However, last year my husband Brandon started shooting with me, and we found out that he’s ridiculously talented. He fell in love with it almost instantly. Soon we decided to become a husband and wife photography team. After one too many “Does he work for YOU?” jokes, we decided that a name change was in order.
Since it’s something we did recently, I thought I’d share some tips on things to consider when choosing a name for your business.
Should you use your name?
Using your name is generally a fairly safe bet when it comes to naming your business. It’s personable and is often quite unique. Most of the well-known photographers out there use their name alone as their business name.
While there are plenty of benefits to using your name, it does hinder you from easily adding more photographers or eventually selling your business. While you may never get to this point, if you ever decide to go in that direction it is helpful to select a business name that is not tied to your own name.
And to all those single ladies out there who hope to get married, using your last name can put you in an awkward place once you’ve tied the knot.
Business names that are NOT your own name
My first rule when picking a name that is not your own personal name is to keep it from being cheesy. This is obviously objective, but the younger generation tends to see names that try to evoke too many emotions as old-school in a bad way. Instead of “Treasured Memories” consider something that doesn’t have an emotion tied to it.
Inanimate objects or memorable terms tend to be more attractive to a modern clientele. Whitebox and Poser come to mind as a successful photographers who have managed to pull this off really well.
Another approach is to create a name that is not actually a real word. A great example of this is Jinky Art. While I’ve only heard them mentioned once or twice before, the name sticks with me and I think it was a brilliant choice.
The hard part about this route is that there’s a good chance that there are many other photography businesses out there with a similar name or the exactly the same name that you might fall in love with. You will want to research all names you consider to make sure no one within your geographic location is already using that same name.
Choosing a domain name
You will also want to consider if the domain name is available for you to use. As much as we may have loved certain variations of some of the names we came up with, we had to change things up here and there because we simply couldn’t get a domain name for it that we liked.
Are you okay with having a site named “www.mynamephotography.com” if someone else already owns “www.mynamephotos.com” and “www.mynamephotographers.com”? You’ll have to be very clear in your marketing and business cards to avoid people heading to the wrong site on accident, and you’ll want to be diligent in your SEO efforts as well to make sure your name ranks as high as possible in search engines.
I would also completely avoid anything other than the .com or .co.uk or any other standard ending for your country. Let’s face it: people forget the .net and type .com first and foremost, so I highly suggest sticking to the most popular ending for your domain name.
Finally, adding some variation of the word photography in your web address will help it rank higher in search results when people search for “photography”, but at the same time you don’t want your domain name to be so long that people get annoyed when typing it in. You’ll have to play this one by ear and see what is available.
The name we chose…
After taking all these things into consideration, we decided on Lemon Tree Photographers. It ties in my favorite color (yellow) to our desire to have something that could represent our growing family. Plus the idea of a lemon tree in Wisconsin is a bit quirky since they don’t grow in our climate, and we liked that connotation. We’ll have to be clear in our branding so people aren’t going to the other domain variations of it, but we’re willing to give it a try.
How did you choose your name, or what has the process been like for you so far? Leave a comment below and let us know!
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