Creativity
I know you didn’t come here for creativity. You came here to look up a number. But it’s not the 1990s and you’re a little late to get good vanity toll free numbers the way you could back then. The bad news is that you’ll have to be more creative than you thought. The good news is that, it doesn’t take a generic term to build a successful business. That extra creativity will make it MORE memorable and MORE valuable than the generic term you thought of first.
If I was starting a legal referral service, where I marketed numbers or leads to lawyers, I’d want the most generic terms possible, using terms you see in all lawyers advertising. But if I was promoting my own law firm or legal service of any kind, I’d look for the most unique terms or names possible, that everyone else ISN’T using in their advertising.
Generic terms used to be popular in business names up until the 1950s. Since then advertising really blossomed and especially when the internet hit, advertisers found that the more unique brandable terms were the best. If you look at the names of the Fortune 500 companies back when the list first started in 1960, it was all generic terms. Then compare that to the Unicorn list, the most successful billion dollar startups today, there are absolutely NO generic terms!
Try your firm’s name, the names of the key people, and look at your advertising. Do you have anything unique in your message? Why should anyone use you rather than your competitors? That’s what your advertising, your message and even your identity should focus on. Hammer THAT home in a unique way and you have a KILLER marketing package that’ll multiply the results of your advertising for the life of your business.
That’s not easy, I admit. But that’s the direction to go in, not toward generic-ness. I know that’s a lot and you probably weren’t looking for all this, but I love this niche and just want to help you, even late at night!
Dictionary words
Someone recently asked me if they could limit the results to “dictionary” words. According to Google, the Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use. When I first started working with big data I would have thought that was a lot. But now comparing that to the amount of data we have analyzed it’s nothing. We’ve got THOUSANDS of times that many data points in our big data today!
It’s natural to want to start with the Dictionary, but if you think about it, there are 350 million domain names. How many of them are dictionary words? A fraction of 1 percent. If you limited yourself to dictionary words, looking for domain names, you’d never get anything. So while you might find a couple numbers in disconnect, those are the numbers that are obvious to everyone else too, and unfortunately you’re not going to get.
You don’t find many dictionary words as the name of large companies because they’re not brandable. They’re always going to be more expensive and ultimately less valuable. To me, dictionary words are exactly what you shouldn’t look for. It’s like saying I only want to look for the most obvious generic terms that everyone else has looked for, for decades.
A lot of people will start here, looking for the most generic terms for their industry, but that’s where the related terms are important. You’re never going to get those generic terms but they will have a lot of related terms, or a phrase that contains it. Maybe one of those will be available or inspire you. Look for phrases, and more creative, fanciful names, NOT generic, unbrandable terms that you can’t trademark.