#136: 5 Best Practice Tips for Choosing A Business & Domain Name In 2023

Show Notes

Are you looking to start your side business in 2023? If yes, this might just be the most important episode you’ll want to hear. Why? Because there are correct and incorrect ways to maximize a domain and business name. But it all starts with choosing a name.

In this episode, co-hosts Lori Vajda and Nola Boea share three critical mistakes to avoid and five important best practice tips for choosing your business name and domain.

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In This Episode You’ll Learn 

• Level up your ‘stand out from the crowd’ ability with insider tips for selecting your business name
• Discover the website domain trends that can help you attract your ideal customers 
• Why you don’t want just one domain in 2023
• How to make a business domain’s name work harder in 2023 
• 
  

Key points Lori and Nola are sharing in this episode:
(
05:23:01) Three well known brands, the reasons the owners chose them, and the methods they used 

(07:23:2) How building trust has become more important for customers in 2023 and why your business’s domain name plays a key role   

(10:38:29) Three important purposes of a business domain name

(12:19:09) Three common mistakes many first time entrepreneurs make, along with tips and resources so you can avoid making them  

(20:28:78) By avoiding these mistakes and combining them with our five tips, it will free you up to let your creativity run wild to create a name that resonates with you and your customers.

Resources 

Name Checkr  - namecheckr.com
Name Check - namecheck.com
Name Chk - namechk.com
WordStream - wordstream.com/keywords
Internet Archive Wayback Machine - archive.org
Who Is Request - whoisrequest.com/history
DomainTools - domaintools.com

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Nola: Think about the companies you regularly buy from, like Nike, Starbucks, Amazon, Sephora, or Ulta, for example. Have you ever considered how or why they chose those names? Just like your favorite brand, a business's name is an important component of its image and identity. In fact, to prospective customers, your company name not only helps differentiate you from your competition, it's also the first impression people get of your business. Yet many first-time entrepreneurs don't really think about the impact of the business name or domain name they select. Some even select two different names, one for the company and one for the website. Stay tuned listener, because in this episode we're sharing five tips to help you choose the perfect name for your business and domain, plus three mistakes you'll definitely want to avoid.

[00:00:48] Lori: Welcome to Sticky Brand Lab, where we bridge the gap between knowledge and action by providing you with helpful information, tips, and tools from entrepreneurs and other experts so you can quickly and easily jumpstart your side business. We're your hosts. I'm Lori Vajda, and this is my co-host, Nola Boea. Hello, Nola.

[00:01:09] Nola: Hey, Lori.

[00:01:09] Lori: You know, in today's episode we're doing things just a little bit differently. In this case, we're talking about three related things. And for you, listener, just to clarify that, the first is going to be on how to choose a name for your business. So we're going to give you some recommendations and information there. The second thing we're going to do is talk about choosing a domain for your website. And here the focus is just going to be on best practices. And third, we're going to talk about the disadvantages, as well as some of the advantages of using a business name and domain name that don't match, and our reasoning behind that might just surprise you.
But before we get into all of that, Nola, I have a pop quiz for you. At the start of the show, you mentioned a variety of different brands. And I thought it would be fun to test your own knowledge on the names of those brands.

[00:02:06] Nola: Okay.

[00:02:06] Lori: Are you ready for a little fun?

[00:02:08] Nola: I suppose. Go ahead and fire away.

[00:02:11] Lori: All right. This brand was founded on January 25th, 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports. The company officially changed its name to blank. What do we currently know that name brand as?

[00:02:28] Nola: Well, if you had just asked me in a vacuum, I would have absolutely no idea. But since you're referring to the brands I named earlier, only in one of them was a sports brand. So you must be talking about Nike.

[00:02:39] Lori: Ooh. First, that's good, and I like your deductive reasoning. It was founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by Bill Bowerman. He was a track and field coach at the University of Oregon and one of his former students, Phil Knight. And the company takes the name Nike. From the Greek Goddess of Victory.

[00:02:59] Nola: Oh.

[00:03:00] Lori: Alright. Brand number two. How did they come up with the name Amazon?

[00:03:05] Nola: Well, I have no idea since I just think of Amazon as this big jungle on the equator with a river running through it.

[00:03:14] Lori: So Jeff Bezos had originally dubbed the business Cadabra as in Abracadabra. After somebody misheard the name as Cadaver, he decided to call his startup Amazon, and his thinking behind that was related to the big river in South America. He thought the moniker wouldn't box him into offering just one type of product or service.

[00:03:41] Nola: Ah, okay.

[00:03:42] Lori: All right. Brand number three. This brand to me has a very interesting history. Initially, the company began as a fragrance shop called Shop Eight in 1969, the store was laid out so that customers could try on the fragrance before purchased. And years later, the founder, Dominique Mandonnaud, I think that's how you say her name, would use the idea to really revolutionize another industry. And what is the name of that company she founded?

[00:04:17] Nola: Oh my. Was it Ulta?

[00:04:19] Lori: No. Although Ulta does have a very interesting name. So the beauty brand is Sephora, and it gets its name from the blend of two words. The first is the Greek word sephas, which means pretty, and the second is the name Zipporah. And according to the Bible, she was the wife of Moses, known for her beauty.

[00:04:40] Nola: Okay. All right. You know something that I noticed about all of the different brands and factoids you mentioned is that all three of them started out with one name and then changed it. And I think it's important to note because even though today we're sharing tips and recommendations for choosing your first business name, listener, it's a good reminder that even with the best guidelines, you may still at some point want to rebrand. And should that be the case, we hope it's for similar reasons as a brands we just mentioned. And that is because your business grew and became hugely successful.

[00:05:14] Lori: Which would be very cool. But there's another interesting idea that came to me in kind of looking at the names of the brands that I gave you the pop quiz on, and that is the meaning to the owner behind the name that they chose, and the method that they went around to get that. Blue ribbon, I believe at the time, was one of the rewards you won for being top. And I think victory, kind of that whole idea behind the running shoe taking you there. Or Amazon, not boxing you in and having a name that's broad, even though you might not know what that meant, because it was a disrupting industry, Amazon, when it first got started, but there was meaning behind it. There was rationale behind it and the blending of two words. And I think those play into some of the tips that we're going to be sharing later on.

[00:06:05] Nola: Cool. Well now Lori, I have a question for you.

[00:06:08] Lori: Okay.

[00:06:08] Nola: Have you ever done research or searched for a particular solution online and in that list of search results you noticed that the business name and the domain name that came up, they did not match?
[00:06:21] Lori: Yes.

[00:06:21] Nola: What were your thoughts went into deciding whether or not to click that link?

[00:06:26] Lori: This is really interesting to me, particularly because around maybe a decade ago, when I would put in a phrase into Google and I would see the name of the business come up with that name, I thought, oh my gosh, there's the solution I'm looking for. How about that? That actually exists. The company already exists. And then I would open it up and it was more of a very spammy kind of site. And when you get that description, well, you get the name of the business, you get the URL, and you also get a spam score. And in looking at that, if things just don't line up, I'm far more hesitant today to click on links that don't match up or that have high spam scores because I worry about getting spyware on my computer.

[00:07:11] Nola: That's a really good point, because sometimes the name an entrepreneur chooses for the business is more of an afterthought. Or perhaps there wasn't enough thought. And by that I mean that a first time business owner could actually put in a lot of time and taskwork setting up their side business without actually putting the same effort and research into choosing a name. Or, they choose a name they really like, but they don't really understand all that goes into the impacts of that.

[00:07:39] Lori: Absolutely. For me, choosing a name is really hard. Some people it's not, but usually means something to us, right? And here, doing the tasks to get your business going and launched and up and running, you can check those off. Picking a name, people can get stuck there. They either can say, I don't really care. I'm just going to do it. Here's the name I've come up with. It means nothing to me. And then someone like myself who does content strategy and content writing, we develop a story to match the name, which I have done for many businesses. Or, first time entrepreneurs get stuck and they become paralyzed with the decision of what to call their business.

[00:08:21] Nola: That actually might explain the name of a company that just opened up in my small town. Probably got paralyzed and probably said to forget about it because this is a place that specializes in really great fried foods, good old Southern Fair. The name is, I Don't Know, It Don't Matter.

[00:08:38] Lori: No way. That's the name of the restaurant?

[00:08:41] Nola: Yes, and the logo is I D K. I Don't Know. It Don't Matter. But I sell really good fried food.

[00:08:49] Lori: Fried food.

[00:08:51] Nola: That whole situation about just not being able to figure out might also explain why some businesses don't have domain names that match. Because they might finally settle on a business name and go forward, but then not actually have a domain name that matches their business.

[00:09:05] Lori: You've started a few different side businesses. Have you ever had chosen a name and a domain that didn't match?

[00:09:12] Nola: Well, I never really settled on a business name and went forward only to later find the domain wasn't available. There were plenty of times I thought I had decided on a business name and really wanted to go for it, but before I went too far, I looked at the domain names, and more often than not, in fact, 99% of the time the domain name was not available. What about you?

[00:09:33] Lori: When I started my dating coach business, I chose Dating Made Simple. I was simplifying the process so people could feel more confident. But that name wasn't available for a domain. So I chose Make Dating Simple. My business name was Dating Made Simple, and my domain name was Make Dating Simple, and I used to have to point out to people that if they were searching for me online, they knew how to find me.

[00:10:01] Nola: They were two different names, but the same company.

[00:10:04] Lori: Exactly.

[00:10:04] Nola: Yeah. That's awkward.

[00:10:07] Lori: Well, it wasn't such a big deal in the beginning and then it became a big deal later on. And today, well, we're going to get into that a little bit later, but let's just say the pendulum swings. Dating Made Simple is what my goal was for the business. The name of the business spoke to what I was trying to do. And the domain of Make Dating Simple was now put upon the client, right? Don't make it complicated. Simplify it. So I think that lends itself to the idea that the name of your business serves many purposes beyond what you call it. Or it's the way for people to find you to get an idea of what you do, and it's how they'll remember you. So even though my domain was different than my business name, because I had to stress each time, I was almost like planting a seed in the potential client's mind to remember these two items, but they were both about what benefit and what you can do in the dating world.

[00:11:10] Nola: Bingo. And I think you've nailed that there.

[00:11:13] Lori: But the question still remains, Nola. As a first-time entrepreneur, what are the best practices for choosing a business name?

[00:11:20] Nola: The reason I was so excited about what you had mentioned and said, bingo, because a company's name really is often reflected by the products and services it offers and the problem it addresses and you, you are making dating simple. And if somebody just enters in their search terms, can I just simplify dating please. Something like that. It helps your business stand out from other businesses that might be doing the same thing. And that's, for example, if there is a cockroach that has the nerve to cross my threshold,

[00:11:51] Lori: God hate cockroaches.

[00:11:53] Nola: I will, I know I will call The Bughouse. How did I find them? Because I'm like, get bugs out of my house. And guess what came to the surface? The Bughouse. They were in my area, so that is the perfect name. The name in the business and in the domain all have keywords that were part of my solution finding online.

[00:12:14] Lori: That's a great example. So we thought it would be helpful if we started by sharing three common mistakes many first-time entrepreneurs make.

So you can identify them and avoid them, listener. Our mistake number one. Names that are too broad or too general. Here, the problem with a generic name is that it often doesn't give perspective customers any sense of what you do, what you sell, the problem you solve, or the benefit they'll gain by using your product or service. So a good example of this would be a company named Big Red. Can you tell what this company is all about, Nola, simply by the name Big Red?

[00:12:58] Nola: I was going to hold up a piece of gum because I happened to have Big Red gum in my pantry.

[00:13:03] Lori: No way.

[00:13:03] Nola: And that's the only thing I can think of.

[00:13:06] Lori: I remember that Cinnamon gum, I used to love that. But here in doing just a Google search, obviously the gum would come up, but one company I found was named Big Red and they produced soda. Another was a convenience store and a third company had a similar name in that it was called Big Red Cloud. Any guesses what that company is?

[00:13:29] Nola: I have no idea what a big red cloud is except maybe pollution during sunset.

[00:13:37] Lori: Interesting, Nola.

[00:13:38] Nola: But I don't know what people are selling for that.

[00:13:41] Lori: This is an accounting software company.

[00:13:43] Nola: No way.

[00:13:44] Lori: Yeah.
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[00:13:44] Nola: In accounting," in the red", meaning you owe money. So...

[00:13:49] Lori: Maybe they try to find that, or maybe they represent attorneys. I don't know.

[00:13:53] Nola: Ah, so this is an example of probably having a special meaning to the owner, but that does not translate to market.

[00:14:00] Lori: Well, you wouldn't want to say big black cloud.

[00:14:03] Nola: No, you wouldn't.

[00:14:04] Lori: Because that also sounds ominous. Even though being "in the black" is being in the money.

[00:14:09] Nola: That's true, in accounting terms, yes. And I guess cloud means cloud computing, so it's probably a cloud-based accounting.

[00:14:17] Lori: It would be interesting to find out what the meaning was for the accounting firm who came up with the software. So that's kind of why mistakes with names that are too general or use common business names where a variety of different businesses have it, often you get a domain that doesn't match the business because somebody's already using the name and it's under a different umbrella. Which gave me the kind of the thought of sometimes we name businesses after ourselves. So I spell my name, L o r i, and I thought, all right. Let's say that I had a design company, Lori Designs, and I go to check and see if that business is available because that's my business. That domain was already taken.

[00:15:04] Nola: Well, try to find anything related to Nola. It's New Orleans, Louisiana, this, that and the other thing.

[00:15:11] Lori: Yes. And matter of fact, that comes up when I go to write your name, it auto-populates with the capital N O L A all the time. Yeah.

[00:15:20] Nola: You were talking about having names that are very general, kind of like Amazon, and I know we're talking about it in terms of a mistake, and I don't know if it was or not, but I had a business name for a while that I named Altruist Associates, specifically to be general, because I did a variety of things on the side. Rather than have several different businesses or landing pages, well, I made them landing pages on one site, Altruist Associates, one company. But the thing is, my business card, people would say, so what do you do? It really was important for me to be able to have some kind of one-liner that made my name relevant to whatever it is they were seeking my services for. It could be a mistake if you don't have some kind of a story or tagline that says, okay, this is really what we do.

Mistake number two. And that is not doing the research before you choose a name that'll work for your new company. It's really important for you to do some research just to see if any other businesses already exist with that name. And this will help you to avoid potential conflicts. I have an example for that. I used to run very briefly, a transformational travel. Actually, it was a retreat company. It's not that I booked travel for others, but I launched a company to lead transformational retreats at these life-altering destinations; at these really special locales. And when I first did the research for the company, I named a whole bunch of different possibilities, and I really liked the term GLAD Travel. And of course, there are so many names are already taken, especially if it has to do with transformational or destination, I mean, the name Travel has been a business for eons and all the names are taken. Even Glad Travel. There was another Glad Travel. There was a competitor named Glad Travel, then they had Glad travel.com. That company existed in Hawaii, had a site that probably hadn't been updated since 1995 and had really bad reviews because people didn't know they were gone. It was still accepting money. People would pay the money, go on site, find this whole dilapidated place nobody was answering.

[00:17:25] Lori: Oh my God.

[00:17:25] Nola: t was, yeah, it was really bad.  But I thought, you know what? Once I put out my website, I used the glad.travel, not glad travel.com, and my company was different enough that I felt I'm totally going to blow away the competition. People are definitely going to stand apart and I used GLAD as an acronym for Groups to Life Altering Destinations, G L A D.

[00:17:49] Lori: Very cool.

[00:17:50] Nola: Well, yeah, I thought so. And I went with that. Then I went through all the tasks, got launched, got incorporated, all of that, and a little friend of mine that I shall not name, even though I'm looking at her right now,

[00:18:05] Lori: Would that be me?

[00:18:06] Nola: Did some cursory, just a cursory search and noticed that GLAD also stood for G L B T Q, legal Advocates and Defenders. Now G L B T Q travel is definitely a thing. And there was a high possibility that my travel destination retreat was targeted to a specific niche audience. And then they would come on there and realize, no, this is not what we're looking for. So you don't want to have traffic that comes and then bounces right away. Because that actually brings you down in Google ranking. So if I had just really thought that through or told my friend about my name before I did all that, that's just one example.

[00:18:48] Lori: I think the part in this mistake that I think is most important here is if you listener are in love with the name, And you recognize and you're doing research that there are other companies that have been in business for a while, they're going to hold that space at the top of a Google search. So if you're in love with the name and you go in knowing that you're going to be much farther down. On that Google search, and that's okay with you because your businesses are completely different. You at least are going in with your eyes wide open, which I think is kind of different than what you're saying, Nola, which I heard you say, is that I fell in love with the name. I knew that there were some other travel agencies in there. Because this was what mine meant to me, it would be okay. But you didn't realize that there were so many businesses with established footholds in the Google search, and so for you to get noticed, it was going to take a lot of content marketing.

[00:19:47] Nola: Yep, absolutely. You've got it. So listener, here are a few reasons you should conduct research before settling on the perfect business and domain name. Research will tell you if anyone has a trademark on the name. And if they do, you really should find a new name. I mean, just like you'd need to know that a car you're buying has a clear title, right? So here are a couple free tools that will check the domains that you're interested in, as well as social media availability for those domain names. One is called namecheckr without the. E before the R, and the other one is namechk without the E before the K. So namecheckr.com and namechck.com. And don't worry, we'll have those links in our show notes. So even if you find out that a company is using the name but is not registered as a trademark, there's still a good chance that they own the.com domain.

[00:20:41] Lori: Mistake number three. Names that are too long, and here are actually three important reasons why this can be a problem. The first is, names that are too long often don't work in social media handles, or they take up too much space in looking on a small screen. There's competition. There's a variety of reasons, but social media can be one challenge, especially if there's any character limits. The second is it's hard to read, especially when you're putting that information in for an email address or a website address. And letters that are too similar, like two Ls or two i's next to each other. You don't always recognize that there are two letters versus one letter. And a third reason why long names can be a challenge is they often get shortened and they don't match. So, I think you had used your own example, Nola, of Glad Travel. You had the name longer in your mind of what it stood for, and the letters represented something. That often is the case for names.

[00:21:50] Nola: Yes. Now, you had mentioned super long names and I can't help but thinking of organizations such as the International Association of Business Communicators. It's a very well-established association. It's a huge, long name. And you're not going to type that in to go to their website. So they have iabc.com. And I'll say from experience that when you are seeking an acronym for your organization, very often those are super expensive because there are so many other organizations with the same acronym that want to buy that. So the demand and supply, right?

[00:22:23] Lori: Yeah. Well, SaaS is a good example of that. S a a S, We had talked about podcasting as a service. There are already associations linked to P A A S.

[00:22:35] Nola: Yeah. And with all that said, if you turn our three things to avoid into three things to keep in mind, our tips for choosing a business and domain name grows to eight.

[00:22:46] Lori: Yay.

[00:22:47] Nola: Also, by avoiding these mistakes and combining them with our five tips, you listener, are free to let your creativity run wild in order to find a name that resonates with you and your customers. Now, before presenting our ideas, we should address the question, why is it important or not important to have a domain name that matches your business? Well, think of your website as a store on the street, and the domain name is a sign out front enticing people to step inside. Now, when it's not the same as your website, visitors get confused. It's like, okay, you know what business you're looking for. You follow the map, you show up. You think you're here, but the name on the store is different. So when you're online, that can often lead to distrust, like you were saying earlier. it might be a phishing page, or there's like a lot of cybersecurity issues. However, more often than not, those visitors, they're just going to take their business elsewhere. They're not going to stick around to try to figure it out. And that's one reason why having a matching business and domain name is so important.

[00:23:48] Lori: As I mentioned in the beginning, my company, Dating Made Simple, and I had Make Dating Simple as the domain name. And that wasn't a big issue early on. But then it became a big issue because there were so many businesses online, it's crowded, right? So you want to be able to stand out. Now, the example you gave of why you want them to match, there's also an equal opportunity in having domain names that don't match. And that is particularly helpful when you want to drive niche traffic to a landing page, especially on your website. In this situation, what we would suggest is, if the business name and the domain name are available, we say, get that for sure. And maybe take on purchasing a few domain names that are different that you can use to market and get back links back to your main website page. So, in this case, I'll use my company's example. If Dating Made Simple is the name of the company, Dating Made Simple is the website domain that's available. Those are the same. Then purchasing Make Dating Simple. That might take people to my book. I can have a U R L that redirects to my website. And now I have a back link to my website. I have a domain name that I can use for marketing purposes, and I can sell a book, and yet I still have the business name.

[00:25:23] Nola: That makes sense. And that's an intentional use of it, and you've really thought that through. Now I have another question for you, Lori. So, having said all that and talked about website and domain, can you explain the difference between a URL and the domain?

[00:25:38] Lori: Yes, so a domain name is the internet address for a website like stickybrandab.com. That's the domain. The U R L is the complete website address that includes the domain and the specific part of the site you want to direct people to. So in that case, you think of the www dot http s sticky brand lab forward slash podcast. That's that other component that lets people know they're on the right page. And how you might even think about that from a visual standpoint, listener, is if you were to go to Google and put in the name of our company, it would pull it up and then you would see About page, Podcast page, specific areas that you could click that would take you directly to the page that we are talking about. With more businesses moving online, having a domain and business name that stand out to the customer really is more important than ever and having multiple domain names allows you to get pretty creative in getting more traffic to your website.

[00:26:53] Nola: An example of having the domain and separate URL kind of working together is, Glad Travel offered transformational destination retreats to Vietnam. And therefore, I had a webpage that was dedicated to talking about those retreats in Vietnam. And so the URL would be my domain name, glad.travel, and that particular page came with forward slash Vietnam. Now for marketing purposes, this is an example where you would have a separate domain name, I could have Vietnam retreat travel, either.travel or.com, and use that in my marketing and have anybody who clicked on it actually get redirected to my landing page all about Vietnam, but on my website. And what would make that effective is when I had the branding on both. So people didn't think that they were going one place and then arrived at the other. They knew that this is exactly where I wanted to go.

[00:27:52] Lori: That is a great example of using domains to help boost marketing. Listener, you just got a bonus tip. But that's how you can use multiple domains to work for you in marketing and promoting your website. It's okay to do a redirect, which is what Nola's talking about, that a landing page can do. But let's for now move on to the five tips that we do want to give to help listeners choose a business name and a domain name.

The first one is be unique, just not too unique. And by this what we mean is a distinctive brand name and domain will help you stand out from the competition and it can boost SEO. As Nola said, if people were specifically looking for transformational retreats and they specifically wanted to go to Vietnam and they saw the total URL address that included Vietnam travel, they're more likely to click on it. So that key word that's in there, even though it's a tiny little lift of a boost in SEO, it still is a great way to help an audience find your business. And by doing that, you're also using it to help search engines help you stand out. So here's a free tool that you can use to find keywords: Wordstream. That's wordstream.com/keywords. You can find that link in our show notes or on our website under our freebies resource page.

[00:29:31] Nola: Tip number two, make it meaningful to you and your audience. Now, there are a ton of name generators online, and they're great for helping you get your creative juices flowing, but don't rely on them to choose a name for your business. I mean, even though they're quick and convenient, their limitation is that they cannot conjure up a name that means something to you either as a business owner or as a company. Now, to help spark your creative juices, get out your piece of paper, your tablet, and write this down. Ask yourself and answer, what were some of the reasons you decided to start your business? Now, write down what and or who drives you to make it a success. So, write all that down. Just do a stream of consciousness and when you're done, look at your list and circle any repeating words or phrases. Those may help identify the key words to put into your business name that will help create a name that means something to you.

[00:30:31] Lori: At the start, we had talked about the fact that Blue Ribbon changed its name to Nike and Sephora had two different words coming together to give its name. You know, that's a great example of businesses that are very well known, that chose names that mean something to them. Even you talked about your Altruist Associates, it had a personal meaning for you. It might not tell the user what your business does. But when you go to tell your story, it really creates that stickiness factor in the mind of the listener for your brand. And hence now, listener, that's what Sticky Brand Lab is all about.

All right, tip number three, give your brand growth potential. It's true that you don't want to choose a business name that's too unique or too generic. You also don't want to go in the opposite direction and make it so specific, you're limited to one single product or one single location. For example, if I as a copywriter wanted Write Words New York, because I lived in New York, and then I wanted to add website designed to my business. Now I've boxed myself in. And then if I moved, let's say I went from the East coast to the West coast, New York is no longer my home destination or where I'm working from, but I've boxed myself in.

[00:31:53] Nola: Exactly.

[00:31:53] Lori: Tip number four, make your brand easy to remember. You know, there's a huge difference between a memorable brand and a name that's easy to remember. For example, let's say that you have cats and you started a clothing company for cats and you call it Cool Cats Clothing. That would be all Cs at the start of your name. But now let's say that you do Cool Cats Clothing for kids, and you decide that you want all Ks instead of Cs, and somebody else comes along and they want Cool Cats something else, a similar business name to it. What ends up happening is all of these businesses are competing and it makes it hard for the user to figure out which of those companies is the one that they want. Because the names are similar, but one letter is changed, or there might be a hyphen between it, or somebody might put a number between it. It just makes it convoluted for the user, and so instead of deciding, they go to a totally different direction. Something that's easier to figure out.

[00:33:00] Nola: So, the rule of thumb here is just keep it simple. The KISS principle, right? Keep It Simple, Sweetie.

[00:33:05] Lori: Good point.

[00:33:06] Nola: Tip number five, our final tip is that once you've settled on the perfect name or the perfect couple of names, before you make any domain purchase, it's crucial to make sure that your company name and domain name are free of anything that could harm your just-starting company's reputation. For example, let's say you create stuffed animals and you named your company Bunny Fluff, and you get the domain name, it's available. Bunnyfluff.com. Well, then you find out that it used to be a porn site. It's on all kinds of spam filters, and you've got 200 better Business Bureau complaints. That's something you do want to avoid. On the other hand, let’s say Bunny Fluff was a really reputable company at one point, and the prior owner of that domain name was in good standing and had a lot of positive traffic, and that's something that you would actually benefit from. Now even though a quick Google search can tell you if there are any news stories or BBB Better Business Bureau reports or things like that, it's really better to use some tools that can do some deep digging. And here are three of them. And again, you'll see them in our show notes and on our resource page.

One is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine over at archive.org. The other is a Who Is Request whoisrequest.com/history. And DomainTools. That's research dot domain tools.com, and we'll be sure to put in our podcast freebies page as well. So it's very similar. This whole concept of doing the research for Bunny Fluff is very similar to getting that Carfax or that history report when you're getting a formerly owned car. And so you want to make sure that you are also getting the history for your business domain.

Well, listener, we hope that the ideas and thoughts we've shared here today have sparked your interest, curiosity, and willingness to start your business and empowered you to become a first-time entrepreneur in the second half of your vibrant life. Be sure to stick around to the very end of this podcast for a little fun.

[00:35:06] Lori: If you found the information we've shared here today helpful and want more tools, tips, and inspiration delivered to your inbox, sign up for News You Can Use over on our website, stickybrandlab.com or click the link in our show notes and remember, small steps, big effects.

[00:35:25] Nola: In fact, to prof. He, he, I did so good too.

[00:35:35] Lori: Your, your P became an F.
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[00:35:38] Nola: Yes, it did. Retake two.