Nerd Fitness. Zen Habits. Scary Mommy. Humans of New York. These blog names should be familiar to those who spend most of their working life on the internet.
But for every memorable blog, hundreds are pretty forgettable. In fact, of the 500 million blogs on the internet, most of them get zero search traffic.
If you’re an entrepreneur or an owner of a small eCommerce business, blogging is one of the best marketing channels you have at your disposal.
It’s inexpensive, evergreen, and a great way to generate organic traffic from qualified searchers on the web.
Choosing a memorable name for your blog is essential to a good branding strategy and makes your business “sticky” to readers and prospective customers.
After reading this post, you’ll come away with:
- Several exercises to help you generate blog name ideas
- Some of our favorite blog name generators
- Examples of excellent blog names and why they work so well
Ask Yourself Questions to Spur Inspiration
What is the main idea of your blog?
A necessary first step is to do a brain dump of everything related to your blog or business niche. This exercise alone can generate dozens of ideas and lots of inspiration.
Think of the topic you want to write about (or the one most related to your business), then brainstorm related topics or words.
A great way to visualize this is by drawing out a mindmap, either digitally or with pen and paper.
You’ll start seeing words and phrases that work well as blog titles. This exercise will help get the creative juices flowing as you work through the rest of the steps in this post.
For example, if you’re starting a blog in the personal finance niche, there are hundreds of related topics and words to serve as the basis for a great blog name. You could start with “money,” then branch to:
- Currency
- Interest
- Savings
- Cents
- Dollars
- Piggy banks
And the list could go on for quite a while.
Who are your potential readers?
The next question to take into account is your demographic. Put simply, for whom are you writing?
It’s important to conceptualize your target reader in your mind. This principle is why marketing teams develop “avatars” or customer personas with authentic headshots, names, and detailed information.
You’re seeking to build a relationship with these readers through your content — a relationship that will hopefully result in a sale. The best way to do this is to understand their needs and wants just as well (or better) than they do.
Facebook provides a way to access this information, but it requires a bit of sleuthing. If you go to the About section of a public profile, you can view all the pages, movies, and music they’ve “liked” publicly on the platform.
Suppose you perform this exercise with several users in your demographic and start to notice common interests. In that case, you can dig deeper into those pages or businesses and study their best practices (including how they’ve named their brand).
What’s your writing style?
Sometimes your writing style is determined by your business, and other times your writing style determines what kind of blog you’ll want to start.
Choosing a writing style goes hand-in-hand with what demographic you’re serving. B2B blogs or brands targeting high-risk or formal sectors (financial services, risk mitigation, etc.) should opt for a more formal yet friendly tone.
However, if your demographic responds well to a more laid-back approach, you can go with something more tongue-in-cheek, like Nerd Fitness.
What if you want to expand to other topics?
Keeping your blog name general (instead of more specific) helps leave room for experimentation and growth.
For example, if you name your blog something directly associated with mountain biking, what happens when you also want to start blogging about mountain climbing or hiking?
Niching too deeply may not be the best move, so leave some room for ambiguity.
Practical Ways to Come Up with a Blog Name
Name the blog after yourself
If you’re an entrepreneur seeking to build a brand that transcends any single business, naming a blog after yourself may be a good approach.
Seth Godin, a marketer and author, does this with a blog titled “Seth’s blog.” Neil Patel, a digital marketer and entrepreneur, takes the same approach.
Some folks may argue that this puts a cap on how large your blog can grow. As soon as you introduce guest writers or contributors, it dilutes your brand’s “cult of personality” factor.
If you’re a serial entrepreneur or have plans for multiple businesses, naming your blog after yourself is a great way to stay relevant without switching your branding.
Pick an unrelated (yet memorable) name
Contrary to the last idea, you can use a blog name that has no apparent connection with your business or brand.
This approach works well for catching readers’ attention.
Here’s an example from the world of software. While not a blog, the branding principles are the same.
There are so many SEO and marketing tools out there, all named after marketing buzzwords like “convert,” “copy,” and “metrics.”
However, there’s one tool I’ll never forget: Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Screaming Frog is software that helps scan and detect problems on websites.
What do screaming frogs have to do with internet marketing? Well, nothing. But the name is so bizarre and random that it’s unforgettable.
This tactic is undoubtedly a risk, and its absurdity may rub some folks the wrong way, but there’s no question it helps with brand recognition.
Go through your competitors’ blog names
If there’s one thing I’ve learned after a decade in digital marketing, it’s this: don’t reinvent the wheel.
Competitor analysis should permeate every part of your business strategy, including how you choose a blog name.
Study your competitors and tease out the trends in their naming patterns. Are they totally random? Are they named after the business itself? Are they mostly clever plays on words?
For example, here are some blog names from the beard grooming niche:
- Beardbrand
- Balding Beards
- Beardoholic
Notice the word “beard” in each name. It’s used as a primary word in combination with other words to communicate the niche clearly.
Most of the names also include some sort of pun or clever spin, which indicates that the audience (and writing style) is more laid-back.
Use a thesaurus
If you’ve got three or four solid ideas from the previous exercises, you can multiply the list by using a thesaurus (we recommend Thesaurus.com).
Type in your ideas, and the site will recommend a series of synonyms, ranging from closely related to distantly related.
You can mix and match them with your list of ideas or add them to the list for use in the following exercises.
Use assonance or alliteration
Some blog or brand names seem to roll right off the tongue. This sensation is no accident and is likely due to two linguistic factors: assonance and alliteration.
Alliteration refers to a series of words that begin with the same letter or sound. Alliteration gives names a certain rhythmic cadence that makes them enjoyable to say and easier to remember.
The blog Cupcakes and Cashmere is a great example of this.
On the other hand, Assonance is when a combination of words uses vowel sounds repetitively.
Coca-Cola is a prime example of both alliteration (both words start with a hard c sound) and assonance (both use the long o vowel sound in repetition).
Consider using another language
Choosing another language for your blog title has several potential benefits. Firstly, a language besides English may best communicate the essence of your blog.
For example, the German word “wanderlust” has become synonymous with someone who loves to travel and is therefore included in the name of many travel blogs.
Secondly, English domain names are getting snatched up by the day. Using another language may help you overcome the obstacle of not finding an available domain name.
Lastly, a blog name in another language adds an element of mystery and intrigue that helps it stand out from blogs predominantly derived from the English language. This factor can also make it easier to remember.
Modify a common saying for the blog name
Another way to develop a unique blog name is by modifying or changing a phrase or idiom to make it sound relevant to your services.
Look for phrases related to your niche (specifically, the ones you wrote down in the mind mapping exercise above).
Repeat Crafter Me, a step-by-step crafting and DIY blog, is an excellent example.
Take inspiration from art, music, and literature
Drawing inspiration from pop culture and media acts as a dog whistle to signal to your audience that you’re “in the know “about the things most important to them.
For example, the music blog Consequence of Sound is named after a Regina Spektor song, which would resonate well with audiophiles and music fans.
Use good pun for your blog name
For more laid-back audiences that appreciate an approachable voice and tone, puns may work (if done tastefully).
Making Sense of Cents, a finance blog, strikes this balance well.
Use humor or self-deprecation
Humor is a great tool to dissuade any notion of pretense or arrogance. I can’t think of a better example of this principle in action than on the blog Film School Rejects.
The self-deprecating blog title makes it sound like the folks at FSR don’t know what they’re talking about. Yet, ironically, they’re one of the most authoritative sources online for amateur filmmaking.
Use common sense here. A small eCommerce business using humor in its blog title is different from IBM or Microsoft.
Use made-up words
What do the brands Sony, Wix, and Haagen-Dazs have in common? Aside from being successful companies, their names are made-up words with no meaning.
The bottom line is to remember that a blog name isn’t going to make your blog a success — it’s all about the content you feature on that blog.
And if your brand is successful, your content helpful, and your audience loyal, it won’t matter if your blog name has a literal meaning or not.
Things to Consider Before You Decide on Your Blog Name
Is it available to buy from a domain provider?
Many blog name generators (including the ones we mention later in this post) have a feature that checks each potential name for domain availability.
It’s essential to make this an early part of your research. There’s nothing more frustrating than spending 30 minutes devising the perfect name only to find that someone else owns the domain.
Does the blog name read well in URL format?
Since the URL of your blog must match its blog name, choosing a catchy and winning name for your blog requires you to think of a suitable domain name as well.
But often, the domain names sound inappropriate when two or more words are combined in a string. An example of this is Speed of Art which reads speedofart.com.
Is the blog name easy to spell?
If you have to explain how to spell your domain every time you mention it to someone, you’re adding roadblocks to your blog before they visit the site.
You can test this by saying your desired blog domain name aloud (or to a friend). Does it lend itself to several ambiguous spellings? If so, it may be prudent to try a different term.
Is the name copyrighted?
Just because the domain is available doesn’t mean the business name itself isn’t already copyrighted.
Copyright laws are different from country to country and state to state. Check out this article for help with finding out if your desired business name is already taken.
Blog Name Generators to Get You Started
Panabee
Panabee is an excellent name generator that provides you with domain suggestions, additional terms, and name variations.
In addition, the tool checks for available social media platforms and handles to keep your branding consistent.
SmartWP’s Name Generator
SmartWP is a free tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to generate SEO-friendly domain names.
What makes SmartWP so handy is that it doesn’t just provide domain variations of a single keyword but variations of several related keywords as well.
Name Station
Name Station is a clever take on the blog naming dilemma and is especially helpful for the indecisive among us.
The platform allows you to host naming contests, effectively letting you outsource the naming process to your audience.
Looka’s Business Name Generator
Look’s Business Name Generator is an incredibly flexible, easy-to-use business name generator that almost makes the naming process fun.
You start by typing in a series of keywords. From there, you can fine-tune the name characteristics, character length, and industry.
The platform generates dozens of variations based on your criteria, which you can click to reveal metrics like Google search volume and domain availability.
“Looka’s” is one of the most helpful and feature-rich name generators we’ve seen.
Blog Name Generator by Themeisle
The Blog Name Generator is one of the latest additions to the industry and comes packed with some excellent, easy-to-use interfaces. First, you need to insert the seed term to build the blog name you’re looking for. Then, it generates a list of unique domain names with high-quality alternatives.
Wordoid
If you’re going for the “made-up word” approach listed above, look no further than Wordoid. The browser-based naming platform combines the linguistic features of multiple languages to create pronounceable, brandable, but completely made-up brand names.
While the tool draws from multiple languages, all of the generated names abide by traditional English phonetic rules. You don’t need to worry about ambiguity in communicating your domain name to your audience.
Zyro Business Name Generator
Originally a website builder, Zyro business offers many free tools for new businesses, including an AI-powered name generator.
It doesn’t have as many features as some of the other tools on this list, but it can’t hurt to add more name ideas to the mix.
Domain Wheel
Domain Wheel is a simple, no-frills domain name generator and checker. Based on your desired topics and keywords, it outputs dozens of domain ideas, only showing the ones that are readily available to purchase.
Nameboy
Nameboy is another domain name generator and checker, but unlike the previous platform, Nameboy will display purchased domains (in case you’d like to make an offer to buy it directly from the owner).
The site also includes a bevy of other helpful tools, including a podcast name generator, a YouTube name generator, and even a restaurant name generator.
Summing Up
A blog name isn’t nearly as important as the quality of the content you publish on that blog, but it’s an essential part of your branding strategy and shouldn’t be overlooked.
By the end of this post, you should have an entire notebook or document filled to the brim with potential blog name ideas.
You can spend days, weeks, or even months deliberating over the “best name” for your blog. Our advice is to give yourself a deadline and go with your gut.
Remember to study your competitors, consider the scope of your business, and choose a name that best resonates with your target demographic.
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