It Pays to Do Your Research When Naming Your Blog
I’ve gotten an incredibly large amount of emails recently about people wanting to re-brand their blogs for the 2011 year. If you’re in the same boat then now is as good of a time as any to do it!
For most of the inquiries I simply point them to this blog post here: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right (and Best) Name for Your New Blog, which took me a long time to write (and I believe serves 99% of most people’s questions), but more than a few have recently emailed me about #10, Violating Copyright.
What a bummer! That’s definitely not the reason you want to (or have to) re-brand your blog!
You must do your research to see if you are, in fact, violating any trademarks and/or copyright that currently exists. The worst thing that could happen is for litigation to arise from your blog name, especially if it’s been growing like a weed! The longer it takes for the issue to arise the more damage (and hassle) it’ll be.
Remember: There is nothing wrong with renaming your blog or even re-branding it entirely. Unless you have some strong ties to a brick-and-mortar institution or there’s significant collateral material out there surrounding your blog I typically am very ok with people significantly re-imagining their digital footprint.
Heck, I recently did it with my Twitter change from @Human3rror to @TentBlogger primarily! Some of you who have been following me for some time know that this is literally like a “death” in the family!
But the internet is a very forgiving place and it’s memory is pretty short.
The point is that it really does pay to do your research when naming your blog – you’ll either pay now (a few bucks buying a new domain name) or later (potentially a lot more with litigation).
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