Picking a name is easy right?  Well if you follow some simple rules you can make sure the name you choose has a greater chance to be liked by someone else.

Many domainers have two strategies

1. hand reg when you see the opportunity and

2. buy expiring names..

So you may ask which method results in more sales?  Well in my experience Im about 50/50 on sales between these methods and there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind a sale.

Like in art,  people buy what they like…for example this sale of vaaben.com for 3k
https://namebio.com/vaaben.com

Domains I thought would sell may  never got offers and names that I purchased on impulse sometimes sell faster.  So what are some guidelines to follow?

Here are some of the rules I follow
1. correct order (bankloans.com not loanbanks.com)
2. correct pluralization (bankloans.com not banksloan.com)
3. correct spelling (bankloans.com vs bankloanz.com) however could work for brandables (lyft vs lift)
4. short – no more than 2 words or no more than 12 characters
5. double letters – like opennet.com not in all cases but in most it doesnt look good or make sense
6. stay with king – ,orgs or eaiser to sell imo than .net but king is always best
7. general vs too niche (general mass market names seem to sell faster eg dazedbeauty.com vs seattleconsulting.com too a narrow means it will apply to less and less sellers)
8. instinct – cant explain this but when im shopping I have a list of all the names I want and maybe that list is 20 or 50 names and after you walk away and come back to the list the ones that just jump off the list are the ones you pull the trigger on…in a list of 20 maybe 4 jump off the page..
9 trending – great thing about domains and why it will never die is there is always a flavor of the year. last two years 4 letters were the craze this year crypto names , fake news and anything trump is hot
10 domain data – if i have the time Ill consider some associated data of the name including domain age, visits to domain, backlinks, alexa rank (some tools and market places provide some of this data but not all in one place)

11. no dashes – stay away from a – in the name something like bank-loans.com

No method is perfect but following these rules could help you pick a winner more often.