Get Your Name on Top With Naymz

We’ve all done it. Searched for our name on Google to see what shows up. If you haven’t, I’m guessing you’re either leaving to do it now or will once you’re done reading this. Naymz offers a service to help your name show up on the first page of results of the major search engines. You have the choice of a free profile or can upgrade for $4.95/month to speed up the process. I’m not sure of the level of service they provide for free profiles, but the paid accounts work by Naymz using paid search to get your name on top.

I imagine this doesn’t cost Naymz too much for somebody like myself, but imagine if Seth Godin or Steve Jobs wanted to set up a Naymz profile (not that they’d need to). I didn’t bother doing research to see what the going rate for those keywords is, but I have to guess that Naymz would burn through that $4.95 pretty quick. Of course, if you’re either of those people you likely don’t need any help showing up in the search engines. And that is where I think Naymz starts to fall apart.

I was tempted to try the pay service — the first month is free — until I did a quick search for ‘phil leitch’ on Google and found that the first 19 results are already me. In fact, I’m not sure why somebody like myself — comfortable with the technology — wouldn’t set up my own Google AdWords account if I really wanted to be sure I was found when people searched for me.

So I don’t see who this service ultimately appeals to, because chances are if I show up that well — granted my name isn’t as common as Tom Johnson — anybody else that really cares about where they show up is probably as active as I am on the web. I don’t know why somebody like my mother would care where she shows up and she certainly wouldn’t want to pay for it. A lot of people probably won’t show up at all, or at least high enough to spend the time to find yourself. I mean how long would it take some random guy named Tom Johnson to find a search result that was actually him?

Regardless of the usefullness of Naymz, setting up an account was fairly easy. Depending on how many links you want to include you could have a Naymz profile set up in under five minutes. It can’t hurt to set up a free profile and I’m sure there are some people that could find this really useful. Web2.0 may be getting to the same place Web1.0 went when any crazy idea under the sun was bound to show up online. Not that Naymz is a crazy idea, but the tip of the crazy idea iceberg might be showing up. I just don’t see any real value to the majority of people nor a revenue stream that can make this a viable business. Since Naymz has the pay option I assume they’re hoping to make money doing this.