Don’t Be Annoying

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The other day, I received an email that started with, “I have reached out several times.” I had not responded to this person’s email because I had no interest in what he was offering, but I will share some advice with you.

It’s fine to email me once about some domain names that you think I might like to buy. You can see the types of names I own, and if you have something that would fit in on that list, you are welcome to share them with me with your price. If I don’t reply, perhaps it is because I am not interested. There’s a chance I missed your email, so a follow-up wouldn’t be too annoying. However, if you send two emails that don’t generate a response, it is likely that the domain names you sent are not of interest.

I do my best to

How to Buy Back a Domain Name

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Yesterday afternoon, I wrote an article detailing a couple of ways a domain name may go under new ownership, unbeknownst to the former owner. I suppose because of the surprise of this, sometimes these former owners have a poor attitude when discussing their former domain name, and that is not helpful to a negotiation.

I thought I would share a few tips to help former owners try and reacquire their lost domain names via negotiation with the new owner:

Be professional – Being an a-hole is not going to win you any points with the new owner, and it will likely lead to a breakdown in negotiation. When someone gets confrontational with me about a domain name my company rightfully owns, I generally completely ignore the person or have my General Counsel take over. I don’t have the patience to deal with people like that.

Know your rights – If the domain name is descriptive and it expired because an old email address was used as the contact email at the registrar, chances are good that the

Offer a Cyber Monday Domain Deal

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We’ve all been in negotiations that don’t end well. Our price is higher than the buyer was willing to spend, and we got stuck on our asking price. Perhaps today is a good day to rekindle the negotiation and offer a Cyber Monday deal for the domain name.

People have come to expect great deals on Cyber Monday. My inbox has been full of companies offering special prices for Cyber Monday and even “Cyber Week” in some cases. Point is, people are looking for deals online today, and why not try to close some of your old leads.

Now that most of the email newsletters with special

Argument Against BIN Pricing

Most domain brokers and domain name marketplaces encourage their sellers to set buy it now (BIN) prices for their domain name listings. They correctly cite the higher sales rates for the BIN names as a reason for sellers to list domain names with BIN prices. While this is true, I don’t think it always works to the benefit of the seller to use BIN pricing.

Let’s say you bought or hand registered 50 average to below average “Western” 4 letter .com domain names a few years ago. These names, which now may be considered “Chips,” have the letters Q, X, W, and Z mixed within them. By US and Western standards a few years ago, these names generally weren’t anything special and could be had for registration fee or a bit more. If you decided to listen to the advice of domain marketplaces and set “aggressive” BIN prices of $750/each, you would have sold all 50 names at some point in the last several months. That once aggressive pricing is now considered a steal.

Before the last several months, I can’t

Ask Other Owners About Offers

I bought a domain name recently, and I did a bit of research to see the prices of similar domain names. This should help me determine my asking price if someone inquires in the future. If you see names that are for sale but aren’t priced, don’t be afraid to ask the owner for their prices and whether or not they have received offers.

There are a couple of reasons for finding out the prices of similar domain names.

The first reason is that prospective buyers will likely find those other names and inquire about them. If a similar domain name is for sale for $2,000 and you are asking $25,000, you may have a difficult time selling.

The second reason is

Blog Comment Tip: Don’t Try to Sell Names

Domain blogs would seem like a good place to sell domain names. There is a captive audience of people within the domain business, and many people who read blogs buy domain names on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the comment section is not a good place to sell domain names.

I have to deal with comment spam on a regular basis. Usually, the spam is caught by the Akismet spam filter, but occasionally it gets through. Akismet is not as good at catching people trying to sell domain names as it is at catching spammy links to porn, pharmacies, and other blog comment spam. This means that I (and other blog publishers) have to manually mark these comments as spam.

The vast majority of comments that have domain names for sale contain