Choosing a Name for Your Business

Choosing a name for your business isn’t easy. Coming up with the business idea was probably a cinch (if you’re one of those natural entrepreneurs, that is) and developing the idea into a concept wasn’t much trouble either. But choosing a name for your business takes a little thought and some creativity.

We know. We’ve done it three times.

We once helped develop and worked with Northern Lights Press, and here is the process we used when choosing a name for the business.

Northern Lights was a stable that all of us were familiar with. It was a place close to our hearts and meant something to each of us personally. We’d have to live with the business name for a long time, so having one we felt good about was important. Northern lights also represent our country, Canada. The Aurora Borealis holds a bit of a magical perception, too, and since we work magic with our services, that’s great. We all settled.

Choosing a name for JCM Enterprises came next. We’d learned a few things from our experience after choosing Northern Lights Press as a business name, and we decided to apply them. Here is what we learned:

• Choose a business name that has an available .com domain name
• Make sure your business name is easy to say aloud
• Test how easily your business name is to type
• Does your business name shorten into an undesired acronym?
• Do people understand the association of your chosen name to your line of business?
• Try to find a business name optimized for search engines
• Scope out similar domain or business names already taken to see their website

Well, we’d goofed with Northern Lights Press. The .com was taken, the name was a bit of a tongue twister and people often ask us to repeat it or spell it out, typing the name was long and difficult, the name meant nothing to search engines and the acronym NLP stood for neuro-linguistic something or other that no, we know nothing about. We always get asked, “Why Northern Lights?”

Doooh.

Alright. With JCM Enterprises, we were smarter. The name meant something to us (James Chartrand McLeod Enterprises shortened up), and it had a nice ring to it. While it wasn’t clear what we offered as a product or service, it was clear we were a professional business. The .com was taken, but we could live with that. We like .ca anyways. Hey, we’re Canadian. Or at least I am.

Typing the name out was a bit of a fingerful, but the acronym JCME was a breeze and both the long and short versions sounded good aloud. We chose that as a domain name to make it ultra easy for people to type fast, and voila. JCME.ca may not be search-engine optimized, but it was a sacrifice we chose.

Enter business number three, one that will be Harry’s little domain. (Hey, I still get to manage it!)

We need a name we can relate to, something that feels like us. We’ve tossed around a few ideas, but each one has been nixed because the association between the name and the business service isn’t clear. We’ve found a few good ones, but said aloud, they made us shake our heads. Others are great, sound good too, but are tricky as hell to type. Some are far too long, period.

Last night, we hit on a fantastic name that appealed to us both and made us sit up with a resounding, “Yes! That’s it!” A quick check on the internet let us know that should anyone visit the .com version of our .ca business or tripped up on their spelling in the URL, they’d land on a porn site. Bad, bad, bad.

So you see, there is far more to choosing a name for your business than first appears. We’ll keep you updated on our ventures with the world of a name that fits just right and let you know when we finally settle on one that works for us.