Although I do not report my own sales, I appreciate when other investors and companies share their sales. Some of the benefits I get out of seeing other people’s sales include the following insight:
I like the idea of operating my own landing pages. For better or worse, I have autonomy over the exact design of my landing pages, and I can test pretty much anything. I can change the colors, I can change the text, I can add or subtract form fields, I can enhance or remove the phone number. With my own landing pages, I can pretty much do whatever I want, as long as I can either do it on my own or pay a designer to do it for me.
There are some costs to doing this, beyond the actual cost of paying a designer to make changes on my behalf. Lost leads is an incalculable cost, and I want to share a recent experience.
A month ago today, I sold my first domain name via payment plan at DAN.com. Although the buyer’s monthly payment is only around $100, I passed break even on the domain name with the second payment and will continue to earn revenue on the deal for a few years (or get the domain name back). One thing I learned today is that the seller may want to specify a specific payment payout preference (PayPal or wire transfer) to the escrow agent depending on the seller’s location and default payment preference.
I noticed a high profile domain name hit the expiry stream recently. The domain name is owned by a pretty big company, and if it is not renewed within the next several days, it will be auctioned to the highest bidder. When I saw the domain name in auction, I started to wonder if we will see more high profile domain name expiries due to corporate layoffs and furloughs at companies throughout the world.
When I set my prices for domain names I am looking to sell, it is more of an art than a science. There are a number of considerations I balance to set prices on my domain names. Here are some of the factors that I consider as I am setting prices:
After evaluating all of these factors – some more than others, I set the price for each domain name. Most of these factors are considered very rapidly, and I often defer to gut feel above all else, thinking, what can I imagine an end user paying to buy this domain name in a reasonable amount of time?
Andrew Allemann wrote an article yesterday to speak out about taking advantage of the coronavirus outbreak in order to profit from it. I understand that in dire straights people might do things they would not ordinarily do to feed themselves and their family, but I echo what he said and would strongly urge people to not buy coronavirus related domain names, especially if they intend to do outbound marketing to sell them.
Case in point, PRWeek published an article that discussed one such outbound marketing effort made to try and sell coronavirus related domain names to Carnival Cruise Lines and its Chief Communications Officer, Chris Chiames. Not only was Mr. Chiames upset by this outbound marketing effort, he posted the exchange on LinkedIn for all to see. Here’s an excerpt from the PRWeek article:
