 If you're wondering how to create a good name for your business, keep watching. Hi, I'm Sammy Blindell, the brand builder, and today we're gonna be talking about how to create a really good business name for your business. But of course, whatever we talk about today could apply to creating a name for your product, creating a name for your program, creating a name for anything that you want to name, even coming up with your fame name. But we'll talk about that in a different video because having a fame name is your name, just as I introduced myself, the brand builder. So we'll go into that in another video. So make sure you check out the rest of the channel. Go and look for fame name and you'll find the strategy for creating your fame name there. So today we're gonna talk specifically about your business name and how to come up with the name for your business. So there's several steps to this and it is such a massive subject that we're not gonna get through it all today in this video, but what we can do is make a start. So the first thing I want you to think about is the vision for your business. So you can come up with all kinds of crazy names and good names and nice sounding names, cracky. When I was coming up with a name for how to build a brand, we went through name after name after name. We came up with so many corking ideas. They were absolutely fantastic, but they weren't quite right. So I'm gonna explain that a little bit more in a minute. So the first step is really thinking about the vision because your vision is the promise of what you're gonna deliver. So if you think about the vision for your business, for example, how to build a brand's vision is to build the world's largest and most valuable brand building resource for entrepreneurs of purpose-driven businesses. So now I know the vision. Okay, so it's an online resource. It's for entrepreneurs who have a purpose-driven business, a mission, they wanna get out there, they wanna build something bigger than just a business. So now I've got a very defined target market for who it is that I'm attracting, I know what I'm building, I know who I'm building it for. So now that helps me to think about, well, that person who's laying awake at night, tossing and turning, and that's what you wanna be asking yourself is, now I know who it is, what is it that they are keeping them awake at night? What are they tossing and turning about? So my dream customers are those that are thinking, I've got to build a brand, I know I want to build my business, I know that my brand is gonna be the catalyst behind everything that I do with my business, therefore I need to build a brand. And so when we did the keyword research, which I'll also touch on in a moment, we found that there were, out of all the brand names we came up with, there were so many searches, millions of searches for the term how to build a brand every year, it just made sense for us to get that. So the first thing is to think of the vision. If you haven't got a clear vision, I have a process for taking you through that. If you want more information on that, look in the description with this video. It's called the Seven Step Brand Kickstarter. It'll help you to map out the entire vision for the business. So don't just shoot from the hip with your business name and think what sounds good or what sounds exciting. What do I think people will like? Start with the vision, because if you wanna build something that's gonna be sustainable, it's gonna be around for a long time, really what I'd encourage you to do as you think about your vision is to step into the future. Step into the future five or 10 years from now. Think about, well, the business isn't who I am today and what I'm building today. The business is what I'm building to serve and support the audience that I want to serve. And therefore in 10 years from now, do I think that I'll be doing other things that I'm not doing now? Do I think that when I step into the future, where my brand is gonna land, when I step into the future, what do I see? What kind of vision do I have for this business that I'm building? When you're clearer about the vision, you won't make the mistake of coming up with a business name, buying all the domain names, creating assets under that name, building products and services and programs under a name that is not right for where you're growing and where you're going. Because then you're creating a name now and then you're changing it in a year from now and then you're changing it again and changing it again, that's a very costly process. And also you'll lose a massive amount of trust and credibility if you keep changing as you go through. So I really encourage you to think bigger than, oh, I'll just do something now and then I'll perfect it later. You can do that with a lot of things but with your brand, don't even go there. When you cut corners, all you end up doing is going round in circles. So it's best to get it right now. So get focused on the vision, that's your first step. When you know your vision and you know what you're building and who you're building it for it makes it so much easier then for you to start coming up with some of the names that you think, okay, well, my brand promise is, as mine is to build the world's largest and most valuable brand building resource, that's my promise. So therefore, you might want to include some of that promise in the name of your brand. For mine, it's how to build a brand. That is my brand promise. Every conversation I have leads to the person on the other end of that conversation building their brand in some way. So that's the first step is what's the brand promise? Build your name around the brand promise, what you're going to deliver, what they're left with. Build it around the result that you give to them. The second step is now coming up with a list of names like we came up with about 35 different names and there was some real good ones in there but when we thought then, okay, so now we know our dream client and what they're looking for, what's going to resonate with them? What's going to appeal to them? Now, creating creative names like Blue Lemon or whatever, that used to work years ago, you could call it what you wanted because we weren't thinking about Google search, which I'm going to come to in a moment. But when you think about what's going to appeal to your dream client, think about the level of your client, where are they at? What part of the cycle are they in? If you call yourself something fun and funky and creative, but the clients you want to attract are fairly serious and professional, then there's going to be a real disconnect, there's going to be a rubbing and a bit of a sandpaper going on between how you're showing up and what it is that they want and what they're expecting to see. So we need to make sure that we match those two things together and create something that's going to appeal to them, attract them, engage them and be fairly obvious. I would create an obvious name for the business rather than a creative one or you might think of something that means something else in Latin, for example. And those kinds of names can be great, they can be funky. If you look at Nike, what does Nike mean? Doesn't mean anything, you know? You think of some of the Uber brand names that people have created, they've invested millions of dollars, euros, pounds and all kinds of currencies in building that name. Well, if you're a startup business or a small business owner, you want to keep your costs low and your income high, right? So you don't want to be spending loads of dollars and pounds and euros and big currency on creating marketing and exposure because if you build a brand then the brand will carry itself. And that's why, again, we called our business how to build a brand because it was very obvious what it was, it does what it says on the tin. So if you call it something that you like, might not be fancy, might not be glamorous but it's what people are searching for and that's what we're gonna come to now. Then you're going to make it so much easier for people to find you. Your marketing costs will drop, your brand exposure will increase and other people will be able to drive referrals into your business in a really super easy way. So step three is to think about what is searchable on Google. Now, like I say, it might not be sexy but if it's searchable then Google's gonna be your best friend as you're creating your name because you're gonna show up all over Google for the exact match of what somebody is typing into Google to find you. So again, think about the stage that your customer is at. What's keeping them awake at night? Have that conversation. I've got another brilliant visualization that takes you into a situation with your client where your client's just pouring out all the things that has been keeping them awake at night and this is all happening in your unconscious mind. So if you wanna go watch that or listen to that visualization, again, look for it in the channel. It's a dream customer visualization. It'll help you to just get quiet and get really focused. It'll be, I think it's about 40 minutes, 45 minute visualization which includes you doing your journaling and really brainstorming and mapping out what it is they're searching for. Honestly, the time you invest in getting this right now will pay you dividends for the lifetime of your business because you won't be changing, you won't be, like every five minutes, you won't be investing more and more money and keep rebranding. You'll save yourself a huge amount of time and a lot of emotional energy because when you're branding, which is the physical side of everything that people see and the name of the business, when the branding carries the brand, which is the emotional side, it's the trust. You can't feel trust as in like reach out and grab it like I can pick up my cup and grab that. I can pick up branding if it's on a business card or on a brochure, but I can't pick up brand because brand is emotional. It's completely non-physical, but it's the whole reason why somebody buys from you because it's trust. And so the weight of your brand will be carried by how you show up and how you show up is gonna be made so much easier if you've got Google on your side. So again, I would just recommend that if you can, if you go to the website, www.howtobildabrand.org, go onto programs, you'll find that we've got a great program on blogging. Now, you might not be thinking about creating a blog, but within that online course, it walks you step-by-step through the process of how to create something perfect for Google. So there's a lot of things that we do with search engine optimization, the keyword research, giving you free tools that you can use to find all this information out. So that way you've thought about, what is the vision for this? What is my brand promise? You've thought about what is gonna resonate most with my dream customers. Then you've taken that and you're putting some searches into Google to find out what people are actually searching for around that. This is where you'll find that how you're thinking they're gonna search for something is going to demonstrate if they are and you're gonna be absolutely right in your assumption or if you're just off the mark. An example that I gave, if you wanna listen to one of my recent podcasts where I talk about being relevant, so you can go to the podcast, I'll make sure I put it in the link for it in the description below this video. And you can, in that I talk about being highly relevant, highly searchable, highly relevant and totally removing things like imposter syndrome and the fear of not being enough, fear of not knowing enough, all of those little sneaky fears that can sneak in when we don't know the answers to these things. Well, listen to that podcast because I give you four tools as well as that online course. I give you four different tools that can also help you to become highly searchable and create names and content that means that your brand is gonna land and when it lands, they're going to keep coming back to you for more. So rather than think about having something sexy, think about creating something that Google is going to optimize you for and rank you for and put you higher up the search engines for. So you're appearing on page one right at the top of Google when somebody is searching for the very thing that's been keeping them up all awake at night and they come to, they go to Google, they type it in, they find you, find that your business name matches exactly what it is that they're searching for. It's like a no-brainer. They're not even gonna look anywhere else because everyone else has called themselves fancy names that mean call to anybody and you're calling yourself something that's highly relevant, highly engaging, matches directly exactly what they're looking for, delivers on the promise. It's like win, win, win, win. The next step is to make sure that you can say the name easy. So whereas how to build a brand is, it's a long name but it's easy for me to say, it's easy to speak. I don't have to spell it out when I'm on the phone. The only thing that I do have to double check with people because I don't know why but they automatically think that the two is a number two. So I have to say how to build a brand with two spell out and I have to say that on every single call. So if you're gonna create a business name just make sure that you don't have to spell it out letter for letter, right? Me just saying, and it's not a number two, it's spell out two, not the number two. It's not difficult for me to say. When I used to have, I've built nine of my own businesses so far, one of my early businesses, I had to spell it out again and I get like every conversation I had, I had to spell it out, they always got it wrong. I never received the email and it was just a pain in the backside. So learn from my experience, right? I've made these mistakes. I hear the mistakes, I see the mistakes all the time. I don't want you to make them. If you're at this point of just starting out then this is where to start, right? So can you say that name easily without having to spell it out? Also remembering that if you're building a personal brand as well as a business brand, then you're likely to be interviewed on podcasts. You might be on the news. You could be doing PR campaigns, radio interviews and they're gonna ask you, right? How can we find you? Where's the best place to go to find you? And if when you speak, there's no contrast there because they can't see you saying it. There's nothing coming up on the screen if they're listening to it from an audio perspective and you have to spell it out every single time. It's going to make your interviewers cringe like crazy. People are gonna spell it wrong if they're listening to it in the car and they hear it and they think, oh, I think it was something like that and they go, they can't find you. Somebody else is showing up because they took the time to make sure that they created a brand name that was easy to say, easy to remember, easy to type and easy to share. That's what we're looking for. If you're gonna build a brand, you want to create something that's memorable, repeatable and shareable. That's memorable, repeatable and shareable. That's when you've got a brand, not just a nice name and a pretty logo. So that's just the four, that's four things that we've covered so far. The fifth thing that I want you to think about when creating your fame name is do you have to explain it all the time? Like if you're, like how to build a brand does what it says on the tin. I don't have to explain what my business is. But if it's Ventura, or what is Ventura? If it's Nike, or what is Nike? If you've never heard of Nike, what is Nike? It doesn't mean anything. Apple, IBM, all the major brands of years and years and years ago that are the corporate giants now, they got away with it back then. But you can't get away with that now because there's too many people that are searching and there's so much competition. Back then when they were starting out that there was one or two competitors. Now, if you're a coach, a consultant, a trainer, a speaker, an author, you're gonna find that there's like millions of people out there that are saying that they do the same thing as you. If you're in a network marketing business then you've not only got people that kind of say they do the same thing as you, you've got thousands of people around the world that do exactly the same thing as you. So you are, if you're building a network marketing brand, then you're gonna need to really focus on your personal brand. So check out personal branding videos. I've done a lot on personal brand in this channel. So go and check those videos out if you're building a personal brand as well as a business one. So does it take you a lot of energy and effort to explain what it is? Because if it does, that's not a good business name. If you haven't got something that's memorable, repeatable and shareable and you have to explain it all the time, then what you're doing is put in a huge amount of pressure on other people that could be out there saying, oh my God, you need this person. And they say, wow, so what do they do? And that person then, it's not their business, it's eating into their time that they could be selling when they could just be sharing you very easily. So if it takes a lot to explain what it is that you do, because your business name isn't clear, that's gonna make it incredibly difficult for you to get referrals and people will just stop referring you. Step six is to think about once you've come up with your list of names and maybe you're choosing between two, three, four, five names, I want you to think about what it looks like as a domain name. And you will maybe have seen this example before, you might not, it might not have entered your conscious mind, but now we're talking about it, you're probably gonna see it everywhere. And that is to make sure that when you write out the domain name, imagine the name that you've chosen or the names that you're choosing between, imagine that they have got www.infrontofthem and .com at the end, or whatever your .org, .co.uk, whatever you're gonna choose. But let's for now just play and imagine you've got .com on the end. When you look at those words together, do they spell something that you do not want to show up for? An example of that is pen island. Pen island, probably a great idea at the time because all they sell is pens. They're saying we are the place for pens. But when you put pen and island together, it looks like penis land, which went viral for all the wrong reasons. So have a look at your domain name and see if I write these words out, if I string these words together, if you've got more than one word as your fame name or your business name, look at them together. And like when they're together, do they spell something or at first glances, does it make you think that it says something else? My brother, he had, he sold it recently, but he had a party booth business. You know where when you go to parties and celebrations and they have like a photo booth and you have the silly props and the hats and things like that and everyone goes in and has fun. Like I've hired his company so many times for events that we've run and it's been an absolute scream, great photography, lots of viral videos going out from things that your clients are sharing from events. So photo booths are a great thing if you're gonna start holding events. He came to one of my events very early on when he was starting his business, when we used to run physical events rather than online ones. And he came to an event and we were talking about the name and domain names and things. And he took part in the session and in his wisdom, he went out and he bought lots of domain names to make sure no one else could have them. But he did it without this step, without looking at when the words are all together, does it make you instantly upon first impressions think of something else? So he bought a domain name called photo booths in Essex because Essex is the area that he was trading. But when we looked at it on first glance, it looked like photo booth sex because you just didn't see the in S. You didn't see that bit or you saw it was photo booth sex and he hadn't seen it because he was too close to it. So my suggestion is that when you are working with your name and you write it out and you put all the words together if you've got a string of words, you're going to buy the domain name, just have a look at them. Is there anything that you can see in them that might be derogatory or inflammatory or rude or something you don't want to be known for and then share it with three or four people and say, what do you think of this domain name? Does this tell you exactly what I do? Is it clear? If I were to say to you, go to www.andfollow that and you saw that on paper, can you see anything that's rude or that I wouldn't want to see, that my clients wouldn't want to see? Just test it with other people. Which brings us onto then how it looks but also how it sounds. So we touched on this a little while ago about if you're being interviewed or if you're sharing it. Say you're at a networking event and someone says, oh, what's your website name? And you say it's www.blahblah, whatever it is. Is it again, is it catchy? Is it memorable? Is it repeatable? And is it shareable? Because if it rents a space in their head, they're more likely to then go and search it. But if it doesn't rent a space in their head and they've got to think about it or they've got to write it down or you haven't got, just imagine you haven't got something with you at the time or imagine that they're talking to somebody else and someone expresses a massive need for an immediate urgent need for what you provide and there's an opportunity for a referral here and they can't remember your web address because it's too long or you've made it too difficult. Then again, they're not going to share you. They're going to go, oh, I know somebody. Let me refer you to them later. And then they're going to get busy and go on with their life. They're going to forget to refer you. The person that was talking to them doesn't even know who you are. So they'll forget to ask them, oh, can you give me that referral? So you want to make it as easy as possible. If I'm hammering that in, it's because it's really important when you're creating your business name. Now keyword research, we touched on keyword research a little while ago, making sure that if you want Google to be your friend, if you want some free advertising and promotion from Google, so every time somebody types in the search for whatever they're looking for that you are a direct result for, if you've bought the domain name, then you are likely to come up very high on Google. That's one tactic for getting very highly ranked. Again, you want to get ranked on Google. You want to create a strategy that moves you to the top of the search engines above all your competitors. You want to do that as quickly as possible. Seriously, go to our website. I'll put the link in the comments below. Go to the website. Go through that blogging sprint because that lays out the entire foundation. You could use everything you learn there, whether you're going to use a blog to build your business or not. That will give you your entire content strategy or give you the ideas for your name. It will help you to come up with so many different things for your business. So you'll never have to worry about how you're going to show up, what happens when you show up, what people gonna think when you show up because you're not gonna care. You're just gonna know exactly what people are searching for. I hope that today's video has helped you to get really clear on what your steps are. I'm just gonna run through them again for you so that we do a little overview and a recap on what we've touched on. So the first step is vision. Create your vision so that you know what your brand promises. You'll know what it is you're building and who you're building it for. The second piece is, will it appeal to my dream clients? If it's creative, that's great, but if it doesn't make sense, then it could be putting them off. Is it searchable on Google? Have you got something that Google will be your friend and it will promote you because you've got a direct match for your domain name for what it is that they're typing in to find you? Can you say it without having to spell it out over the phone? Is it an effort to explain what the business does because the name isn't clear? When you have it as a domain name, does it read well so you're not creating some other kind of identity for yourself that you don't want? Does it sound good when you say it and is it something that includes your keyword research so that whenever someone's typing in a direct search for what you provide, you are the one that's showing up, not someone else. If you've loved today's video, please share it. Tag me in. If you're putting it on any social profiles, I'm Sammy Blindell across all of my social networks. Go out there, make that ripple of impact that you were born to make and I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video.