Perhaps the biggest consideration when choosing a brand name is unfortunately the least fun. It's finding a name where you can actually still secure the domain name! Domain names have been hard to come by for some time now thanks in part to the dramatic increases in website volume, and partly because their scarcity has encouraged domain squatting.
Ideally you should be aiming to get a .com domain name as anything else will cause some confusion. Second best are .net domain names, but even here you will always wind up with a percentage of users accidentally going to the .com. Another common approach is to find domains ending in country level endings that look like they are part of the word.
The site that made this practice mainstream was Del.icio.us which tellingly eventually also purchased Delicious.com. Some tools and resources to find domain names are:
Domain registrars usually have a search tool to check if a domain is available. There are tons of registrars and most of them offer very similar rates. The best known is GoDaddy, but it's not a particularly pleasant experience using their service thanks to the large amounts of advertising and cross-sells they run.
Better services are through NameCheap and MyDomain. These sites also offer Bulk Searching so you can get a lot of domain name ideas and process them altogether to see what is available, and more often what is not!
Chances are you're going to often find yourself wanting a domain name that is already taken. If after finding a domain name is already registered, you visit the site and there doesn't seem to be much, or sometimes anything going on there, then you can try acquiring the name from the owner.
The best known company for domain brokerage is Sedo who also have auctions and a variety of other domain services. Alternately you can try contacting the owner yourself. Use a service like DomainTools to run a "WhoIs" check and if the owner has listed their details, you can often just send them an email.
If you work at a large company or have your details available through the domain on your email address, then you might want to register a Gmail or other anonymous account for the purposes of not giving away that you can afford to spend tons of money on the domain. And remember to negotiate when purchasing domain names, as you can almost always do better than the asking price.
Can't find a domain you like that is available and/or affordable? You can try services like Bustaname, Suggestly, and Domai.nr to search for some ideas you might not have thought of. These sites sometimes help stimulate your creativity, but aren't always wildly helpful. A more mundane suggestion system comes from checking a thesaurus to look for variants on words you might be attempting to use.
Finally, if you are really having trouble finding a brand name, you can try services like BrandBucket and BrandStack where you can purchase not only a domain name but a logo to go with it, which you may or may not wish to use.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Martin Hughes at 02142011
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