I spend about 3-5 hours a week searching for and buying domain names. Sometimes its utterly frustrating, and other times its the joyous hours of a start-up when the team resonates on the vision and brand identity. I use instantdomainsearch.com and bustaname.com to accelerate my domain searching.

I am no expert on choosing brands- but I have some guidelines that will help you hone down on your best domain.

1. Don’t just spin off another site’s domain. No more mynannyspace.com, freeamazon.com, bloogle.com- traveling too close to a famous brand makes you look like a cheap clone.

2. Don’t use more than 2- maybe 3- words in a single domain. Count your syllables. hotdogstands.com passes; favoritebooklistschicago.com fails.

3. You can make up words (“Google doesn’t mean anything” has been told to me at least once a week) but be careful. Made-up words are often hard to remember- hard to spell- or hard to pronounce. I owned agavian.com, izmus.com, and many other domains that are painful to spell over the phone. “Go to a-g-a-v-i-a-n dot com”

4. Google any domain you are thinking of buying. If streamlineglobal.com is available; but there is already a large brand in your industry called “streamline”, stay away. You don’t want people google searching your name and finding a competing site.

5. Don’t be afraid to spend $1k – $2k on buying a hot domain. See buydomains.com. You would be surprised how far $2k will go with domain buying.

6. Create your own culture. The logo design, your colors- icons- and layout- they can give your domain culture; think about what your domain will look like as a brand.

7. Explicitly state what you do. This seems obvious- but its often overlooked. If you let people pay for stuff with their iphone; call yourself paybyiphone.com. It works.

8. Don’t confine your brand by geography or industry if you have plans of scaling. You can’t launch chicagodaycare.com in san francisco.

9. Only buy dot coms. Dot net, dot us, dot org, etc- they are transparently second tier- and everyone will go to the dot com by accident. The only exception is to work your extension into your name, like del.icio.us

10. Toss the name around. Sometimes a friend needs to tell you your domain is bad. I will admit I’m better at finding professional domains than fun domains.