Creating Original Podcast Names For Discovery

We debut our podcast name generator and share a simple method for choosing names that pass the say-spell-search test. We explain why renaming won’t hurt your audience and how to avoid name collisions that kill discovery.

If you try the podcast name generator, send us your favorites! 

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Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Transcript

Jordan: 0:00

Okay, so we're starting off this quick cast with a new tool that just launched, and it is our podcast name generator. Alvin, you were sort of heading up this project. What is the podcast name generator?

Alban: 0:14

Well, I had to find out what a podcast name generator was because we had a blog post on naming a podcast that kept ranking for podcast name generator. And so when I looked into it, uh, there's a lot of people who really wanted some kind of tool to help come up with podcast names. And so we did some research and we put together a tool that helps kind of brainstorm names for podcasts. We can talk about how it works, but obviously, Kevin pointed this out before we started recording. Most of the people listening don't need to name a podcast because your podcast already has a name. You might even have rebranded your podcast because you found an even better name. And so I don't want to, you know, sell it to people as like you got to go use this podcast name generator because it's probably for newer podcasters. But in going through the process, we took a lot of time to be deliberate about what makes a good podcast name. And I think that's applicable to everyone who listens. So maybe that's a more interesting angle for us to take.

Kevin: 1:14

Can I add something to the point though? Yeah. Now that I'm thinking about it as you're as you're reading it back, I think that oftentimes somebody will rightly so pick a name for a podcast and then launch and record a few episodes. And then they might have second thoughts about that name.

Jordan: 1:30

Yeah.

Kevin: 1:31

They might come up with something better. And I love the idea of like, don't wait for everything to be perfect before you start recording, before you launch your show, because that can be a trap that we fall into, right? It's like a reason to procrastinate and not start. Um, I don't know if this is the right name that I'm gonna live with forever. But you don't, you don't have to. And I don't think there's really necessarily anything wrong with changing the name of your show. If you get to a point where you're like, oh, I wish I had named it this, and you do a little bit of research and you find out that that name is available, you're more excited about that, but you're like, you feel trapped. I I just want to say, like, I don't think you should feel trapped. So for people who are listening, I get it that you are podcasters, you do have a name of your show, but it doesn't mean that you can't like still think about it. It doesn't mean that you can't change the name of your podcast. I don't think it's that big of a deal. There are a lot of podcasts that I listen to that if I listen to the next episode and they're like, hey, we're changing the name of the show because we we have a name that we're more excited about. I'm not gonna stop listening. Like the name of the show isn't well not why I listen, but the name of the show might be how somebody finds you. And so if you come up with something better to help people find you, I think it's fine. Like, go for it. Change the name of the show, change your artwork, change it in Bud Sprout, it'll change everywhere. It's not that big of a deal. So, in that vein, we're gonna talk about the podcast name generator, knowing that most of you have podcast names, but knowing also that like changing the name of your podcast is not a terrible thing if you don't love the name you have.

Jordan: 2:57

Yeah, I actually just was reading a fan mail message that we received from a listener asking about like rebranding and relaunching your podcast. And we just went through this with podcasting QA. And actually, next week, an episode of Alban and Kara going over how they went through the rebranding and relaunching process is going to be coming out. And so, I mean, yeah, maybe when we're talking about podcast names, what makes a good podcast name, things to consider, and you think, you know what, maybe I should change it. It is really easy. We've we've done the rebrand, we've done relaunching all those things, and it's totally doable. You're not gonna lose audience members, things like that. So, yeah.

Alban: 3:39

One of the things I kept running into was you know how like bands always have like kind of strange names.

Jordan: 3:45

Uh-huh.

Alban: 3:45

And you know, bands just like you come up with something like Radiohead. And if you think like, where did you come up with that name? Red Hot Chili Peppers. I don't know. It doesn't describe anything about music. Often there's band names that are just like kind of random. And then the album title might almost seem random, but then the music is consistent. And I think it's because music, it's just the vibes, it's just the feeling of the music, it's emotional communication. And then with podcasts, people kind of name it the same way. So I met someone at podcast movement and they're talking about a show, and they were like, Oh, we just named it after our friend, like Glenn, because Glenn's cool. So we called it Glenn is great. And I'm like, what is that at the so it's about Glenn? And they're like, no, it's a philosophy podcast.

Jordan: 4:30

Yeah.

Alban: 4:31

I'm like, well, what's the connection with Glenn? And they're like, we're all friends of Glenn. It's a random name that would actually be kind of funny as a band name, but it has no connection to philosophy. And it's just gonna make it hard for people to understand the concept of the show. So maybe with this all this in mind, we can talk through like some of the methodology that um John, who did all the development and a lot of the work on this project, uh, that John and I talked through as we were building it because I think it applies to everybody, and you can kind of see has my name fallen into any of these unhelpful patterns?

Jordan: 5:07

Yeah. Where do you want to start with that, Alvin?

Alban: 5:09

Well, the first is your podcast name is audio first, right? And so radio has this common phrase they call the radio test.

Jordan: 5:18

Okay.

Alban: 5:18

You know, if you're talking about something on the radio, people should be able to hear it once and remember it.

Jordan: 5:24

Oh.

Alban: 5:24

Uh, they should be able to hear it and then type it into Google and find the product.

Jordan: 5:30

Or be able to like understand what you're saying.

Alban: 5:32

Yes.

Jordan: 5:32

Yeah.

Alban: 5:33

And so what does that mean? I think your podcast name probably should be the same. If you say it one time, people should be able to hear it and know how to spell it. People should know how to find it. And if you have to explain, oh, it's actually a pun, or we spell it weirdly.

Jordan: 5:49

We have like a dollar sign instead of an S.

Alban: 5:52

Yes. It's a dollar sign instead of an S. We mashed up two words into a single word. Any of those things, you're not killing the podcast, but you're gonna make it a little harder because now if anyone ever recommends it to a friend, they have to like explain the joke.

Jordan: 6:07

Yeah.

Alban: 6:07

So Kevin and I both read or listen to Stratechery, which is a blog, but it's strategy with tech in the middle of the name. And the fact that you have to explain it every time you it recommend it makes it a little bit less recommendable.

Jordan: 6:22

Well, if you say it fast enough, it just it sounds like gobbledygook. Like I think I heard you reference it one time and I was I I could tell what you even said.

Alban: 6:30

So the goal is people should be it should be easy to say, spell, and you know, recall after hearing it once. It should be kind of obvious, but one goal should be that it's unique. Now, this gets harder when you're using real words, but you don't want to have another podcast out there with the same name.

Jordan: 6:48

Yeah.

Alban: 6:48

You're gonna run into some issues of trademark, uh, depending on what the words are, but you're just gonna be it's harder to brand yourself if you're trying to launch a show like Let's Talk About It. Um, I think the podcast host had an article where they're naming all these shows that, and one of them was Let's Talk About It. There's like 35 podcasts named Let's Talk About It.

Jordan: 7:10

Seriously.

Alban: 7:10

So it's impossible for anybody who's got that podcast to recommend it to a friend. Like you've got to listen to this show. It's called Let's Talk About It. Well, now you actually have to show it to them or send them the link because there's no way it's you know verbally recommendable.

Kevin: 7:22

Yeah. Like the app stores on your phone, that's what comes to mind when you tell me that. Anytime somebody says download this app, or like what app are you using to do that? You know, and you give say like a trailrunner, like what app do you use to find trails to run on or something. I'll use Trailrunner. And then you search Trailrunner, and there's 30 apps called like Trailrunner Outdoors, Trailrunner, you know, Sky High, Trailrunner whatever. Which which one? Which trail? And it's almost like one gets successful, and then they other app developers intentionally kind of copy that name or want to put that name in their title so that they kind of grab some of the traffic and some and capitalize on some of the confusion.

Jordan: 7:55

Yeah.

Kevin: 7:56

But for podcasts, you don't want that. Like you don't want confusion. You want as soon as they open up Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever they're using to search, you want whatever they type in to be, you want to be your podcast right on top.

Alban: 8:07

Yeah. And don't do the like rip off a famous podcast name bit. Like, don't name your podcast This American Lives or something. Right. I don't know. There's something like we all know what you're doing when you name your podcast almost exactly the same as a very, you know, popular show. Somebody reminded me of this the other day when we launched a podcast name generator. They're like, oh, where's the on fire button? Because in the old days, everyone used to copy John Lee Doumas' Entrepreneur on Fire. So they just called their thing like marketing on fire and podcasting on fire. And they just add on fire.

Kevin: 8:46

Authors on fire, real estate on fire, everything was yeah. All of these existed.

Jordan: 8:51

Yeah.

Alban: 8:52

And it's a like come up with something on your own. It's okay.

Jordan: 8:56

Yeah. And I think it has the opposite effect. I'm I'm sure people do it like, oh, well, when they search this, then my podcast is gonna come up because it's popular. But I really think it has the opposite effect because their episodes are gonna rank way higher than yours. You're just gonna get like buried underneath their podcast anyway. So it just, yeah, it's not beneficial.

Alban: 9:15

Yeah. If I tell you, you have to check out these new shoes I've been running with. I really like them. They're called New Balances, and you'll go, oh, and you type it in, you go, there it is, newbalance.com, and you click it. No, no, no, no. The shoe is actually called New Balances. It's a totally different shoe brand, but they're gonna dominate the whole space because they're the main thing. So anyway, avoid name collisions. So one of the things we built in was when we generate a bunch of names, uh, we're using the podcast index to check are these shows in existence? We're gonna find a one-to-one perfect match. You know, somebody else has it. If so, we're gonna recommend it's probably not the best name for you to go with. Um, you could look it up. Like there, I think there was a Buzzcast when we launched Buzzcast, but it was years old and had never released any episodes. So we went, okay, I feel comfortable. We can own this name if we move forward with it, versus trying to jump in with this American Lives and know we're never gonna get this name no matter what we do.

Jordan: 10:15

All right. So I'm gonna link to our podcast name generator in the show notes. How do they use the podcast name generator? What steps do they have to take to generate some podcast names for themselves?

Alban: 10:27

Uh so you just kind of write about your podcast. So um, you know, give us the concept. I've got an example in there, um, but just write out what your show's about. And then we added this piece where you can pick like a tone and a format. So you kind of get different names if maybe the format is an interview show or if it's a narrative or it's a round table uh tone. We should probably be getting different names if it's serious or if it's a joke or if it's funny or it's educational. You'll probably get different feelings. Imagine like a true crime podcast that's really serious will have a very different name than a true crime podcast that's kind of like lighthearted.

Jordan: 11:09

Yes.

Alban: 11:10

So we let you put in the tone and format, and then we're going to go and work and find you some great names. At least we think they're great names, and we'll bring them back and then let you know here's some that are in use. So you might want to check and make sure that they're not being actively worked on, and others that are uh totally unique, and you can grab them and go ahead and start a podcast.

Kevin: 11:32

Okay. I've got one question for you. All right. Why use this tool instead of just firing up your own Chat GPT or Drok or Gemini or AI tool of your choice?

Alban: 11:42

So that's where we started. Um I made a custom GPT and linked it in one of our videos so that people could just use Chat GPT. What we did that's different is one, we're checking for the names to make sure you're not copying someone if you don't want to copy someone. And then I went through dozens of iterations with John where we're trying to refine the prompt. We're trying to refine pulling in the tone and the format to come up with something to get better answers. And it was pretty surprising, you know, the vast difference of improvement we were able to get through those iterations. So our goal is to keep improving it. And the more people to use it, the more we will move towards uh better and better unique names.

Kevin: 12:29

Okay. Yeah. So the big idea here is that if you just go into ChatGPT and you say, Hey, I need help brainstorming a podcast name, and then you type a little bit about like what your podcast is about and how many people are on the show, and you say it's a funny show, you're saying that the quality of results should be significantly less than what you guys have because you've got a very advanced, sophisticated prompt that's been through many iterations of trying to get to the point where it's consistently generating high quality names.

Alban: 12:55

Well, you experienced the one of the first ones where Kevin typed in uh three people from Buzz Sprout talking about podcasting news. And the very V1 of the prompt came back and said Buzzcast, great name. Right. And yeah, which I thought was great. Well, but that's I was shocked coming up with Buzzcast as like a this is a great name. It's just looking around on the internet and going, oh, I've seen a bunch of stuff, and that sounds like Buzzcast. Well, that if you used that tip or if you used that recommendation, you just end up with a name collision. You'd be copying the same name someone already has. Right. And we're doing a lot of work to avoid that on the front end, but also we do that check at the end as well now to make sure we're trying to give you as much unique, valuable names so that one shot you should be able to come up with something. You're like, oh, these actually sound good. They they relate to um what I'm trying to do with this podcast.

Jordan: 13:50

Yeah. So you could get here with like several hours spent with Chat GPT, or you could just plug it into the podcast name generator and go.

Alban: 13:58

I hope. Yeah, that's that's the goal. And we worked on it to uh try to make it as valuable as possible. So um we hope people like it. And I I'd love to hear people who came up with their own podcast name, put it in your own description and see like what does it come up with? Does it come up with something that's uh half as good as what you ultimately picked, or is maybe there a name that you might consider? Oh, I might switch over and try to grab the social handles for that in case I do a rebrand.

Jordan: 14:26

And better yet, tap the text the show link in the show notes to send us your favorite iterations of the podcast name.

Alban: 14:33

I love it.

Jordan: 14:34

Yeah, that'll be fun. All right. Well, we have a great episode for you next week. We're gonna be talking about podcasting during the holidays. So if you have any tips or questions about podcasting through the holidays, go ahead and tap the text show link in the show notes to send in your responses. And we're gonna cover that on the next episode. So until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.