How to Name a Business

In today’s world, you have to think about your domain name or your address on the Internet BEFORE you name your business.  In many cases, they will become one and the same thing.  Our business name is TestiVar, Inc. and our domain name (or web-site address) is TestiVar.com.  Google, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft and most other successful businesses these days share the same website domain name as the name of their business.

So naming your business is really the same thing as establishing a web-site domain name.  And it turns out that choosing the right web-site domain name is CRITICAL to your success on the Internet and therefore your success as a business.

We did a large study of profitable and unprofitable sites to determine if choice of domain name had much to do with their profitability.  Here are some factors that we found to be common among profitable domains that were significantly different from the control group of average sites:

1. Profitable domains end in dot com.  No other top level domain even comes close.  If you want to have a profitable online business, use a “dot com” domain.

2. Keep it short.  Keep it REALLY short.  Keep it EXTREMELY short.  The correlation between shorter domains and profitability is astounding.  Think Microsoft, Etrade, Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon.  Don’t think…  AmazingProfitableWebService.com.

3. Profitable domains are easy to pronounce as words.  Look at the above list.  MPDI.com may be a very short domain and mean My Profitable Domain Inc. to you, but those kinds of domains didn’t do as well as E Bay, Micro Soft, E Trade, Google, Yahoo, Amazon.  This is probably because people find it easier to tell people about new websites they like if they can use verbal words.  Amazingly, sometimes people actually talk to each other verbally rather than email or SMS each other.  Your domain name needs to be easy to communicate.  It needs to sound like a word (even if it is a nonsense word like Google), not just a string of random consonants that isn’t possible to pronounce as a word.

4. Don’t use confusing letters when said verbally.  tox.com may otherwise be a great domain, but if you heard that sound — would you know that it was spelled tox or would you wonder if maybe it was tocks?  The most profitable domains use phonetics that are never ambiguous.

5. Certain sounds seem to be popular for some reason that we can’t even decipher.  Here are the scores we have for the various letters of the alphabet.  Use more of the letters with higher scores.  Avoid letters with a lower score:

a: 38
b: -3
c: 29
d: 38
e: 67
f: 23
g: 17
h: 16
i: 41
j: -5
k: 28
l: 25
m: 33
n: 20
o: 55
p: 22
q: 8
r: 46
s: 47
t: 61
u: 5
v: 8
w: 18
x: 7
y: 2
z: -2

Those were our findings.  We hope they help you choose a more profitable domain name for your web-site.  Remember that every business choice you make affects your profitability in one way or the other.  While choice of a domain name may be a choice that is less important than the words used on your sales pages (as an example), it does affect profitability.  The data clearly shows that.

There are no real conflicting business decisions that would conflict with your choice to pick the very best domain name for profitability reasons.  It will probably take less than one hour of your time exactly one time in your business to choose a great domain name that is most likely to contribute to a very profitable business.  It is wise to invest that hour now…  even if you already have an established business.

Many profitable online businesses have changed their name after launch.  Yahoo advertising was once known as Overture.com before they were purchased by Yahoo.  They changed their name from Goto.com due to a branding study.  That may or may not have been the best decision.  But the company DID survive rebranding.  Yours can too.

In fact, it can start to thrive if you start to make every business decision (including domain name selection) based on profitabiltiy rather than personal preference or some other criteria.