Developing & Branding Your Personal Competitive Advantage

What is in a Name?

Personal Branding, corporate, culture and product branding is highly involved when creating and sustaining a promise of value and image.  Clearly an appropriate name is important and so is a website to draw the name and online presence together. 

So what does one do when the perfect name is taken?  Almost anything you can think of dot com is taken.  (I think that domain is available?).

To start, what do you really offer?  Can you be creative and build unique awareness in yourself, blog, business, websites and products?  Think out of the box here my friends – you can establish a great reputation and build on your individual brand in creating unique names and sites for yourself, blog, company and products.  The obvious downfall is the time and resources it may take build the awareness.  Anything worth doing is.

If you don’t mind, let me share personal stories and feel free to share yours by posting to this blog and Your Brand, LLC Forums.  I hope this is helpful for anyone struggling with domain and company names.      

During my days as an executive recruiter, I would say “your brand” often in discussions with candidates and clients.  In Jan. 2005 I finally started a company called Your Brand, LLC. because it was so perfect for my skills and passion.  Registered the company, tried to find who owned yourbrand.com because it has an owner with no activity.  Well, the owner is going to holdout for a huge pay day.  No thanks!  So what did we do?  What do we really offer?  Turns out “plan” is wildly used term in the vision for products and services.  Let’s see, I wrote the Strategic Career Plan as a process like a business plan for people, The Personal Board of Advisors online tool covers this as well as health & wellness planning, financial planning, business planning.  All of this contributes to what I believe is a personal brand – so, how about www.yourbrandplan.com, I thought?  Tested it and went with it.  Now, many people refer to my company as Your Brand Plan.  Okay, fine.  Another problem, last year I started to hear people going to yourbrand.com and getting nothing, and a few tried www.yourbrandllc.com, so I bought and redirected that one.  I also wondered if people would associate the products more than the company name so bought and redirected www.strategiccareerplan.com and www.personalboardofadvisors.com.  In testing, there was some negative feedback to the long url.  I tell you through experience, if the url is long but descriptive, do it.  Has to be memorable though and there is a point of being too long – mine may be for some?    

Know More Media is packed with descriptive and creative names – I think it is powerful. 

Here is one more personal story.  As a speaker, I wanted davidsandusky.com.  Guess what, davidsandusky.com is taken and not being used.  After no returned calls from the small hosting company who owns the domain, I had to get creative, again.  So I asked, what does David Sandusky do?  As an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, business owner, speaker and consultant/coach on personal branding – networking is a common theme.  www.davidsandusky.net WORK was born.  I though I needed the dot com, this is a better. 

Moral of the story, a name is important and so it the domain name.  Don’t let this be a road block to your great ideas.