The space of public domains is much like a real estate market. Dot-COM domains like New York. Two-letter domains are like Manhattan. They are extra expensive just because there are just 26×26=676 of them. In our days all the two-, three-, four- and even five-letter domains in .com zone are purchased and can only be bought in secondary market. Same about domain names which are dictionary words and widely used last names. In this situation finding a good domain name is a challenge.
Top level domains (TLD) intends to divide domain space. For along time number of TLDs was limited to 6: .gov for government organizations, .mil – for army, .edu – education, .com – for commercial entities, .org – other organizations, .net – network operators. In our days there are over thousand TLDs available.
It is still possible to use domain name outside of .com zone, or choose a longer name. I’d suggest to use Hover to investigate if your desired domain name is available or not because it also offers a good set of alternatives. Here you may try to make an offer to current domain name holder, choose a different TLD, or find available domains in .com zone which are similar to your keywords and are still available.
Domain name is like a record in your smartphone address book. It’s used to lookup by a human readable name before making a connection to server’s numeric IP address. The easier domain name is, the easier is to find your website.
It’s a good idea to purchase domain before you select name for your business. Good domain is easy to spell and remember, it also should not be too long,
For sample, company Apple, Inc. has a domain with name apple.com.
Yet another one trick is to use national zones. For sample Forbes magazine owns domain forb.es (formally Spanish) and Youtube have a shortcut youtu.be (Belgium). Full list of national zones is available in Wikipedia.
One more approach to get a shorter domain name is to add a digit. If you sell cats, you may find an option like cats4you.com or 2success.com for coaching.
Finally you could try to generate a pronounceable or find a foreign word which doesn’t exist in English dictionary. In case it works for Toshiba, it will work for you too.
Have you found a new way? Let me know!
P.S. For some languages there is an option to give a try to non-latin TLDs (e.g., Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, or Chinese). They are called Internationalized country code top-level domain. This is a narrow niche because international visitors may not be able to type them.