy encouragement for later

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