A Hyphen May Help You Find a Buyer

Darryl Lopes, formerly a broker at Uniregistry and now an independent domain broker, shared a great tip on Twitter this week that could be helpful to domain investors who are looking to sell a domain name:

For the sake of discussion, let’s say I want to sell DomainInvesting.com. The traditional way that I would search for a buyer if I was doing outbound would be the following:

  • Search Google for “domain investing” to see what companies are advertising and what companies have pages on their website dedicated to domain investing.
  • Do a Google “inurl” search to see what companies have DomainInvesting or some variation in their url.
  • Use the Domain Search tool at DomainTools to see who owns domain names that have DomainInvesting or DomainInvest in them.

Darryl’s tip is very helpful. If I wanted to sell DomainInvesting.com, it would make sense to see if someone else owns Domain-Investing.com or even Domain-Invest.com to see if they want to upgrade. The same goes for other domain names where they hyphenated version is owned by someone else. It could be an especially valuable tip if that domain name is already developed since the owner might be more inclined to buy the non-hyphenated version.

There is a caveat to this of course. Domain investors need to be mindful of trademarks and other intellectual property controlled by others. If the other party has a trademark and the domain name is not totally generic, it could result in that other party making a claim against the non-hyphenated domain name owned by the investor. Whether they have a case or not is another story, but it’s something to consider.

Thanks to Darryl for sharing the tip.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

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