The New _____ states in the original 13 were named after places in Britain. The name was chosen either because the settlers were from that particular place in England, or the proprietor of the colony had title or association with that place.

As for New Jersey in particular. After the English captured the territory which is now New York, New Jersey, and Delaware from the Dutch, the English King gave the land to his brother, The Duke of York, as a proprietary colony. The Duke of York kept New York but gave New Jersey to his friends, George Carteret and John Berkeley. George Carteret had been Bailiff of Jersey and had sheltered members of the royal family there after the English Civil War, so the new colony was named New Jersey in his honor.

I would really recommend George Stewart's book 'Names On The Land' to anyone interested in the subject of place-names in America. I picked it up on a whim a few years ago, and despite being 60+ years old it is really a definitive source of information on this subject. And well-written enough to be a fun read in addition to being informative.

Here's a Slate piece about the reissue.

In the case of Oceania the two larger islands there were named after the foremost coastal provinces of the (Dutch) Republic that supplied most of the fleets (Nieuw Holland and Nieuw Zeeland). Tasmania was named after its discoverer, Abel Tasman.

Willemstad (capital of Curaçao, a country in the Carribean) was named after the political leader of the Republic at the time of conquest. It is located on the Saint Anna Bay, supposedly named that because its Spanish discoverers went ashore on Saint Anna's (name/feast) day.

Another former colony, Suriname, was probably named after the Surines - a tribe native to the area before driven out by the Arowaks. Its capital Paramaribo is thought to have been named after an Indian village (Parmirbo) that already existed on that location.

So it would seem that for settlements and smaller areas pretty much anything went (note that Suriname is 4 times the size of Netherland) and bigger ones were named after provinces or the like.

Did they name some colonies for essentially marketing purposes? Where I live, many of the little towns along the river have "Port" somewhere in the name. However, my area is so far upriver it's pretty much just a stream at this point. I was told by a local historian that the investors who held land grants for this area wanted potential buyers to think the river was navigable at this point, which it isn't. Are there instances like this, where places were named purely to drum up interest in the area?