50 Car Blog Name Ideas To Get Your Motor Running

A blog can be the perfect way for car enthusiasts to make money from their passion. After all, there are plenty of people passionate about their cars, why not share your knowledge and experience with them? One of the first steps is finding car blog name ideas.

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Finding a blog name sounds like it should be simple. Even with all the sites online these days, there are countless car blog name ideas that aren’t in use. There are also many different angles to consider for naming your site.

In some ways, there are too many options! It’s easy to get overwhelmed in the process and not even know where to begin. That’s why this post aims to make everything much easier.

In the post, we’re covering some key areas, such as how you can find good blog name ideas and some general rules to get you going. We also talk about other early aspects of building your site, such as purchasing the domain name and buying your site. By the end of the piece, you know have everything that you need to start building your site.

50 Car Blog Name Ideas

How To Choose A Good Blog Name

A blog name can be almost anything. But, in general, you want a name that is unique, memorable and short. At the very least, it’s worth hitting one or two of these targets.

By unique, we mean a blog name that isn’t too similar to what is already out there. For example, there’s a site called caranddriver.com. Calling your site thecaranddriver.com or acaranddriver.com wouldn’t do you any good.

If your name is too similar to another site, it’s going to be tough to develop your own reputation. There’s also the risk that people will confuse your site with your competitor’s. That’s not a good situation.

Something as simple as ‘Mike’s Car Blog’ wouldn’t be a bad idea, but since we’re in the brainstorming process, let’s table that one for now. We might be able to find something even better. Consider what you’re going to focus on and how you’re going to approach the blog overall.

For example, the site benzinsider.com focuses entirely on one type of car – the Mercedes-Benz, while thesupercarblog.com is all about supercars. Are you going to be fixing up a specific make or model of car? Or is it an enthusiast blog?

One situation you’ll run into is that someone might be squatting on the domain you want. “Squatting” is legal, but it’s annoying. It means that someone owns the domain you want, but they don’t have a website on it. They are just hoping to resell it at a higher price than they bought. Domains are cheap, just $15/year, so they could own the domain for 10 years at $150. If they resell it for $1000 at any point within a decade they profit, so guys will hoard thousands of good domain names hoping to resell.

A great trick to do to stick it to ’em is to just add a word before/after the domain you want. For example, if you wanted streetrodmods.com, but it was being squatted, you could do mystreetrodmods.com, or streetrodmodonline.com. It’s not ideal, but it works.

Two quick things to avoid, in my opinion: misspelling things with a z or a 2. Personally, I find that a bit annoying. Something like conceptcarz.com or zero2turbo.com is what I’m talking about.

Lastly, in terms of optimization, I’d avoid obscure domain names like .fun or .name. These might put you at a disadvantage in terms of brand recognition in the future, and even hurt your search engine rankings.

Keyword VS Branding, & What About Trademarks?

Regardless of where your inspiration comes from, domain names can be broken down into two general areas. Some are based on keywords, while others are branded instead.

If you’re looking at creating a site, you might have already heard of “keyword”s. These are focus-phrases that are used to help your site rank and get traffic to your content. It’s basically a way to focus each article you publish so that search engines accurately rank you.

Keywords in your domain name aren’t essential, but they can help if you find a high-traffic phrase. A keyword-based domain does seem to have a slight ranking advantage due to the fact that your domain appears to search engines as being highly focused on this specific phrase.

Although it doesn’t guarantee rank, if your site does actually publish a lot of content related to this specific phrase, then you’ll naturally gain rank around related terms.

This claim is controversial, as Google did hit keyword domains pretty hard in the past, but, that change mostly stopped this type of domain from having a dramatic unfair advantage.

With this approach, your domain name simply contains the full keyword that you are targeting. For example, you could target the keyword ‘best sports cars for girls’ and create a site with the domain name bestsportscarsforgirls.com. Your site would then focus on information about sports cars for girls.

Alternatively, you can focus on a branded name. The sites sub5zero.com and blog.winfooz.com are both examples. A branded name doesn’t include a keyword. The name doesn’t even need to relate to your topic. IT can be a play on words, or just a word you make up.

It’s easier to find a short branded name than to find a short keyword one, as there are so many different angles to choose from. However, the initial marketing work can be more difficult, as potential visitors don’t automatically associate your site name with your niche.

What about trademarks like Ford, Chevy, and other household names? Avoid them. I know there are lots of examples online of people using trademarked names like f150forum.com or viperalley.com, but you never know which company will have how much of a problem with you leveraging their name to earn money. Just because other people get away with it, doesn’t mean you will.

How Much Should You Pay For A Domain Name?

The main bit of advice here is to avoid any kind of up-sell or cross-sell, or other offering by domain name services. Many will try to get you to buy multiple domain names at once to protect your brand, or offer you to buy expensive domains at auction. It’s not worth it.

A $3,000 domain name will perform just as well as a $15 domain name. Especially if this is your first website, or you are relatively new to online marketing. A more expensive domain just puts your business more in the red, and means it’ll take longer to reach profitability.

If you have a budget, I wouldn’t pay more than $100-$200 if you find a domain you really like. Past that, and you’re just wasting money.

How To Build & Make Money From Your Car Website

Before it comes to building your site, it’s important to consider the type of service that you want to use. There are many options out there, but most fit into one of two styles.

The first style is a drag and drop “visual” website builder. Weebly is one example and there are plenty of others. In fact, many of them are free to get started with.

These done-for-you builders can sound like the answer to all your problems. They’re designed to make website creation easy, even if you have no idea what you’re doing.

The builders can be amazing for saving time too. You can often end up with a website that looks highly professional but took barely any time to put together. Sounds like a sure thing, right?

One problem is that free plans are limited. Most don’t allow you to use your own domain. It’s much more difficult to rank a subdomain site than to rank one that uses your own domain name.

There are also other issues. For example, free plans often give you barely any SEO tools. You won’t have control over some aspects of your site either. You might not even be able to make money from your site in some cases.

The obvious solution is to upgrade to a paid plan. But, these can be seriously expensive. You still might not get all of the control that you’re looking for. This cycle continues. As you want more features, better servers, and continued support, your monthly payment increases.

To make matters worse, you’re locked in with a single company. A website created using one builder cannot simply be transferred to another one. Not all hosting services support this type of proprietary software.

A self-hosted WordPress site is a powerful alternative. WordPress is an open source website building software, one that can be used with many different website hosting companies.

I mentor a lot of newbies, and some of them get frustrated with WordPress because it isn’t a drag-n-drop, visual builder. It takes some learning to understand that what you see in the back end doesn’t always translate to the front end. 

However, you still don’t need to know any code to built it, and it’s the most widely used website building platform in the world, so it’s got something going for it! You can easily build your own WordPress site without any previous experience. You don’t need to figure out the system all at once either. Many people learn as they go – focusing on the most time-sensitive areas first.

Learn how to publish articles. Then learn how to add images. Then learn  how to add plugins. Etc. It’s much better to plan for long term success than to take shortcuts for quick initial gains.

How Much Do Car Bloggers Make?

There are many car blogs out there, but most of them don’t publish income reports. Even so, you’ll probably be able to spot methods of earning on many car sites, such as sponsored posts, ads and product sales.

While there might not be many car blog income reports, many bloggers do talk about cars in their content. For example, the site Local Adventurer focuses on traveling, which includes discussions on renting vehicles.

The March 2019 income report from the site showcased a total income of $17,708. Most of their income came from sponsored product posts (around $11,000), with display ads being the next most significant and then affiliate marketing.

Remember that RVs are vehicles too, and RV websites have huge potential to earn because there’s tons of products to promote, and lots of enthusiasm for the traveler lifestyle. Never heard of #vanlife before? They need to fix and customize their cars just like gear heads!

A second interesting site is Making Sense of Cents. This is more of a finance blog focuses on many different aspects of being frugal and some of these do relate to cars. You might think of a car blog being about supercars and car mods, but a car blog for The Average Joe on how to do DIY repairs could help people save money, and live a better life! 

The June 2019 income report for the site is less detailed than many other sites, but it does highlight affiliate income of around $50,000. That’s seriously impressive.

Display Ads

Display ads are always popular as a way to make money. The idea is that you are showing ads on your site, while earning money from the process. Google AdSense is the obvious choice for doing so, but there are other display ad networks out there too.

Regardless of the network, display ads end up being pretty passive. Your main task is to set them up. You might focus on some testing or ad optimization too, but those aspects aren’t essential.

The passive nature of display ads makes them powerful. This means that your content doesn’t need to relate to your ads at all. You get the chance to write whatever you like about cars (or about anything really).

Of course, display ads have their limitations too. The biggest issue is that they heavily rely on traffic. Sites with low traffic generally don’t earn much money. It can take a long time to build your traffic up to the point where you are making good money from your ads. This can be frustrating (believe me, I know!).

Still, the online audience continues to grow. There’s plenty of traffic out there, it’s simply a matter of bringing some of it to your site. Besides, display ads don’t need to be your only way of making money.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links represent a completely different way to make money – affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a more active process than display ads. You are responsible for inserting the links, not to mention finding decent affiliate programs to sign up for.

This means that some of your content is going to need to relate to the products or services that you’re promoting. For example, you might talk about various options for renting transport and link to some car rental affiliate programs. You could also make your car blog more of a business blog instead, teach people how to start their own home mechanic business, the monetize your site using affiliate programs for car parts.

There are plenty more options of what you could possibly promote on your website, depending on the niche you go after. As we’ve seen so far, a car blog could be about teens dreaming of lambos, or a practical DIY dad type of thing. Completely different audiences, but both related to cars!

Affiliate marketing is especially good because you can earn more money than with display ads for the same amount of traffic. Affiliate campaigns can be highly targeted, promoting excellent products to “warm” audiences (already familiar with products), meaning your conversion rates will be high. Some products could earn you $10’s, or $100’s per sale meaning just a few sales per day (among millions of people shopping online 24/7 around the globe) could turn into a full time income for yourself.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are many different aspects to creating a successful blog. The name that you choose is just one of these. Putting too much time into choosing your name is just a waste of effort. In the end, the name will never be what defines your blogging success.

Nathaniell

What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!