I haven’t been doing a whole lot of outbound marketing to sell domain names this year, primarily due to the pandemic and economic fallout that resulted. When I do outbound marketing to sell domain names, it is for my “inventory quality” assets that are relatively easy to replace. I have selectively picked up my outbound efforts a bit since the beginning of the month, and I want to share a tip.

To give a bit of background on my outbound marketing efforts, I can share that I primarily find leads via related Google searches and via the lead generation tool at Dropping.pro. Instead of just looking for email addresses and aiming for the cannon approach, I try to take a nuanced approach and find someone specific at a company. I then try to find their email address or the email convention for the company.

Last week, I kiddingly posted a tweet illustrating what happens when a domain investor shares a sale publicly. Many people reply with congratulatory messages, but there are almost always people who reply pitching their (typically less good) domain name they seem to think would be comparable to what sold:

Domain investor 1: “I sold https://t.co/teAKVWiv9i for $50,000!”

Domain investors 2 – 10: “Congratulations, that’s great!”

Domain investor 11: “I am selling DomainNameAwesum.garbage for $5,000. HMU if u want to buy it.”

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) August 14, 2020

Yesterday morning, I wrote about the need for GoDaddy to add 2 factor authentication (2FA) at Afternic to enhance account security. While we are discussing account security, I also think it is important for Escrow.com to offer its customers a form of 2FA for account logins.

The potential security issues at Escrow.com and Afternic are different, but the ramifications are serious on both platforms. If someone would gain access to my Escrow.com account via the password, they would have access to all of my domain name sales and acquisitions that have been transacted via Escrow.com. Similarly, if someone gains access to a domain broker’s Escrow.com account, they would have access to client domain name sales data.