Sales Suggestion for Fabulous & Others

Elliot Silver
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5

When I am looking to purchase a domain name in the aftermarket, one thing I try to research is whether the domain name was on the market before, and if so, the price listed on other websites. When I want to flip a name for $25,000, there’s nothing worse than a potential buyer telling me he saw it listed for sale for $15,000 on another website – even though it may have been a very old listing.

One piece of advice I have to Fabulous / Dark Blue Sea – as well as other domain investors who may do the same thing – is to NOT list the asking price in the Whois information. When a company like DomainTools archives Whois lookups, it archives this information forever, and I can see what Fabulous or Protopixel (a DBS subsidiary) had it listed for at one point when I am doing my due diligence on previous ownership.

Although many buyers don’t really care about a previous sales price when they want a particular domain name, it can never help in a negotiation (unless of course you got a significantly better price). When selling to other domain investors, this can be used as a negotiation point for a lower sales price.

How Do I Reply to a Domain Offer?

Elliot Silver
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55

It”s a bit strange to me, but there are a lot of domain investors that don’t know the best way to reply to a domain offer. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as easy and as clear cut as it may seem, but in my opinion, if you are going to be a domain investor with a goal of selling domain names, you need to know how to reply to an offer to close a deal.

First off, it’s critical to research who your potential buyer might be by using the email address, name, IP address and/or anything else revealing about the potential buyer. This is important to make sure they aren’t going to use your reply in a UDRP or lawsuit, and so you are able to know why the domain name is coveted and how it will be used. I don’t like pricing domain names based on the size of the wallet of the buyer, but it would suck to sell a domain name for $5,000 when the buyer is going to spend millions of dollars to market a new brand around a specific domain name.

With that being said, I want to give you a recommendation to learn a good way to reply to potential buyers: attempt to buy a domain name from one of the industry leading companies or domain investors. I am sure some people will probably not like to get emails from non-buyers posing as prospects, but it’s a good way to learn from experienced domain investors and domain sellers.

For example, Buy Domains has successfully sold millions of dollars in domain inventory, and they get inquiries every single day from potential buyers. They’ve probably got a pretty good response down by now, and you may be able to learn from that.

The one caveat is that you can’t be too passive in this exercise because many companies may not even reply unless you make a significant opening offer, which says a lot right there without even saying anything. Needless to say, a company like Buy Domains will probably reply no matter what, and perhaps they will try to cross-sell, down-sell, or up-sell you depending on the domain name.

Although the domain business isn’t yet mature, there are plenty of leading companies out there whose insight can be gleaned by others. Your success can only help them in the future.

Alexa Site Audit – Is It Worth It?

Elliot Silver
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25

A friend of mine recently suggested that I put my higher performing websites through an Alexa Site Audit to see if there are any changes I could/should make with regards to site structure, links, meta tags, SEM, SEO, and more. I looked through the site, and it does look like the report is comprehensive, but at $199 per website, it looks like it might be a bit on the expensive side if it’s used on several websites.

I am curious to know if anyone has ever purchased a Site Audit from Alexa, and if so, was the report worth the money? Similarly, was the report actionable for you?   In other words, if you aren’t really a developer/programmer/coder, could you understand the recommendations that were made and were you able to make changes to your site to leverage those recommendations? Things like broken links should be easy to fix, but recommendations about getting more inbound links from authority websites might be more difficult and aren’t easily actionable.

Whether you have experience with this report from Alexa or not, are there other companies that offer similar reports and services that can be helpful? I am sure everyone else gets those spammy emails and form submissions that say something like this:

“I’ve helped hundreds of companies increase their traffic and I’d love to show you what my service can do for you. I don’t promise the world, I’m straight forward and to the point … I deliver rankings. My rates are completely affordable and I don’t want to oversell you either, I start small and have my clients begging for more. I won’t take on your site unless I know I can deliver rankings. Reply to this e-mail if you have the slightest interest … you’ll never see rankings the same way again.”

I’d love to know what you’ve used that actually works and has been helpful to your business. From my perspective, there are a whole lot of services offered out there promising the world, but that makes it difficult for website owners to find someone/something that can actually deliver.

Third Quarter Estimated Taxes Due Tomorrow

Elliot Silver
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0

I am not the best when it comes to remembering important dates. Of course I remember April 15th when federal and state taxes are due for most people, but if it wasn’t for the reminders that I set in my calendar ahead of time, I probably would forget about estimated tax due dates.

If you are a little behind or maybe if you forgot, this is a reminder that Q3 estimated taxes are due on September 15, 2010, which happens to be tomorrow. I am a bit ahead of the game and sent mine in yesterday.

2010 Estimated Tax Due Dates:

  • April 15, 2010
  • June 15, 2010
  • September 15, 2010
  • January 18, 2011

The nice thing about estimated taxes are that you just need to fill out the federal 1040-ES tax form and mail a check for federal taxes, and it’s similar for state and local estimated taxes. Even if you are running behind, you can still mail your check in before the deadline and be all set.

Don’t forget about the Domain Tax Guide if you need a hand with your taxes and don’t have a clue about how to do them (or you can give the guide to your tax accountant as a reference tool).

Hand Domain Registration Today, Hoping for Sale Today

Elliot Silver
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40

Maybe I will look smart with this, and maybe I won’t.   We’ll see…

I was looking for a long tail domain name to register today with the hopes of re-selling it to an end user later on today. One domain name I found was PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com, and I registered it at Godaddy this morning. I chose Godaddy because almost anyone who buys domain names has heard of them, and the trust factor for an easy domain transfer/push is there and could reduce any anxiety.

I chose PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com for a few reasons:

  1. Philadelphia is a historical city with plenty of tours
  2. There are a whole lot of tour guides in the city, especially with a bad economy.
  3. There are very few barriers to entry to be a tour guide, so having a good domain name can propel someone to a higher search engine ranking, generating more business
  4. Large companies own other big city TourGuide.com domain names (ChicagoTourGuide.com is on sale for $2,388
  5. It’s a .com and .com is still king 🙂

FYI…Sorry for going back and forth with past and present tense in this post. As I am writing this, I have not yet sent out any emails, but I am in the process of finding people the email.

I am going to send the following email to prospective buyers of this domain name:

Dear XYZ,

I saw that you are a tour guide in Philadelphia, and I think you might be interested in buying PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com, a domain name my company owns but doesn’t have plans to develop. When someone is looking for a Philadelphia tour guide, they are likely to search Google/Yahoo/Bing for “Philadelphia tour guide” or something similar. Have a website built on the exact match domain name can be very helpful to your search engine ranking for related searches.

Additionally, I believe it would be cool to be known as the “Philadelphia Tour Guide,” and that can be done more easily with PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com. You can build your brand with this great generic domain name. I am offering this domain name to several Philadelphia tour guides and tour companies over the next few days, and the first one to agree to buy it for $1,800 will get it. The domain name only costs around $11/year to renew at Godaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar.

I hope you consider buying this domain name. Please get back to me ASAP, as it will sell to the first person or company who agrees to the asking price. Payment can be easily made using Paypal or a trusted escrow service like Escrow.com.

Regards,
Elliot J. Silver

I am going to search Google and Philadelphia’s Craigslist to find people who are advertising themselves as a local tour guide, and I will send them an email about this offer.

Should I not be able to sell it, I plan to park the domain name at Parked, and I will have a for sale notice on it in case people are interested in buying it.

Fulfillment by Amazon Program

Elliot Silver
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11

Did you know you can build an e-commerce website and have Amazon store your inventory and fulfill your shipments? A friend and I were talking about a new product he is developing, and when we started talking about distribution, he mentioned that one option he is considering is the Amazon Fulfillment Program.

With this program, customers can store their inventory at one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers. You can then either sell your products directly on Amazon.com where customers can purchase them along with other Amazon products, or you can sell them directly on your own website and simply use Amazon for inventory fulfillment. Instead of paying for storage space or filling your home/business with inventory, Amazon will do it for you, likely for a smaller cost than you could do it on your own.

Living in an apartment in New York City, I can’t exactly store much inventory of any kind. Likewise, it would be a costly pain in the neck to deal with shipping and other inventory control if I used a storage facility. This seems like a great concept for small business owners.

As I’ve discussed with BumperProtectors.com (now developed using an Epik site), ultimately it would be great to be able to sell bumper protectors.   Since I have no experience with inventory and have no space for it either, Amazon fulfillment would be something interesting to explore if I ever want to earn real money.

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