Hold Naming Contests to Find Company Names

Click here to Start a Name Contest

Whenever starting a new business, one of the main aspects to consider besides the idea itself is what it should be called. The power of a good name should not be underestimated. Choosing the right name can enhance the success of your company; on the other hand, making the wrong choice may sometimes be costly or doom the venture to failure. For example, Chevy Nova by General Motors’ was unsuccessful in Latin America because the company failed to notice the fact that “Nova” in Spanish stands for “it doesn’t go”.

In general, it is not hard to come up with a name for your business; however, when taking into account a number of characteristics that a good name needs, the name-search could become rather excruciating. To make matters worse, there is no consensus on the features of a good name. Some believe that the best names are informative so that the customers immediately know what your business is about. Others favour newly coined names (like Kodak, Intel, Nike) over already existing words, claiming that the former are more memorable. Finally there are those who for attention-grabbing purposes insist on a name beginning with a plosive letter (like B, C, D, G, K, P and T).

When looking for a name, one of the most important aspects to consider is checking whether there are any available and relevant domain names in accordance with the name you chose for your business. Moreover, since there are already about 200 million registered domain names, the process of finding a good name could potentially turn out to be more time-consuming than initially thought.

Creating Name Ideas

The website name generator NameStation helps to make this process easier for you. It offers a great number of opportunities to coin and combine words, so that you will never feel that your creativity has reached a dead end. Within seconds, you can generate hundreds of domain name suggestions. In addition there are several applications to help you with that, such as creating compound words with preset wordlists or words that you prefer to feature in the name of your future business. Among other possibilities, the system also offers word-substitutions, alliterative word combinations and translations to and from English. Furthermore, when creating new names the system automatically checks domain name availability.

Social Naming Contests

NameStation is a social naming service, allowing you to create public naming contests to find a name for your business. Holding a name contest with NameStation enables you to benefit from a global brainstorming event in essence, since the contests are open to suggestions from participants from all over the world. Everyone is free to contribute ideas to their own liking, with or without using the help of the system. You may choose to hide the responses from the participants to avoid distraction. Furthermore, you can easily interact with the participants through comments asking them for reasons behind their name suggestions if they have not added those from the start. It is also possible to connect with Facebook and ask your friends to contribute their ideas to the name-search.

Available Domain Names

In general, it is advisable that the .com extension of a domain name is available. With an urge to reach the market fast, some entrepreneurs often opt for the .net version if the .com is not available anymore, later regretting the decision. Consequently, when searching for the website, potential customers accidentally flock to the .com version, possibly never reaching their actual desired destination – that is your website.

After finding a suitable name, test it on a sample of potential customers to avoid mishaps like the Chevy Nova case and to find out whether the name is relevant, memorable and likeable. A good domain name is the corner stone of your online brand and when searching for it, remember to consider the long-term perspective. Contemplate future options for your business in order not to discover after a year that you are trapped in your domain name. When you feel it is a looming possibility, you can always start a new name contest at NameStation.

Get a Domain Name

Have you ever been inspired by the multitude of useful websites out there on the web and thinking of starting your own website? Some of them seem to be doing quite well. Who wouldn’t like to have their own pet project on the web, gaining a few more users each day and potentially evolving to a serious startup – all you need is a unique idea, a few skilled people and a bit of seed financing. And for an online business, you also need a domain name.

How difficult can it be, right? Well, seeing that you’ve reached this page, it can be assumed that you are by now aware that its not a trivial quest. In fact, by now you have probably spent a lot of time on domain search sites, become frustrated by the fact that most even remotely sensible names are taken, felt hopelessly lost, googled something like “get a domain name” and landed on this page. So welcome, let’s see what can be done.

There are over 80 million .com domains already registered. There are only 13 million .net domains, so if you don’t care that someone already holds the .com name, the .net is the first alternative to consider. If your service is location-specific, you may have better luck with additional extensions like .us, .eu, country-specific domains.

The .com domain though is the cornerstone of establishing an online identity. With a .com you can be certain that the name you’ve chosen is absolutely unique in the whole world. This is a crucial requirement, if you’re planning to invest in building a brand – otherwise you could end up advertising your competitors. Finding a good .com domain takes persistence and patience. If you have the time, you can look up names one-by-one, until you hit the perfect one. You can hire a marketing agency to do it for you or buy an expensive domain from a domain name aftermarket. You can also use automated domain name availability checking tools that do quick mass lookups. Lets take a closer look at one of such tools – in fact its over 10 different domain search tools combined onto one website – NameStation.com.

NameStation is one of the fastest bulk domain lookup tools on the web today. First, you can try your luck with the random name generator tool, which creates 20 pronounceable names each time you press the Search button. There are different base languages to choose from, so if you get tired of English names, why not try Latin, Sindarin or even Klingon? The names are still totally random, but they sound a bit different. Sindarin by the way is the language of elves in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, created by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Now, if you need your name to reflect what your business actually does, you need to include a meaningful keyword. On NameStation, this keyword can then be combined with random nouns, adjectives, verbs and preset wordlists with the most popular prefixes and affixes that usually appear in the website names. You can go even deeper by researching semantic relations to any given keyword with the Dictionary Domains search. At first it may seem as a bit complex but that’s because it is a highly powerful in-depth research tool. Dictionary Domains search also recommends synonyms, related words, popular affixes and prefixes. All you have to do is click on each one of these to get 100 new domain name ideas.

You can most likely find 4-5 potential candidates after working 15 minutes on NameStation. Each candidate can be saved to your Favorites and registered at your preferred registrar. Domain registration is simple, just click the “register at …” link at NameStation and follow the instructions on the registrar page.

There is a lot more to explore at NameStation. For domain industry professionals there are other specialized tools like multiple domain extensions check and bulk domain search. If you create a free NameStation account then over time you can save and customize your keyword lists that help you find available domains any time any time you’re hit with a spark of inspiration for a new online venture.

Best of luck finding a new domain name! If you have any useful tips that may benefit fellow domain seekers then please post them as  comments.