I have previously talked about a successful git branching model by Vincent Driessen which I find to be very useful as starting point for creating a branching model that fits your needs.

Now there is a cool little tool called gitflow which is a collection of Git extensions to provide high-level repository operations that match the branching model by Vincent Driessen.

You can also go one step further and install git-flow-completion to help you to achieve git-flow completion nirvana. This requires that you install a great little tool called bash git completion.

Happy GIT-ing!