Naming a Blog: How I Came Up with a Travel Blog Name & How to Name Yours

Hello! My name is April and I’d like to introduce to you my blog. I know I’ve had it for a while but when I started it I wasn’t quite sure to what to call it. All I knew is that I wanted to start blogging like, yesterday. So I gave it a name I was never quite happy with just to get started. So for all of you naming a blog, here’s how I came up with a travel blog name and how not to make the same mistakes I did.

This post contains affiliate links. Should you decide to purchase something from one of my affiliates I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Check out my Disclaimer for more info.

Naming a Blog: My First, Second, and THIRD Travel Blog Names

When I was studying abroad in Chile people often did not understand my first name. This was particularly true of Starbucks employees. If I said it in Spanish (Abril) they asked me to say it in English because I guess people there just don’t name their kids after months (unless your name is Julio (July)).

So one day I thought I would skip the process of saying my name in Spanish and just jump right to English, “April”. Oops. I had to repeat myself but when I got my drink, they had written my name onto the cup as ‘Impo’. Now it could have been worse but it was still pretty funny. After this happened, most of my friends in Chile started calling me ‘Impo’ as a joke and so I named my blog ‘The Adventures of Impo’.

After that I ended up naming my blog, Just Leaving Footprints, since I was writing a lot about sustainable tourism. I became a vegetarian and was very passionate about low-waste living. I wanted to niche down since the travel blogging world is pretty saturated. The problem with the name Just Leaving Footprints was that after I had used it for a few years, some other people started using it on different social media accounts. I’ve always gone by my name on social media, April Vera Lynn. So I hadn’t claimed it on social and didn’t think I needed to. And while I am still very passionate about sustainable tourism, I realized that having a word like ‘travel’ or ‘adventure’ in my blog name may actually be better for SEO (search engine optimization).

The Beginning of April Vera Lynn Travels

Even though I’ve been travel blogging since 2014, I only just changed my travel blog name for the final time to April Vera Lynn Travels in February of 2022. I know, I know. I’ve been incredibly indecisive in the past but I figure I can’t outgrow my own name and I like that I have the word ‘travels’ in there for SEO. I can finally say I’m 100% happy with my blog’s name.

Advice to New Bloggers that are Naming a Blog

I think the best advice I can give to you if you’re wanting to start blogging and trying to think of a good name is don’t settle. Don’t settle for a blog name you will grow out of. Do not settle for anything cheesy. Definitely don’t settle for anything that doesn’t relate to what you’re going to blog about. Above all don’t settle for a name that is nice now but won’t grow with you, your blog or your brand. Brainstorm for a few days, not a few hours. Maybe even a few weeks. It is possible to change your blog name down the road but from experience, I can definitely say I would not recommend it. It’s a hard and tedious process on the backend with hosting, can confuse your followers, and when you change your blog’s URL it will negatively affect your SEO temporarily for at least a good three months.

Tips for Brainstorming a New Travel Blog Name

via GIPHY

Below are some tips you can use for brainstorming a new travel blog name. Grab a notebook, pen, and Thesaurus and get creative while using these tips!

• Write down your first name and travel-related words that start with the same letter because alliteration is amazing (see what I did there?). For example, I could have named my blog ‘April’s Adventures’ or ‘April Around the World’. If you scroll down a bit you will see I’ve already put together a huge list of alphabetized travel words for you. 🙂
• Figure out what your travel niche is and come up with a name that suits that. This is what I did with my old blog name, Just Leaving Footprints, since I did (and still do) write a lot about sustainable tourism. If you were to write a blog about traveling in winter mainly for skiing, it could be called something like ‘Winter Wanderlust’. (Seriously alliteration is the bomb). Make sure that if you think your niche will change with time (many do) that your name can still account for that. Don’t name your blog ‘Sarah’s Solo Adventures’ if you think you’ll still be blogging when/if you decide to get married/start a family. You will likely end up writing a lot more about family travel in the future if that’s the case.
• Ask yourself what places you will write about. Is your travel blog going to be about traveling all over the world? Only in the Americas? Will it be country-specific? If it’s going to be country-specific I would highly suggest using the name of the country in the blog name. For example, you could do something like ‘Canadian Cory’ or ‘Sarah Goes to Spain’.
• Write out your favorite travel quotes and come up with a name that incorporates one of them. I did this with ‘take only pictures, leave only footprints’ to help come up with Just Leaving Footprints, back when I was still using that name.
• Ask yourself what kind of traveler you are. Are you a planner or do you go with the flow? Do you enjoy backpacking or are you hoping to write more about luxury travel experiences? Are you always getting lost or are you good with directions? For example, if you get lost easily (like I do) you could name your blog something like ‘Lost with (Your Name Here)’.

Below are some alphabetized, travel-related words to help you brainstorm a good blog name:

• Abroad, Adventure, Anywhere, Atlas, Away
• Backpacking, Borders
• City, Coast, Compass
• Destination, Direction, Drive
• East, Earth, Everywhere, Excursions
• Far, Foreign, Forests
• Galivant, Globe, Globetrotting, Go, Goes
• Hike, Hotel
• Intrepid
• Jet, Journey
• Kilometer
• Landscape, Lattitude, Local, Lost, Longitude
• Maps, Miles, Mountains
• Navigate, North
• Outdoors, Outside
• Passport, Parachute, Peak, Planet, Postcards
• Quaint
• Retreat, Ride, Roam
• Sailing, Sights, Suitcase
• Tourist, Train, Travel, Traveler
• Upgrade
• Venture
• Wander, Wanderlust, Whereabouts, Wherever, World
• Yonder

Make sure that once you pick a blog name you do a Google search to see if that blog name is already taken or not. If it’s not taken, then I would highly suggest purchasing your own domain name with Siteground. I actually chose to stop using Bluehost and switch to Siteground because their website speed is way better and they are a lot more helpful. Having your own domain means that your website URL will look like this: yourblogname.com instead of yourblogname.wordpress.com which is a lot more professional. I would also highly suggest trying to use .com rather than .net or .ca or other variations as they’re less commonly used and may not perform as well for SEO.

Other posts you might like:

• 8 Things I Did To Double My Travel Blog Traffic In One Year
• Blog Promotion: 13 Facebook Groups to Promote Your Travel Blog In
• Travel Blogging Resources
• Online ESL Jobs: Companies to Apply For

Did you find this post helpful? Pin it for later!