TreatmentCenters.com is a great example of a company buying the domain name they needed and building it into a million dollar website. TreatmentCenters.com was sold for $100,000 by Afternic/BuyDomains as reported in DNJournal. This domain name informs visitors about exactly what they will find when they type it in to their browser, and it doesn’t disappoint upon arrival. For this business model, there probably aren’t any better domain names out there.
Using a directory model, TreatmentCenters.com provides paid and unpaid listings for various health and mental treatment centers and counselors throughout the country. Visitors can search by condition, by state or by provider name to find what they need. When a website like this is able to provide names, addresses, contact information, and data on the topic of interest to the searcher, it builds stickiness, and the searcher will probably return. This provides a positive experience for the visitor, and it also provides an ROI for the advertiser.
Kudos to the people behind TreatmentCenters.com! This is an aesthetically pleasing, well-functioning website, and it looks like a million bucks! I hope to emulate it with some of my entries down the road – including Lowell.com.
Great Domain Name Strategy: Vacations To Go
Travel planning company Vacations To Go employs one of the finest domain strategies I have seen. The company owns some fantastic niche travel domain names, allowing them to avoid paying high pay per click costs. While they seem to avoid the very expensive one word generic domain names (like Cruises.com), they do own a ton of great second tier travel domain names that probably receive some traffic. Just a few of the highly targeted domain names owned by Vacations To Go include:
AcapulcoCruises.com
AthensTours.com
LowCostCruise.com
LowPriceCruises.com
MexicanCruises.com
ItalyCruise.com
Showing their vast domain knowledge, Vacations To Go even owns some fantastic typo domain names, including:
BahamasCrusie.com
CheapCruies.com
Norweigan.com
The smartest thing about this strategy is that instead of paying $.50 – $10.00+ per visitor’s click on Yahoo or Google, they own all visitors to their domain names, and only pay around $7/year for each domain name. All of their names are forwarded to their main site, with a subfolder tracking how the visitor reached the main page. If a customer books just one cruise or vacation after landing on a domain name, they’ve almost certainly paid off the domain name for life (and then some).
One major issue I see is that many of the domain names owned by Vacations To Go don’t seem to be listed in Google. As you can see in the screenshot below, MexicanCruises.com isn’t listed in Google when the exact domain name is entered into the search bar. This isn’t good, as it means if a customer tries to directly navigate to the site using Google instead of the internet browser bar, they won’t even see the domain name. On some of the names where this is an issue, Vacations To Go attempts to alleviate this by buying the keyword of the domain name, but that is costing them money.
There are many reasons why Google could have removed the names, but it may have had nothing to do with anything Vacations To Go did. To rectify this, I would suggest that someone from Vacations To Go enters all of their domain names into Google, and take note of the names that do not show up in the results. They should then request reconsideration from Google. By doing this, Vacations To Go will have their domain names put back into Google, saving them from having to pay per click every time a consumer types the domain name as a search.
On other domain names, such as MexicoCruises.com, the domain name is listed in Google at the top. If a visitor accidentally types this domain name into Google instead of their navigation bar, they will see it as the top natural result, and they may click on this listing rather than on the paid search listing. Vacations To Go has protected itself by paying for Adwords keywords, which is another smart move.
Vacations To Go certainly has one of the best domain strategies I’ve seen. Not only are they building value for their brand, they are also building value for each of the domain names they own. If they were to ever sell the company, they could provide a traffic, click through and ROI for each domain asset they own, adding tremendous value to their portfolio. I give high praise to Alan Fox and his team at Vacations To Go.
Making a Reasonable Offer for a Domain Name
Usually when I want a domain name, I place a value on it to my portfolio, and I make the owner an offer that is within my value range. While I may end up paying more than I could have paid, it virtually guarantees that I will receive a response. These days, it is difficult to pay too much for a great category killer generic domain name. There are so few available for sale, the prices continue to rise.
Domain owners receive dozens of emails for their valuable domain names daily, weekly or yearly. For the most part, unless it isn’t a top tier name, chances are very good that your offer isn’t the first, nor the last offer that will be made on a particular name. If you send a lowball offer, the owner will likely delete it like all the others – or send you an email telling you to get lost (or some unprintable variation of “get lost”). If you make a reasonable offer, you are much more likely to get a favorable (or at least some sort of) response.
I know there are many people out there who would tell me they bought a great name for a tenth of the value simply by making a low offer for it. Well, I think that is mostly due to lucky timing, and it certainly doesn’t happen often – especially with software that allows people to send out massive amounts of inquiry emails. If you have no idea how much a domain name is worth to you, then it probably isn’t advisable to even be making offers until market research is done.
From my own experience, if you want to acquire a name that you believe is worth $20,000 – $30,000, you will have much more luck by offering close to $20,000 rather than $2,000. Most motivated domain owners would probably thank me for the offer, and ask me to increase it, assuming that if I start there, I am willing to go higher. My approach is to either increase the offer just a bit (if I have room) or tell the owner that’s my final offer – and I stick to it. If the domain owner is inclined to sell for that price but wanted to see if I was willing to offer more, he will probably accept my offer, lest he regret declining a fair offer. Owners want to receive the most for their names, but most won’t turn down a reasonable offer if he knows its the best he will get.
I know there are plenty of stories to counter this strategy, but as more people enter the industry, the more important it is to make your first offer an impressive offer. You should get a better response rate and end up owning better domain names. You may pay more, but you will close more deals.
Responding to a Domain Name Offer
Like nearly any piece of property or other asset, almost all domain names are technically for sale for the right price. There aren’t many domain owners who would pass up on a high seven figure cash offer for a domain name, with the exception of developed businesses or very few exceptional domain names. If you sincerely have the ability to pass up on a $5,000,000 for a domain name, I congratulate you, and you can probably stop reading this post and go back to your bottle of 1926 Macallan.
For those of you who have more of a Budweiser taste, please continue.
The problem I see is the way some UDRP proceedings have gone recently, where domain owners can potentially be penalized if they receive an offer and attempt to negotiate a better deal. It seems that some UDRP panels consider an owner’s contemplation of selling a domain name a sign of bad faith. This is dangerous for domain owners, and I know it causes many people to think twice whenever an offer or solicitation is received. Just about everything in this world has some sort of price, and simply because a person would consider selling a possession doesn’t mean that they owned the possession for the sole purpose of selling it.
That said, I think domain owners might be well suited to respond to certain domain email inquiries and offers with an agreement to waive the right to file a UDRP or lawsuit if anything about the domain name is discussed. The person making the inquiry or offer would have to waive his rights to any future legal action before ANY discussion about the name can take place. Any person who is interested in buying the name should be willing to sign, and if someone isn’t willing to sign, it probably means they have ulterior motives, or perhaps they are just kicking the tires.
I am not an attorney, so this isn’t a legal opinion, but the point of this post is to discuss the question of whether this type of agreement would protect domain owners and if it would be a legally binding agreement. Since most domain owners would be willing to sell names in their portfolio for a price (even though that price could be sky high), it might be something worth considering before future negotiations.
Mike Berkens' Daily Domain Blog
The domain investment business is fairly small, so there are many individuals that “everyone knows.” However, there aren’t as many individuals that everyone knows and likes. Mike Berkens is one of those few people. Mike’s company, Most Wanted Domains owns tens ft thousands of great domain names, and as far as I know, Mike is as bullish on domain names as anyone else in the industry. (You can read my “5 With Mike Berkens” interview for more detailed information.)
Mike started a great blog recently, and although I’ve linked to it a few times, I want to separately encourage everyone to add TheDomains.com to your RSS readers. Mike is one of those types of people that can move and shake the industry, and I have great respect for him. He has maintained a low profile until recently, and I am glad to see him blogging.
Mike is an influential guy in this industry, and his blog is a daily “must read.”