The name of your product is the first thing a buyer reads and often the only thing they remember. A clever, abstract name feels creative to you and reads as confusing to them — and confusion at the top of a page is just a reason to leave.
Say what it is
- Describe the outcome or the thing, not a mood — 'Instagram Caption Pack' beats 'Spark'.
- Keep it short enough to say out loud without explaining.
- Avoid made-up words unless you have the budget to teach people what they mean.
Clever can come second
If you love a clever name, use it as the subtitle and let a plain one lead. The clear name does the selling; the clever one is a bonus for people who already decided to look closer.
Test It On Someone Who's Never Heard Of You
The quickest way to check a name is to say it out loud to a friend who knows nothing about your work and ask them to guess what it is and who it's for. If they pause, or guess wrong, the name is doing the opposite of its job — and you can't hear that yourself, because you already know the answer. A stranger's blank look is the most honest feedback a name ever gets.
The common mistake here is naming for the people who already follow you. An inside joke or a reference only your regulars get feels warm to you and reads as noise to the newcomer deciding in two seconds whether to care. Your best future buyers are often strangers, so write the name for the person who's meeting you for the first time, not the one who's been around for a year.
Plain Doesn't Have To Mean Generic
The fear with a clear name is that it will sound like everyone else's — 'Notion Template', 'Lightroom Presets', another 'Ultimate Guide'. But the fix for that isn't cleverness, it's specificity: who it's for, how much is inside, what shape it takes. 'Notion Template' becomes 'The Freelancer's Client Dashboard'; 'Lightroom Presets' becomes '12 Warm Film Presets for Portraits'. Same plainness, far more pull, and no decoding required.
Numbers and format do quiet work in a name. '30 Instagram Captions for Coaches' tells a buyer the quantity, the niche and the platform before they've clicked anything — three separate reasons to believe it's for them, none of which needed an invented word. Specificity is what stops a clear name from being a forgettable one.
A Quick Before-You-Publish Check
Before a name goes live, run it past a few fast checks. None takes longer than a minute, and together they catch the two failures that quietly lose buyers: a name that's confusing, and a name that's clear but instantly forgettable.
If it stumbles on any of these, the fix is almost always to add specificity rather than reach for something clever — a number, an audience, a format, a plain description of the outcome.
- Would a stranger know roughly what it is and who it's for?
- Does it contain a word someone might actually type into a search box?
- Can you say it aloud without following up with 'it's basically...'?
- Does it sit comfortably next to its price — neither too grand for a £5 file nor too plain for a £200 one?