422 – BCS Part 5 Of 6 – How To Successfully Change The Name Of Your Business

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Make your name change a success

01:42 – Why change
04:28 – Where have all the good names gone?
08:54 – Deciding on your new name
12:00 – The story behind the name SuperFastBusiness
13:41 – Making the switch
17:35 – The brand that stuck
20:48 – Challenges to look out for
22:25 – Researching the reputation
25:07 – Paying the best price
26:49 – A good time for an update
29:37 – Covered so far
33:58 – Personal considerations
35:30 – A big takeaway

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Part 1 of the series
Part 2 of the series
Part 3 of the series
Part 4 of the series
Part 6 of the series

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. You’re listening to Part 5 of a 6-part series that I’m doing with my good friend, Matthew Paulson. Good day, Matthew.

Matthew: Hey James, how are you?

James: Good. We’re going well so far. Now if you haven’t listened to the first few episodes of this series, I recommend you go back and listen to them. They’ll all be linked to in the show notes. Part 1 was how to grow and monetize an email list of 250,000 emails. Part 2 was about side projects, and why you probably shouldn’t do them. That episode had a really big reaction in the Internet marketing community, which we’re very grateful for. And Part 3 was a website sale case study, where you sold a website for $400,000, Matthew, and we broke that down. Part 4 was all about optimizing your business, and how to double revenue if your business is failing, or even if it’s not, in 6 months or less.

Why change names?

Today we’re talking about how to successfully change the name of your business. So, Matthew, why would we want to do this?

Matthew: Well, when you first start out your business, you’ll pick out a name and sometimes that’s not a good name, and it takes you a while to figure that out. The name of my business was Analyst Ratings Network, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why that’s not a good name. You know, there’s 3 words to it, it’s hard to pronounce for some people, it’s 7 syllables long. It just wasn’t a good name, and I didn’t realize that because I wasn’t communicating it with people verbally, it was just through the Internet, so in email you can get it, but the repeatability of that name was not good.

What kind of came to a head and made me decide to change the name, I went to a conference called MicroConf, and I was talking to people about the name, about my business, what it does, and whenever they would repeat the name back to me, they would get it wrong. I would hear, “Analyst Network,” “Analyst Ratings,” but I would never hear the full name, and it just happened over and over and over again, and I thought, hey, this is a problem. If other entrepreneurs can’t get the name right, I doubt my customers will too. And that kind of sealed the deal and I figured, I need a better name for this business.

James: Right. You know, it’s a pretty common thing where we have a suboptimal name. I’ve had a few names, similar thing. I had a website development company and it was called ATLWeb, and a lot of people were calling it “ALTWeb”. So it was probably because ALT is some kind of a keyboard maneuver. And ATLWeb originally was sort of a short code for Atlanta. But people outside the U.S.A. don’t know what short codes for states are. People inside the U.S.A. still preferred ALT than ATL. In the end, I decided to move that back the the mother ship and change it.

But I’ve had much better success with other names that are so much more obvious. SuperFastBusiness is much easier for people to remember compared to ATLWeb. And I’ve done a lot of brand mushing up, where we‘ve rolled up several brands. At one stage, we had InternetMarketingSpeed for our blog, we had FastWebFormula for the community, ATLWeb for websites, SEOPartner for SEO, BuyWithBonus for affiliate stuff.

We had some domains for sale on a website where we were just selling domains. In the end we just scooped them all up and brought them back to one place. And it was so much easier. And that’s another thing, it might be just simpler for customers to find you and to understand what you do if you have a good name.

Are the good names all taken?

While we’re on this, I’ve noticed some people come up with objections like, all the good names are taken. And I just want to cover that one. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode, actually in episode number 3 when we were talking about selling a website. There’s lots of good domains for sale. Often, you can find a great domain that’s for sale.

And sometimes they might cost $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000, however, you’ve got to weigh that up in terms of the long haul for your business. How much is your business worth to you? I mean, we gave that case study where you sold a business for $400,000. A good name is going to be a very small part of the overall success of that business in terms of cost, but a big part in terms of how much you can sell it for.

Matthew: Absolutely. The name that I picked, which is called MarketBeat.com, that name was actually taken. The Wall Street Journal used it for a while. They haven’t used the name in over 2 years. I checked the name wasn’t trademarked, and the domain was for sale on Sedo.com.

And I asked a trademark lawyer, hey, do you think I could use this? It wasn’t trademarked, and he thought it would be fine if I had the domain and I should be pretty safe to use it, so I ended up paying $9,500 for the domain. For some people it’s a lot of money, but in terms of a business that does pretty well and I’m going to use the name for probably the next 5 years, it’s a relatively small investment into the business, for something that you’re going to use forever.

James: It’s also a barrier to entry for other people. Some of the people who have to choose crappy domains, or go with the domain they registered for $9, they’re not going to have the same market presence as a MarketBeat-style domain.

I’ve got lots and lots of 2-word domains that I have fortunately bought well and sold well. And they’re so brandable, and it’s instantly recognizable about what this domain might be for, and that’s why people buy them. There was one that I really wanted to develop out into a Udemy or a Lynda-type site called LearnStream. It was such a great 2-word domain, it really lent itself well to that type of business. It’s obvious when you hear about a name like that what it could possibly be, about learning, online streaming.

So a lot of factors go into coming up with a name, and we’ve started talking about a few of them. You certainly want to do your checks to make sure that it hasn’t been used for something unsavory or bad or that doesn’t say something weird when you put the words up. Like Therapist can also be TheRapist.

And you might want to trademark your domain if you can, and if it hasn’t been before. Once you do it, that’s a whole other conversation. But the main point around that is think about what domain’s going to serve you well for the next 10 years. A lot of people at 3 in the morning are going to register a domain that might serve them well for one campaign, for the next week. Think a little longer term. Think about the long haul.

And I know I registered SuperFastBusiness quite some time back, and it’s been a brand that has been able to stay with me for a long time and can endure, but I should have trademarked it a little earlier. We also covered that one in an earlier episode where other people can come and start using your name if you don’t trademark it, especially in different top-level domain variations.

If you get a really good domain, it’s nice to own several versions of it, just to protect your brand. And branding’s super important, and if you do have something substantial, it really is worth protecting and perhaps trademarking.

The steps to a new name

So let’s talk about what are the steps involved. You’re at this point where you had your first domain, which had an unfortunate start in terms of the name, what it could have spelt out. And you decided you wanted to change it because your customers couldn’t figure out what your brand is and they could never repeat it quite properly. By the way, that used to happen to me with FastWebFormula. People couldn’t quite figure that out. So you’ve decided to make it easier, what steps have you gone through?

Matthew: Yeah, so the first step was to identify the name. I had a list of probably 10 names. I just asked friends, family for, hey, what do you think sounds good? And some of my best customers I talked to and asked them. After I had 5 names, I was like, hey, I’m thinking of switching my name to one of these, what do you like and why? What do you think each one of these means? So I just did some surveying to try to get some better ideas of what people thought the new brand would mean, and what does this company do?

And I got some pretty good feedback about MarketBeat. There were a couple of other names I was considering that were decent names, but when I heard them or when people thought about what those names might mean, they didn’t quite make as much sense. So you got to be really careful about the name you pick and you need to get some good feedback about it. You can’t really trust yourself in picking a name, it is something where so many people are going to be interacting with your brand. You just need to get that feedback.

James: Yeah. I’ll offer a slightly contrarian point of view. I’ve often found friends and family are the very worst people to ask an opinion for, because they just often cannot relate to what it is that we do. I remember going to a meeting with my dad, actually, a lunchtime meeting, and he stood up at the table, and he had to introduce his guest, which was me, and he goes, “This is my son, James, not exactly sure what he does, but evidently it works out really well for him, and it’s got something to do with the Internet.” Then we both sat back down, and I just chuckled.

It is really hard to explain what we do to the outsider. So if you do get feedback, often it’s good to think about your target customer and to see what else has already been successful in the marketplace.

And I also remember an episode of Seth Godin’s, where he was talking about the weirder a name is or the harder it is to for people to grasp what it means, the harder it is to get traction in the beginning, but the stronger ownership you have when it does have traction. You look at a list of words like Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Apple – they all don’t mean that much to a first-time listener, however once you know what it is, they have ownership of that brand.

So I think it’s OK to have a brandable domain, if you want to put some effort into making people know what that actually means over the long haul. Don’t just buy a domain because it’s got keywords in it and you think you’re going to pick up search traffic. I think MarketBeat is a great name for what you are doing with that subscription.

Matthew: Yeah. I made the mistake of buying a keyword domain when I first started. So I called it Analyst Ratings Network, I bought AnalystRatings.net, and then I ranked every everywhere for that keyword of “analyst ratings” and it turns out that wasn’t a very important keyword and I just didn’t get a lot of traffic from it. So there, I was kind of stuck with that domain name even though the reason I bought it didn’t even have much of a business impact.

Where SuperFastBusiness came from

James: One of the reasons I went with SuperFastBusiness is I was thinking of that triangle. You know, the one where you can have cheap, good or fast, pick 2. And I didn’t want to be cheap, because I was just coming from Mercedes-Benz. I really don’t resonate with the key Hyundai philosophy of doing things. So that was out. Definitely wanted to be good and fast. So of those 2, I thought fast is good. A lot of people online are pressed for time.

And business is so general that it was able to capture all of the business units in a nice little grab bag. I didn’t want to be too specific, and one of my original companies was called J-Six Solutions. Again, solutions was quite broad, enough to cater for the next 10 years’ worth of business, whether it was sales training, whether it was website development, it didn’t really matter, I could put it all under that, because I was solving problems.

So don’t pin yourself too tightly into a corner. A keyword-rich domain can be a bit restrictive for the long haul. If anything, go a little more general, a little more brandable would be something.

So you’ve picked out a name with your panel of experts, you’ve decided on it, you’ve approached someone to buy it, no doubt.

Matthew: Yeah. I finalized the name, the domain was listed on Sedo for 10 grand, the guy wasn’t that willing to budge and I just sucked it up and ended up paying $9,500 for that domain name, which is fine. I made sure that I could trademark it, and that wasn’t a big issue. I made sure there weren’t any existing trademarks for that name in the United States where I live.

The process of switching over

Then once the name was finalized, there was a huge process to move everything over and let customers know. When I made this move, it was only 4 or 5 months ago, and I had 200,000 people that got email from me every day. So if all of a sudden one day they started getting email from somebody they don’t recognize, that could be a lot of people doing a spam report or unsubscribing.

So I had to make it very clear that this is the old name, this is the new name, this is why we are changing it, so I just made a big effort to over-communicate the change while we did it, and 4 or 5 months later now I still have a big note on the top of the website saying, hey, we changed the name. We used to be this, now we’re this, this is why. So just over-communicating the change if you’re going to do that, that’s a good thing.

People don’t pay as much attention to your business as you think they do, so you can’t send one email saying hey, we changed our name. It should be probably 5 emails over the course of a couple of months and notices all over your website. If you have a newsletter, a notice in there and just make it so people can’t miss the name change.

James: Yeah, it’s interesting what you said, people don’t pay as much attention as what you do. I’ve found generally, when I want to change a whole website, like when we picked up 6 websites and moved them to one, we didn’t really need to communicate that much to the customers, because I don’t think they cared so much. With the magic of a 301 search engine friendly redirect, if people were clicking on links to the old site, it would transport them to the new page on the new site that had the same information.

It was really interesting when I changed FastWebFormula across to SuperFastBusiness. It was a forum, so we just picked up the whole forum, copied it across into the exact same directory, and this is a really important thing, if you’re going to move stuff around, then I suggest you copy the exact same page structure and directory structure. That makes it really easy to send a catchall redirect to the new site because you can literally copy an entire site across to the new site, then you just do a redirection of the old site, and the corresponding page will go to the corresponding page.

If you have /blue on the old domain, then it will go to /blue on the new domain. It makes it a lot easier for the usability. You don’t want to cause carnage and chaos for a website by chopping and changing all of your hard-won links and search engine positions. I’ve still got indexed pages from my old sites years later because of the 301 search engine friendly redirect. Now if you’ve got any comments on that point, I’ll ask you, Matthew, just before I go on to the next point that I wanted to make around this topic.

Matthew: Yeah. I think the 301 redirects are big, both for SEO reasons and for you know, if you have old links floating out there as I did, when someone clicks on a link in the newsletter we sent out 6 months ago, we still want that link to go to the right place, and I think that’s hugely important if you’re switching websites.

James: Yeah. And so my next point on this, which is similar, is you can then just go and modify your Send From addresses and your autoresponder systems, etc. I do have a little notice in my FastWebFormula community, and it just says, if you ever see FastWebFormula, that’s what this place used to be called.

Because you’ve got to keep in mind that it’s only really going to affect people who knew you up until the point of the change. After the point of change, there’ll be so many new people that it’s not going to mean anything to them. So don’t overcook the warnings or the messages, keeping in mind once you’ve fully informed everyone who was there, then it’s like a new start. It really is like a fresh beginning.

The name people still mention

The interesting thing that I found, of all the brands I moved, and there was probably about 8, there’s one brand people keep talking about and keep mentioning, to the point where we’ve recently reestablished a site on that domain, because they still refer to SEOPartner. It’s the strangest thing. We haven’t had it for years. People still talk about our SEOPartner services.

So we’ve done something similar to what you did with MarketBeat, is we’ve created a new source. We’ve created an industry news site and we simply put banners that redirect people to our products page. Our goal is to build up the industry news source for wholesale SEO resellers. So people who sell services but don’t provide the services or do them in-house, they should be getting the news from us and then they’ll be redirected to where they can buy wholesale services. So it’s pretty much the brand dictating that it’s so strong it deserves its own entity.

Matthew: So why do you think that name got stuck in people’s minds when they just kind of forgot about other names?

James: It’s such a good name because it says what it does. It’s both brandable and easy to understand. It’s got SEO in the words, so it’s very clearly delineated. It’s got PARTNER in the name, and that says, “Hey, we’ll do this with you.” Being a wholesale provider, it’s really easy for people to get it. Hey, these guys can partner with us, and we can go out and help customers. So because of the way that it went, and it wasn’t always like that, it wasn’t always positioned as a wholesale vendor, it just became the wholesale vendor. It went through this crazy phase.

In the beginning, there was these two packages. Then we ended up expanding up to six or seven and then 10, and then we went back down to three or four, our core packages. And then we went more from retail to wholesale because of the side thing we’re talking about in the episode number 4, about growing your business around the same customer.

Well, our coaching community customers are often resellers, and they always need products and services to resell. So it turned out that I’d created my own customer base for this wholesale vendor business. It’s a sticky, sticky name, and a great name. I originally bought that for $500 on GoDaddy auctions, and created that business live in a workshop called Business Internet Formula. It was my fourth workshop that I’d run. I created this business from scratch in the workshop live. We recorded it. The recordings are still inside the SuperFastBusiness membership.

That business went on to become a 7-figure per year business in its own right, and it was born in this live case study. The domain was just a winner. It really is a good domain. So there you go. Sometimes, your customers will really drive the direction by showing you they just don’t get what you do or they totally get what you do.

What sort of challenges are there with name changes? Did you find things that happened that you weren’t expecting?

Some challenges with name changing

Matthew: Yeah, a couple of things. One is it seemed to be kind of a, you know, if you’re preparing for something you think is going to be a big deal, you’re going to get a lot of feedback about it, a lot of comments, and it just turns out your customers don’t tend to care that much. They’re like, oh, OK, new name, got it.

And you’re not going to get a lot of feedback about it either way. A couple of people have said, hey, nice name change, but that’s about it and you know, after I made the change the business just kind of went on as normal. So it’s something you think is going to be a big thing and it ends up not being a big thing in the short term, immediately after it happens.

James: Yeah. I’m so not scared of changing names. The sort of reaction I get from members is like, “Oh, cool.”

Matthew: Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

James: I didn’t know you do that because I now put everything in one thing. I didn’t even know you did that because I had these partitioned businesses and brought them all together. It just made sense. The best solutions are always simple in hindsight. I think that’s Eli Goldratt saying. It’s always obvious in hindsight.

Matthew: Yeah. The other thing is, if you’re going to switch domain names, even if you do a 301 redirect, it still takes Google a few weeks to kind of realize that you switched domains and all that stuff has happened. And you can tell them that you’re switching domains, but for me, I probably took a 2 or 4 week dip in traffic when I made that change, and I kind of new it was coming, I didn’t know what the scale of it would be, but it’s something you have to be aware of and kind of prepare for.

James: And you also have to see what sort of reputation the domain you want to move to has. You will transfer your page rank, and you will transfer backlinks, but you want to also pay attention to what’s already pointing to that thing. If it’s had a tarnished reputation or being blacklisted. Maybe it was used in part of a blog network and it’s been toxic or fingerprinted by all these tools on a bad domain, bad neighborhood, etc.

Matthew: And how do we do this?

James: One thing is you can type site: and then the domain name, and see what’s pointing to it. How many pages are indexed to it. Once you hook it up to Google Webmaster Tools, you might get a little peak at what’s pointing to it, and you can use other tools like Majestic SEO or ahrefs.com to see what’s going on or SEMrush. These tools should give you a bit of a picture as to what’s happening with that domain. Google aren’t going to update pagerank anymore, so you might not see it in your browser. But you might get a feel for some historical value for it.

But the main thing is you just want to check that it is actually indexed. If your site is not indexed at all, that could be a big indicator there’s a problem. In the old days, you’d have a great out pagerank bar, but these days, point your domain to a server, put up an index.html or index.php page and put some text like new site and see if it pops up and gets indexed. If you get indexed, then it’s probably going to be fine.

I think you can actually submit to Google Webmaster Tools a reconsideration request. I’ve had domains knocked off and then restored when I’ve sent them an explanation. There was one domain, which I’d purchased, and for some reason just was not showing up and I’d installed a software app onto this domain, and I put in a Google reconsideration request, showed them that this is a legit domain and here’s how it serves people, and they restored it and it popped up straight back away, it was really good.

Matthew: Yeah, it’s important to know that a manual penalty like that from Google is not the end of the world. I’ve gotten a couple on my sites for just kind of random reasons. And if you fix whatever they tell you to fix and you remove the bad pages they don’t want, you send a reconsideration request, you almost always get it taken care of. It’s not the end of the world.

James: Yeah. Just don’t fly into a big name change onto some corrupt domain. So just put it up first, see that it’s good, and then switch it across.

Getting a good deal

If you want to get a feel for what prices might be on a domain, there’s a great website called DN Sale Price. I don’t think it’s updated anymore, but it certainly has good historical record of stuff probably up to 2013. You can punch in a couple of two-word domains. Most of them are going to give you a range of prices. Often, they’re in the $2,000 or $3,000 price range.

I think I’ve talked about the process of how you can save money buying domains in one of the other podcasts. But often, if a domain is listed for sale, like the person is actively trying to sell it, you can go through a negotiation process. One of the keys is to not make a ridiculously, low, silly offer. I think it’s not respectful of people to make a lowball offer.

If you’re looking at a $5,000 domain, sending a $50 offer is just insulting. You wouldn’t send anything less than a thousand dollars for a domain like that. Often, you’ll be able to pick it up for $2,000 or $3,000 if they’re asking 5, or $1,000 if they’re asking 2 for example. Often, 50% is good. But if you find a great domain and someone really knows it, you’re going to be paying pretty close to what they’re asking for.

So, other challenges, let’s see. You’ve changed the name of your business, you’ve told the customers who used to deal with the old brand. From the new day forward, everyone knew only knows the new ones. So that’s pretty easy. You’ve checked the reputation, you’ve protected yourself with some kind of a trademark if possible, and now, often you’ll do a design upgrade as well. I think that’s sort of an important aspect.

Looks count

If you’re going to change the domain and you get a fresh start, you might as well look at things like how you want to be perceived in the market. Your logo might get an update and your design of the website and the material should all probably be redone with a style guide, and that would be a guideline as to what your colors are, the look and feel of your website, and every document you do, whether it’s a website, an email, a PDF, should all follow the style guideline.

I learned this sort of stuff from a big brand like Mercedes-Benz who are so active in preserving their reputation. Their brand quality is preserved through very strict guidelines on how that brand can be used, like you must have the words a certain distance from the star. There must be nothing within a certain distance of the star and the words for example. They’re really, really fussy, but it certainly shows because it’s one of the top two brands in the world probably.

Matthew: Absolutely, yeah. We did a new logo and we changed the name of our business. I paid an agency to do that and do it right, and the logo we came out with is pretty simple, but it works, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

One other mistake that I made when doing the switch was I’d kind of forgotten to tell my business partners that we were changing the name, so there were a couple of advertising agencies that I do business with, and they found out when everybody else did, and it probably would have been a good idea to give them some heads up saying hey, we’re going to do this on this date. So you should probably tell your advertisers that’s happening too, and I just kind of forgot to do that, so it’s important to, you know, like who else, what other companies interact with this website, and they probably need to know too ahead of time.

James: Yeah, that it is important so everyone on the team, any stakeholder who you deal with would be good. There are other little side complexities. If you are rolling together a few brands like I’ve done, so we’ve got two slightly different case studies here. We’ve got one with just a straight name swap, the other where you’re porting a few different things together. It can change the way you have navigation on your site.

When I had stand alone brands because they were single products mostly, they mostly had the sales offer at the home page. And when I switched to an all-in-one, then I had to come up with a new way to navigate through products. We use what’s called a product chooser, where people can navigate quickly to the part of the website that they need. So each segment of the website effectively became a mirror of what used to be on the old website but it had a front layer put on top. So give some thought to it, but keep it as simple as you possibly can. That’s really the overriding factor.

Quick recap

Just to recap, it’s simply finding a better name than what you have. You’re making sure everyone involved is informed about it. It’s having a little timeline or process of how you might go about the logistics, which will be setting up the new thing and then pointing everything across, letting everyone know. That’s probably a good time to start attending your analytics and checking things like your rankings and your traffic and how people navigate through your site and how they’re responding to the brand. After a small settling in period, you’re probably better off for the whole experience.

I wonder if there’s anything else we should talk about for this episode.

Matthew: I just think you’ve done a really good job of communicating. You brought 4 or 5 things under one domain name, and it’s still pretty easy to navigate to understand what you offer, and what the various options are. And I just think that serves as a good example of what people can do when they’re trying to offer 4 or 5 services at once.

James: Yeah. It’s really hard to simplify the complex. But I think we’ve had a fairly interesting process through that journey. Thank you also for the feedback. I did hire an expert on conversions at one point to help me reorganize it a little bit. That was Peep Laja. He’s from ConversionXL. He basically gave me some really good feedback on how to navigate people through to where they’re going. He talked to me about this idea of pogo sticking. Originally, the way we approached it was to put our brands on our master website and people would click on them, and then he said, “Well, they don’t really know what your brand is. So they have to click on it to find out. And if it’s not what they though it is, then they go back.” That’s called pogo sticking.

So now we changed it to customer facing wording, like “Help me with my website,” “I need more traffic” and “Coaching products.” We actually changed “I want coaching” to “Coaching products” because the products navigation tab on my website is the one that lights up like a Christmas tree on our heatmaps. People want to know what I’ve got. So they’re clicking on that Products tab. When people click on the Products tab, we do our very best to help them find the right section.

We’ve color coded the sections. The colors run right through that section. If they go into the website section, for example it’s purple, and all the options in the website are purple so that they can get a sense for where they are within the website, and over a lot of iterations, I think we’re up to about 8th version of the website, and we’ve got the next one coming through soon.

We’re trying to just remove elements, simplify, and we focus really heavily on our navigation with heatmaps and with Google Analytics. We want to get someone where they need to be quickly and easily so that they get the most value from their visit. It’s such a fascinating thing. In fact, if someone has multiple products and they’re trying to sell them, I would highly recommend getting the OwnTheRacecourse theme. We actually sell our theme. There’s an ad for on our sidebar because so many people have thought, “Well, you know what, he spent all this time and effort to figure it out. We’ll just copy it.”

So we just make it. It even comes with sales page templates built in, and it’s a fast start at least to something that converts. So use the opportunity when you’re changing your name to rethink about every aspect of your business. Question everything. Is what we were doing before the right way? If our name wasn’t perfect, I wonder if our website is ideal. I wonder if our logo needs a rejig. I wonder if we could do something a bit cleaner or smarter on the next one. That’s pretty much our default position. We question everything on an ongoing basis. That’s how we keep iterating.

Peter Drucker said that the key to success in business is marketing and innovation. So a name change is such a great innovation. Use it as an opportunity to leap forward in more than just a small increment. Make it a big leap forward.

The personal side of things

Matthew, I think we’ve probably covered the subject of successfully changing your name in business. I think one other aspect we didn’t really talk about is the personal business things, like a lady who might get married and then say, “Hey, what name should I be using now?” Those sort of things can be challenges as well. I don’t know if you’ve encountered that but I’ve certainly seen discussions along those lines before in my own community.

Some people choose their middle name from the beginning so that they could just build out a brand around their first and second name, and that way, it’s going to be interchangeable. A lot of women these days don’t change their name when they get married, so there’s those possibilities.

Matthew: Yeah. There’s an entrepreneur I know who had a divorce recently, she’s a woman, and she had to decide whether or not she’s going to keep her married name or go back to her maiden name, because everyone knows her as her married name, and that definitely can be an issue.

James: Yeah. Both you and I are a little more in favor of business names for things that we might want to sell or distance ourselves from it at some point, in a good way, not in a bad way. Not because we don’t like it but because maybe we change.

One of the reasons I really never developed my own domain name is I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. So maybe one day I won’t be in the Internet business space. I might be a surfboard design company or whatever. I do have a surfboard design business, but it’s only in its very infancy.

The message from this podcast

Think long term. That’s really a message that I’d like to come through from this podcast. Think long term, think very carefully about what name you want and commit to it for a while, unless you get strong feedback that it’s not getting you the results that you were hoping for.

So let’s wrap up this episode, Matthew, because we still have part 6 coming up, which is a very exciting one. It’s website monetization tips, and that will be a great way to end this 6-part series of business case studies. I look forward to catching up with you on that one Matthew. If you want to check out what Matthew’s got going on, head over to mattpaulson.com. That will guide you to his various interests in the online space.

Matthew: Yeah. I think you guys should definitely stick around for Episode 6 of the series. Somebody just paid me $1,000 for one hour of my time to help them monetize their website better, you’re just moving ads around, picking different networks, optimizing, just placements can have a huge impact, and I think we’re going to double this guy’s ad revenue from maybe 3 or 4 grand to 7 or 8 grand overnight just by moving stuff around and optimizing things. So if you’ve got a website with traffic, it’s definitely an episode to listen to.

James: Looking forward to that one Matthew. Speak soon.

Matthew: Thanks, James.

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