When I meet other gamers I introduce myself as Derek, but in the next breath I quickly add that I write as Ameron on Dungeon’s Master.com. After four years of blogging a lot of gamers immediately recognize the blog’s name even if they don’t recognize mine.
Name recognition is one of the most important parts of having a successful website. Your potential audience has the search engine at their finger tips and when they type in those key words they’ll get many options to choose from. If they don’t recognize the name of your website they’re less likely to click on your link. That is assuming that your website even comes up on the first page.
When we first thought of starting a gaming blog we wanted to make sure that all of our hard work was going to pay off. We wanted people to read our stuff and we wanted them to keep coming back for more. We felt that the quality of our articles would help us build a solid and loyal readership (which it did), but the trick was getting people to visit in the first place.
Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. Today’s the “D” is for Dungeon’s Master as we share the process behind how we came up with our blog’s name.
Coming up with a name is a lot more work than you might think. Neil (Wimwick) and I had a lot of discussion about it before we finally landed on Dungeon’s Master. While looking through some old emails recently I found one of the very first discussions we had regarding the blog name. Since many people ask us how we came up with our name I thought our readers might find it interesting to get a look into our creative process.
Hey bud, I’ve been giving some thought to the name of a potential blog. The reason for this is simple, right now we’re thinking great idea’s (and hopefully writing them down), but we aren’t really doing anything to move the idea forward.
We’ve both said that having a blog in place would provide the motivation to start writing and hitting publish. Well we can’t do that without a blog, it’s a nasty, vicious circle. I am, however, convinced we can break the cycle. Thus I give you my very serious thoughts towards generating a blog name.
I was on Dungeonmastering earlier and read (and visited) some blogs on his blogroll. There is Evil DM, Chatty DM, Gnome Stew, Critical Hits, Treasure Tables… I looked at this and thought, what’s missing? There are no blogs with monster names in them. This isn’t to say they don’t exist, but I think that if a good blog existed with a monster name in it, it would be listed.
Now of course the blog isn’t going to be dedicated to monsters, so if you feel that might narrow the vision we can scrap it. However, kobolds and goblins have a very neat little place in D&D lore and I thought that tapping into that might work.
Some suggestions:
- Ogre’s Eyes
- Goblins Embrace
- The Mimic’s Bite
- The Magic Mouth
My other thought is to name it after a tavern, a.k.a. ‘The Prancing Pony’. The sky is the limit on tavern names.
I do think I like the tavern idea best, simply because it embodies so much about the game. How many games have you played that started in a tavern? It’s also the place adventurer’s go to get the scoop on the town. Further it’s a place for discussion. A tavern can be seedy or high class which lets us cover off multiple topics.
Some suggestions:
- The Dragons Flagon
- The Dragons Hearth
- The Silver Anvil
- Troll Sweat
A final suggestion is to name it after a paper. I’m thinking that Eberron has a few papers, the Korranberg Daily, etc. Or something along the lines of Volo’s guide to the Realms.
Ok, that’s it for now let me know your thoughts. I’m itching to get started on things.
From this email we continued the discussion in person. We knew that landing on the right name was critical to early success. We wanted to have a Dungeons & Dragons name that would come up in search engines. We needed something simple and timeless. We needed a term or phrase that would not change between editions or campaign settings. Something that would appeal to all of D&D.
At the time my favourite gaming blog was Dungeonsmastering.com. I figured if we could incorporate “Dungeon Master” into our name in some way we could meet our own desired criteria and possible even get a few readers looking for Dungeonmastering who clicked on the wrong link. And then it hit me. I sent Wimwick this very short email.
How about: Dungeon’s Master
www.dungeonsmaster.com
It’s available.
And with that, we had it. We instantly realized it was the perfect name. There was no need for more discussion, our blog had a name and Dungeon’s Master was born.
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2 replies on “Dungeon’s Master – What’s in a Name?”
Great story.
It’s actually a similar approach I took when I chose a name for my writing blog.
Was looking at a variety of names, but then went for the somewhat obvious and something that people were likely to google.
And it worked well. A surprising amount of my blog traffic comes from there. 🙂
A name means everything, whether your coming up with one for a blog, naming your child, or a character in a story. So its good you thought it through.
I just googled “Dungeon Master” and your blog came up #3 on Google. Yet for some reason I didn’t know about your blog until the A to Z challenge. But I’m glad I found it!