I am sure that in the same way as many other new bloggers have done, I have been thinking hard about the name and content of my blog over the last couple of weeks. Probably the hardest decision to make was about the blog name. What has become clear to me very quickly was that “My Free Review” has no immediate impact for anyone searching for content with Google, Yahoo or any of the other major search engines. The same lack of impact would also effect users of StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, etc. While every blog on “how to increase Traffic” to a blog always says content is King, that’s no good if you don’t have anyone to read it! Reading articles on changing the domain name for a blog, made it clear that the longer I left it the more the impact of the change would be. Not only are there lots of changes to make to the blog database, but there are also major effects on search engine and other rankings. So yesterday I spent several hours trying to come up with a new name that could be tied into a domain name as well.

I started by thinking of names that would have the right combination of simplicity, memorability, and authority. A name that people could identify with for the type of content but had the right sound to it, catchy without being trivial. Words in the frame included tech, techno, expert, xpert, review, pro and even (in desperation) geek. I wanted to avoid using a domain name with any of the “modifiers” suggested by the domain name sellers like GoDaddy such as adding THE, NEW, BEST, MY or OFFICIAL at the beginning of the domain name or ONLINE, HOME, SITE, LIVE, BLOG to the end. Not only do these often look lame but they also lengthen the name and potentially make it less memorable.

The other big influence on my choice of name was that I wanted to have wider variety of content than reviews and hoped to reflect that in the name. So, you ask, why have I ended up with proreviewer.com! Simply, after several hours of researching available names, apart from a couple that were available at “premium rates” ranging from $500 to $5000, I couldn’t find any name that fitted the above set of criteria. Even when extending my list of acceptable words most of the others I tried were not available or just didn’t work for me. There were also a couple of names that I could have used but were within a letter of another blog name and with content in a similar area. So I ended up with a shortlist of 5 names and with the help of family and friends (a focus group of 3!) whittled this down to a final 2. Even choosing to include proreviewer in the list, which was close to exiting names and tied back to reviews, was difficult, but in the end it was considered the best we could come up with.

As you can see, the new name has become a major compromise. It still reflects an area that is more narrow than the intended blog content but I will just have to live with that and The need to have something that sounded authoritative and was in the right area to reflect at least some of the content was important and I am sure that Darren Rowse’s excellent and highly successful site, problogger.com had an influence on my final decision.

Other Relevant Posts

Why I Decided to Write this Blog

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P.S. Just visited Problogger to check spelling of Darren’s surname and coincidentally there is this post:

Six Defining Moments of a ProBlogger

which I thought was quite appropriate as I see changing this blog name as a defining moment in my blogging life.

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P.P.S. I think it will take a couple of weeks for me to make all the internal WordPress changes so don’t be surprised that “My Free Review” (myfreereview) will appear in various links and other places for a while.

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