You're ready to open your online store. While you get your suppliers and prices set and take product photos you decide to take the step of registering your domain name so that is all ready to go before you buy your shopping cart software. But the domain name you want is taken. What do you do?

Here are some ways you can generate other domain names that you could use for your business.

• Use your product name in your domain name. If your business is called Elvis Ltd and you sell lighting, the domain name elvis.com.au might be taken but elvislights.com.au might not.
• Create a brand name and register that. If in the above example, elvis.com.au and elvislights.com.au were both taken you could create a brand name of your own called something like 'Lotsa-Light' and register a domain like lotsalight.com.au
• Try hyphens or change the order of the words.
• Add localisation information. Add your country or state to the domain names to help find something unique.