How to Create the Perfect Domain Name for Your Small Business

Choosing a domain name for your business is as important as choosing its brand or logo. With 1.5 billion websites in the world, the need to stand out from the crowd, and be easy for users to find you, is more important than ever.

So how do you make sure that you select the best domain name for your business?

Well, there are a few dos and don’ts. What’s right for one business might not be a good fit for another, so take your time and do some research. And these tips on creating the best domain name for your small business are a great place to start.

Pick a Suitable Domain Name

Choosing the right domain name will help boost the domain authority of your business website. So it, literally, pays to get it right.

If possible you should choose a domain name that is the same, or close to, your registered business name. This will avoid any confusion about the ownership of the website.

If you are a start-up and have not chosen your business name yet, then you have a much wider scope. Pick a name that explains what your business does, and contains keywords that users might search for.

Make It Idiot-Proof

Simplicity is always best when it comes to domain names. Don’t try and be clever by putting in symbols, hyphens or punctuation. It will confuse users and they will never remember it.

Also, try and avoid words that have alternative spellings in different countries. For example, an SEO business site called optimizenow.com could confuse users in the UK and Europe.

Choosing The Right Extension

Once you have chosen your business domain name you need to think about the extension. The domain extension is the part of your website address after your chosen name. The extension specifies the website category or international code.

Is .com Always the Best Choice?

Nearly half of all websites use .com as an extension, and it is the choice of most big brands and businesses. But how important is it for your small business website to be a .com?

Generally, it’s accepted that if you can get a .com domain then you should. This is because it is the extension that internet users are most familiar with. Often people just assume a website is .com, and will start to type that anyway.

When To Keep It Local

The only real exception to choosing .com is for businesses that would benefit from having an extension specific to their country. In some countries such as the UK or Germany, choosing a .co.uk or .de extension indicates that the content is targeted at local users.

For merchant websites, this can reassure customers that they won’t pay large shipping costs. Or for news websites, it demonstrates that the content will be the most relevant.

Do Your Research

Finally, always do your research before buying a domain name. Check which other sites have similar names, and what your competitors have chosen.

The last thing you want is for users to mix your site up with another one. If you have chosen something like DenverGardening.com it is always worth checking whether there are Denvergardeners.com or other variations.

Domain sites such as www.fivemint.com allow you to search through all extensions and variations to make sure you pick something unique.

Small Business Advice at Your Fingertips

So, there are some top tips on creating the perfect domain name for your small business.

Think about the extension as well as the name, as both will affect your domain authority. Always make sure you do your research to avoid confusion with other businesses and go for something simple and in keeping with your brand.

If you found this guide useful, then check out more tips and advice for small businesses right here.

Small Business Brief

Entrepreneurship, Marketing

Catchy Names for Business: 10 Tips for Naming Your Startup

Launching a new business? That’s great but what will you call it?

Giving your business the right name seems innocuous, but it’s harder than you think it is. The right name can dictate your success or failure.

Beyond the risk of being among the worst business names of history, you’re risking possible legal problems and marketing issues. Using a name that evokes power, values, and core dedication to your niche can rake you all the monies.

How can you make catchy names for business? How do you name your business with branding in mind?

In this guide, we’ll give you 10 of the best tips in naming a business. We’ll talk about some of the do’s and don’ts.

Ready to dive in? Here’s what you need to know.

1. Pick Easy To Spell Names

The first thing you need to remember when naming a business is to keep it as simple as you can. Avoid trying to do weird spellings or hard to spell names. People are easy to confuse, so having a name that is hard to spell can mean disaster for the company.

Keeping choosing a business name that is as simple as possible is in itself value proposition. Go back to basics. Stay away from weird names like Flickr, Tumblr, and, funny enough, Krusty Krab.

2. Go Back To Your Roots

If you’re having a hard time trying how to pick a business name, here’s an easy tip. The most effective way to name your company is for you to go back to your roots. Try to see the foundations that put your business here today.

What do you stand for? What do you want to accomplish? What are your long term goals?

Talk to others and discuss with the stakeholders of the business. Leave the ideas in the air and let them cool down. Revisit the ideas and check if the names are not yet under registration.

3. Don’t Be Too Specific

One of the common styles of naming we see around is people calling their companies by trade. Business names like ABC Plumbing and DIY Hardware tend to be easy and common. Even then, they limit the possibilities of growing out of the first name you take.

When you’re looking for ways on how to name your business, making it too narrow or specific can give you headaches in the long run. You don’t want to have a name that ties you with a specific product line or service. You won’t even want to tie it to a city unless you intend to stay there for a long time.

While there’s a lot of these pros and cons, choosing an expansion ready brand name is better.

4. Read It Loud, Get the Sound

Here’s a pro-tip if you want to have a memorable brand when naming a business. Read the name out loud and make sure it “rolls off the tongue.”

This sounds vague, but names that sound fantastic when you say them tend to be more memorable. Names like Gold’s Gym, Coca-Cola, and Krispy Kreme have specific mouthfeel to them. There’s a level of not only alliteration but the rhythm that makes them memorable.

Even then, make sure you still follow the other rules. Prevent any tongue twisters, considering you still have them to be easy to mention.

5. Have A Purpose

Here’s more of something to not do. Make sure that naming your business does not involve a random mish-mash of words. Choosing a business name should have a purpose, using words that convey the value of your company.

There are 5 ways of choosing a business name. They are:

Descriptive business names
Acronymed business names
Actual word names
Made Up business names
Founder named businesses

Some people will smash words together at random, hoping to get descriptive or made up names that stick. While this is ok most of the time, you want to have goals.

Facebook comes from “Face” and “Book”, conveying the service as a “book of faces” you know. HubSpot comes from “Hub” and “Spot”, conveying the business as a “hub” for its customers and a “spot” to stay.

6. Stay Away From Weird Naming Conventions

One of the naming conventions that emerged in the past few years is the Net 2.0 style convention. Names like Bit.ly, Agar.io and the like tend to use their domain extensions with their brand. Unless you have a very simple brand name, don’t do this.

The one that comes to mind is the defunct bookmarking site deli.cio.us. If it’s not too obvious, creating a company name like this can annoy people. It also prevents the natural naming rhythm in your mind and can be a bit dyslexic.

7. Don’t Generalize Too Much

While we advocate simple names when learning how to pick a business name, don’t be too general. You want your name to be easy to remember. You don’t want one that gets lost in the sea of brand names because it’s too common.

Strike a balance between descriptiveness and memorability. With the level of SEO and online advertising that you need, naming a business should show you are unique. It’s near impossible to carve out a niche without a proper business name.

8. Dash In Some Humor

Sometimes, how to name your business means using a name that can convey humor. These kinds of names tend to evoke emotion and can be meaningful on their own.

Let’s use a popular example: Elon Musk’s The Boring Company. The Boring Company elicits a type of dry humor that only SpaceX’s CEO will have the nuts to pull off.

The business name is funny, as it’s called a “boring company.” Even then, what’s its purpose? Boring holes underground.

It’s funny, it works and it has a purpose. While joke names can be good, be careful. Use and descriptiveness should not be below humor in the list of priorities.

9. Convey Sound And Shape

One easy way in choosing a business name is to try to convey the shape of the word. This works the same as tip #4 but in a different sense.

Depending on your products, you would want a brand name in similar “sound shape” as what you offer. One famous example is Kodak, using two hard consonant sounds at both ends. This is a strong word “shape”, which visualizes the shape of a rectangular camera.

If you can make a business name that communicates what you offer through how the name sounds, you’re golden.

10. You Should Be Happy With It

At the end of the day, you want to be happy with the name that you pick. You’re the business owner, and you’ll live with the name for a long time.

Creating a company name should be something that resonates with you and your customers. Enjoy it. Take your time.

Making Catchy Names For Business Isn’t Easy

When it comes to catchy names for business, there are a few things you need to remember. You want to have a name that’s not only memorable but purposeful as well. It needs to convey meaning and your value as a business.

Are you looking for more business tips? What you need is a team that can teach you more about good business practices. What you need is Small Business Brief.

Explore our other guides to get the latest on how to expand your business. We are your prime partner for everything small business. From buying a business to online marketing trends, we have it here for you.

Small Business Brief

Marketing, Technology & Software

Be the Best You Can B2B: 10 Tips for How to Build the Perfect B2B Website

Launching a new website for your B2B services? That’s great but with over 1.7 billion other websites in the world, you need to do more than simply existing online.

A good B2B website is forgettable. You need to strive for something great.

Start with understanding effective web design. Once you have a basic idea of how you’ll funnel traffic and increase conversions, it’s time to put that design into action. Moving ahead is difficult but don’t fret; we’re here to help.

Read on below to discover our tips to build the best B2B websites.

1. Know Your Target Audience

Whenever you create something, it’s always better to know the audience you’re making it for. This is the most important rule of website creation. The sad part is that a lot of people overlook this and rush headlong towards inevitable failure.

It’s always essential to have a holistic understanding of your audience’s identity. But to get the most out of your B2B web design, you need to know their interests as well as their needs and goals. Always emphasize how and why your website is useful to them.

2. Design for Mobile Devices

More than half of the entire world’s global website traffic comes from mobile devices. That’s why you need to ensure your website stays appealing to them. Nowadays, the most common approach in web designing is to build “mobile-first” sites.

You need to ensure your B2B homepage allows for ease of navigation. What this means is you need to make a cleaner design. It should behave like an app to make it easier for audiences to go through.

3. Add a Sticky Menu

If you want the smoothest, easiest to navigate website design, consider adding a sticky menu to a long page. Consumers browsing through your B2B homepage will appreciate this feature. After all, they could open a specific section of your website without having to search through all your content.

The approach will offer a smooth customer experience. This is due to the fact that your design aligns with how your user behaves. It also serves as a good map of your website.

4. Make a Clear Marketing Message

Introduce your brand and the things you’re doing at the top portion of your homepage. Using this approach helps present your company right away. This helps your audience know how you can help them as soon as possible.

Remember, having a clear introduction makes your consumers trust you more. This points them in the right direction. That means you get more sales and conversions as a B2B homepage.

5. Present Your Core Pages

Your B2B webpage serves as the first point of interaction for your audience. Your users are more likely to browse through it before they start exploring all other parts of your website. That’s why it’s necessary for you to present all your core pages within this space.

With this approach, your customers have the means of clicking on a certain section of your website. It’s convenient and it takes them to the page containing more information about their interest. You can read this great resource if you’re interested in how to market your B2B website.

6. Use Video Content

A third of an average user’s activity is watching video content. It’s one of the most convincing arguments that point to the usefulness of video for engaging customers. They love it since it shows information in an easy-to-digest yet engaging manner.

Make sure your videos don’t automatically play when users see it. It’s annoying to most users, especially when it’s their first time visiting you. Instead, make a strong call-to-action message to compel them.

7. Leverage Your Experience

Speak from your own viewpoint and experience when talking with consumers. This helps make the entire communication process feel more natural. Aside from that, you’ll add more uniqueness to the value of all your content.

A good way to show customers your experience is to collect client testimonials. This helps make your B2B business look more well-established and professional. This also gives a clear picture of what your audience stand to gain when they choose to work with you.

8. Give Hassle-Free Customer Support Design

Anything related to your website design should point itself toward satisfying your clients. Give working solutions that drive results while increasing efficiency and reduce the time of operation needed. Understand your customers and how their business works to increase your service value.

Your relationship with your B2B consumers is longer. Having a good design for your customer service section can define how effective your website is. This shows your customers how effective and flexible your business is, especially when addressing possible problems.

9. Use the Right Call to Actions

Make good use of call to actions to make and convert leads. The goal of these is to point the consumers in the right direction and act in a favorable manner. It should present it in such a way that it’s hassle-free and easy to do.

For the design, make sure to engage your customers with a clear, simple message. Ensure that you’re addressing the issue in a friendly manner. With that said, give them something to respond to and follow up.

10. Add an Opt-In Section

It’s important to work with the businesses you already engaged in with your brand. Having a section that allows your users to sign up for newsletters is important for your business. This section also gives you the right consent to use their data.

Remember, you need two checkboxes on this section. First, it’s about the information use consent. The second is all about the information and topics the user can receive from you once they opt-in.

Make an Amazing B2B Website Today!

You need to know your customers and their needs to make a great B2B website. It’s important to give them a unique, personalized experience. This helps them understand your means of resolving whatever issues they’re dealing with.

Why stop here? We’ve got more blog posts to help you establish your business.

Do you need help boosting the domain authority of your B2B website, for example? Read our guide here and learn more!

Small Business Brief

Marketing, Retail, Safety & Loss Prevention

10 Incredibly Handy Marketing Alternatives For Firearm Retailers

Do you find it hard to gain customers as a firearms retailer?

Before, getting people to buy guns was an easy task. Getting access to the general public was easy through the newspapers and radio was easy. Also, it wasn’t hard to make up slogans to convince potential customers that they needed guns.

However, with the year’s recent surge of gun control laws, it’s harder to place an ad for your store through the usual means. Mediums like them are still a bit touchy on how to put gun ads, so you should consider looking at other marketing alternatives instead. For instance, you can try out launching an online marketing campaign.

Many firearm manufacturers have established an online presence early. You will notice they’re the ones doing well with business right now. Find out how they’re doing it by reading what we’ve prepared for you below.

1. Marketing Through Social Media

Social media is the most visited type of website on the internet today. This is because it’s normalized into the lives of some people, especially the younger generation. You can expect them to be on any kind of social media platform for the better part of the day.

For this reason, you shouldn’t ignore big platforms like Facebook and Twitter when you’re thinking of alternatives to marketing your online firearms sales. It’s even easy to generate buzz through your posts. All you need to do is make your post some eye-catching and engaging.

Twitter also allows you to spread the word of your posts quicker than Facebook does. This is because of how it’s designed, making it easy to view public posts and easier to share a certain post. If you want to get the word out faster than you expect, Twitter is the place to go to.

With all that said, you should take note that social media platforms still don’t support paid ads about firearms. You need to rely on organic social media sharing be effective in social media marketing for now.

2. Inbound Marketing

This kind of marketing is like a mishmash of different marketing tactics. It uses the different aspects of SEO to help you target which people will like what you are selling. This all ends up to you sending them different forms of engagement to entice them further on your offer.

Another great aspect of inbound marketing is that it’s cheaper than most alternatives. In fact, the only time you spend on something is to gain the analytical data you need to look for an audience. This makes it a wise choice for any business who finds their purse strings a little tight for a budget.

What makes this such an amazing marketing tactic though is that it’s trackable. This means that you can check on and see how effective your approach is to your customers here. This allows you to either strengthen your strategy or change it up.

3. Utilizing User-Generated Content

What better way to gain customers than by using your existing ones as a marketing medium? This is the essence of marketing through user-generated content (USG) and it’s been an effective one for as long as it’s been around.

This kind of marketing involves you making a sort of event your customers can participate in. The online event also includes your product, of course, as it’s the other essential part of USG marketing. What happens now is they make a post that involves a gimmick with your product.

A great example of how this works and how successful it can be is Coca Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign. They had their users snap a photo of them with one of their products which they then posted on Instagram. The twist was their products had different names on them and users tagged their friends with the same name to promote both the trend and Coca Cola’s product.

That’s the general gist of USG campaigns. How you do it and what your gimmick is all comes down to you and your decision.

4. Launching an Online Store

Have you ever considered opening a gun store online?

Opting for e-commerce choice is a great way to market your products online. The great thing is you can do it in one of 2 ways, too.

The first choice you have is to partner up with an existing online store. This method can help your products reach the demographic faster. Choosing a good store also means you only need to worry about the presentation of your products.

For the most part, online stores like these take care of the other aspects of running an e-commerce store. Things like shipping and paying shipping fees are all handled by your host. The drawback is they take a percentage of your sales.

The other option is to run your own e-commerce store. Yes, it’s true you have to worry about shipping and customer services. Those should be small prices to pay compared to the benefits you can get by doing this.

You get more return when you sell from your own site. This makes it easier to return any investments made for your business.

You also have more control over how your website works. For example, you can make a separate page for specific products much like Spikes Tactical.

5. Blogging/Vlogging

Setting up a blogging/vlogging website allows you to build the trust of your customers. This is also a quick and easy way to engage with your customers through the internet. Blogging means you get to take advantage of a demographic of active readers on the internet.

Though small, they consume a lot of content on a regular basis. Most of the time, they’re also active commenters. This allows you to engage with them to talk with them and such.

Meanwhile, vlogging is an even better engagement tool. This allows you to add a more personal touch by talking and answering queries in a video. Also, videos get the attention of viewers faster, so that’s another advantage in vlogging.

6. Influencer Marketing

An influencer is someone with the expertise in talking something up. They’re an effective marketing strategy because of how persuasive they are. Combined with their often large audience, this can mean a great surge of business for you.

All you need to do is pay them a small fee for their services. Then, they will take care of the rest by spreading the influence they have. Often, their influence even goes past their regular audience.

This happens because of how much attention their stories get. Opting for a famous influencer is often getting more than you bargained for.

7. Boosting Marketing Through Google My Business

Google My Business is a way for you to put your business on top of search engine results. This is a must-have for any business for various reasons. For one, this allows your physical store to become pinned on Google’s map.

This allows customers to visit your store if they’re close to the area. Another reason GMB is great is that it allows you to gain more authority on web domain. Gaining authority on domains is important because of how Google’s algorithm changes.

When a change happens, websites tend to have trouble ranking high on search engines again. With domain authority though, it becomes a non-existent problem. Your website will always be easy to rank by search engines, making marketing easier.

This also allows your Google posts to appear on top more often. Content marketing also becomes easier as a side effect.

8. SEO Marketing

General SEO means getting a high rank on search engines for the most part. This makes it easier for potential customers to discover you when they search up firearms companies on different search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

What makes this a great marketing tactic is that it’s easy to learn. It may be hard to understand at first, but with some research, you will get the basics of SEO. More often than not, that’s all you need to launch an effective SEO marketing campaign.

There are also many ways you can increase your SEO. For example, you can build links with other relevant websites. This makes your website links have more weight in the future, enticing others to link to yours as well.

Another way is by building a functional website. Search engines love websites with next to no problems. Doing this can get you a high rank on its own.

The point is that you can increase your SEO through ways you’re effective in. This makes SEO marketing a tactic that improves certain skills as well.

9. Affiliate Marketing

This is another great process where you leave sales in the hands of capable individuals. In affiliate marketing, you partner up with either your customers or similar businesses. How this works is first, you give them a special link that’s an essential part of the process.

They then talk your business up to other people in any way they can. When the others become convinced, your affiliates then give the link to your page. Each link you give out is unique to each affiliate.

It allows you to figure out who was successful in referring you to others. They do all this in exchange for a small fee. For the most part, though, the fee is small compared to the sales you make.

10. Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the best forms of marketing available today. This is due to the fact it does a lot of wonders for your business. It can increase your brand’s recognition, SEO score, and client trust.

Also, there are many ways you can create content for marketing. Content can be anything as long as it’s relevant to your business. This means you can play to your strengths and create content you know will turn out great.

Try Out These 10 Awesome Marketing Alternatives Today

It’s getting harder and harder to market firearms in today’s market. Try out these marketing alternatives to increase sales today!

While you’re looking for a new marketing tactic, why not expand your service options as well? For example, having a delivery service will reduce security risks and accidents while handling firearms. Check out this article about the key characteristics of delivery services to learn more.

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