When starting a business or re-branding your business you should take some time to decide on a easy to brand business name. In today’s age it is hard to find an easy to brand business name with matching domain names. If you are facing this issue then the following tips will help.

1. Try to avoid using the industry name in your business name. I see this all the time and it not only looks horrible it shows a lack of imagination. If your business name was Canadian Mortgages for example that would be very hard to brand.
2. Do not use your own name to name your business. It is really hard to brand you as a person unless you are willing to create a personal brand that you will commit to your whole life.
3. Try to avoid long made up words. If you are going to use a made up word keep it 2 syllables or less. Branding the name Mrgmazoo for example would be difficult.
4. When stuck try combining animals or objects with other descriptive words. For example Red Frog is very easy to brand and very easy to remember.
5. Using geographical words is not advisable. This will limit your brand and again make it hard to create a unique brand.
6. Choose easy to spell names. If people can not pronounce or spell your business name you won’t be in business very long.
7. Avoid names that have multiple spelling variations.
8. Do not add ABC or #1 to the beginning of your name. It not only looks cheesy but in today’s world will not help your business.

What tips would you have for choosing a brandable business name?

Over the past week I have been using twitter in order to see what, if any, benefits it offers to our business.  I have made some great contacts, learned a lot about others and increased traffic by 35%. If you own a business, you really should consider joining twitter and using twhirl to become part of the community.

What is twitter?
twitter is a micro blogging system that allows you to post your ideas, thoughts, questions and links. Think of twitter as a large chat room in which you can correspond with others. Unlike a chat room you can choose who to listen to and who you wish to speak to.

How do I use twitter for my business?
To make use of twitter, you should start by building a group of people you’d like to follow.  For example, if you are a web designer,  you might want to use the search and start following other local web designers.  The designers you are following will post their own tweets which you will see if you have installed twhirl. The best way to make contacts on twitter is to be helpful and reply to others tweets.

Should I use twitter to advertise?
No. If you’re thinking of using twitter as a tool to advertise, not only will it not be effective, you will likely receive an adverse reaction from the community.  The people who are on twitter are very technical and will quickly block you if your only tweets (posts) are advertising or spam.

Can I send my blog posts to twitter?
If you have a blog there are 2 plugins (WordTwit and Twitter Tools) you can use to post your latest posts to your twitter. It is acceptable to post your own blog posts on twitter.

How do I get followers?
The true secret to twitter is not to try and get followers. Followers will find you if you are helpful and post meaningful content.

Do you use twitter for your business?

A common problem among small businesses and their attempts at marketing is that they hear about various marketing strategies from a variety of sources and then they try to implement them all into their overall advertising campaign. They may hear that the color brown elicits trust, whereas links that are colored blue are more likely to get linked, all while the primary color for the business is red. What ends up happening is that the company message gets all muddled and the business never really gets established in the community.

Consumers won’t remember companies that go about things from a million different directions. When you decide on a marketing campaign for your company, it’s important that you maintain a certain level of consistency across the entire campaign. Even if it’s not an outright advertisement, everything associated with your business should have a common theme or feeling to it. When you look at marketing for BlueFur, the color blue always features prominently and there’s a good chance that you’ll see an image of the furry blue monster.

Be consistent not only in the look and style of your various marketing materials, but also in your ad message. What is it about your company that you want to emphasize? What is it that you want people to know you for? To remember you for? This consistency should be maintained across everything, including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, signage, banners, newspaper ads… everything.

By being as consistent as possible, you will have a much better chance at establishing your brand in the marketplace. Can you imagine of every Starbucks store had a different color scheme or if certain Nike advertisements lacked the swoosh altogether?

Last week we asked what will have more impact on the Internet in the next 5 years and 46% said that blogging will have the most impact. This weeks question is…

Many people assume that they should only include a single element on their blog in one location. This makes logical sense, because why would you waste valuable screen real estate on the same information over and over again? Well, what if the reader misses the first mention? Then you may have lost an opportunity and you may have an opportunity to recapture that opportunity ever again.

Perhaps the best example of this is the emphasis of your RSS feed. There is nothing wrong with mentioning the availability of a full feed RSS in multiple locations, because it reminds casual users that there is an RSS feed available and they are free to subscribe whenever they’d like to. On the BlueFur blog, for example, you’ll notice that there is a button next to the search box at the top, but there is another reminder to subscribe to the RSS feed in the sidebar a little further down the page.

On Beyond the Rhetoric, there is a slightly different strategy that takes on a similar sentiment. A large RSS icon is placed in the sidebar, but within each individual post, there is a subtle reminder of the RSS feed just before the list of related posts. Two mentions of the RSS feed, but they’re both low-pressure and not “in your face.”

The next time you consider giving your blog a little makeover, consider including multiple mentions of your RSS feed to help maximize the number of subscribers.

We’ve already talked about setting up your first company website and why it’s so important to have a presence on the web. Even if your business is mostly of the brick-and-mortar persuasion, many of today’s customers will do a little bit of research online first. This is true of restaurants, printing houses, design agencies, and just about any kind of business. By the same accord, many customers will want to contact you via email.

First and foremost, your website should prominently feature a way for potential customers to contact you. A simple contact page containing your mailing address, phone number, and email address will do just fine. Your email address should be at your website’s domain. This provides a much higher level of professionalism than if your email address has the @gmail.com or @yahoo.com extension, even if you use these services to manage your email.

Beyond this, you should also realize the importance of email signatures. Signatures are the brief snippets of text that are added to the end of every outgoing message. While your personal email may have a signature with a favorite quote, your business email should stick to the basics and re-iterate all your contact information. The standard format for a business email signature would be something like this:

John Doe, Director of Sales
ABC Company Ltd.
123 Fake Sreet
Anytown, BC A1B 2C3
Phone: 123-456-7890
Fax: 123-456-7899
Email: johndoe@abccompany.com
www.abccompany.com

This way, customers don’t need to go back to your website to find the most important contact information. It also adds a certain level of professionalism to each outgoing email. If you happen to have any seasonal promotions or anything that you’d like to draw their attention to, you can add this to the end of your email signature as well. Maybe you want to make a quick note about a coupon code, for example.