By now you might be aware of name-checking services such as Knowem, Name Check or User Name Check, which will check whether your username/tag/brand has been taken at 120 or more sites. They can also, for a fee, register your tag/brand at those sites.
But have you considered the URL shortening sites that have become popular owing to Twitter? Have you checked your brand name there to see where it leads? Try the following (at your risk):
- http://tr.im/coke (about cocaine tootache drops)
- http://tr.im/ibm (News8 TV, Austin)
- http://tr.im/google (some dark Cyrillic page)
- http://tr.im/telstra (The Australian newspaper)
- http://tr.im/gm (Huffington Post article about mayors)
- http://tr.im/obama (K12 school video about Obama)
- http://tr.im/jeep (specific forum post about a Jeep)
Companies that have grabbed their brand include:
- http://tr.im/nike
- http://tr.im/optus
- http://tr.im/oracle (kind of, points to Sun URL!)
- http://tr.im/chrysler
So the message is clear. Go to all the URL shortening services and grab your brand name, even if it is very long. Point it to your home page or some permanent URL. I mentioned tr.im partly because it displays click stats for your URLs (hence worth getting a free account) and partly because it seems to have a few brand names available while the older URL-shortening sites don’t.
You can also grab keywords (don’t bother looking for “seo”) relevant to your business or your resume. I grabbed some for my resume, hoping I won’t need them in a hurry:
- http://tr.im/seocv
- http://bit.ly/seocv
- http://tinyurl.com/seocv
- http://snipurl.com/seocv
Some of these sites give you usage stats:
I didn’t list the sites that don’t offer an alias option. Is.gd has a workaround – you place a slash at the end of the short URL followed by your label, but it’s not pretty or memorable. Example: