Beware of Conflicts of Interest With Consultants & Brokers

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I am neither a domain consultant nor a domain broker, but I receive quite a few requests from people to help them with their domain investment decisions and businesses. One such request came last week, and when the domain name intrigued me, I saw that I knew the owner of the domain name.

Despite the fact that I would not help the person who inquired, it got me thinking about a potential conflict of interest. If I were to have agreed to consult on behalf of the person who inquired, it could have caused a potential conflict of interest because of my association with the domain owner. This is something people who use domain consultants and domain brokers need to consider before signing a letter of engagement.

The domain name industry is somewhat of a

Communicate With Your Domain Broker

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I’ve worked with a variety of domain brokers on outbound and inbound domain sales, and I have experienced different levels of communication with these domain brokers and brokerages. I think the domain owner should let the domain broker know how much communication is desired since different brokers tend to have different communication preferences.

When I have engaged a domain broker for an inbound purchase inquiry, especially for a domain name that receives quite a bit of regular interest, I appreciate it when my domain broker follows up with me regularly. I like to know what the buyer is thinking and where the buyer is at in terms of interest or taking action. Even if there is no chance of a deal (ie buyer willing to pay $10k but my price is $100k), I want to be updated with the status. Perhaps I can offer more flexibility in pricing or terms, and knowing what the buyer is thinking is helpful. It’s also helpful to know a status when holding negotiations with more than one party.

When I have engaged a domain broker for outbound sales, I

Tip for Getting Domain Blog Coverage

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If you are a company that is active in the domain name space, or if your company caters to domain investors and domain name owners, I want to share a tip to help you get coverage for your product, service, or company. This tip is applicable for my blog, and it may also work for other domain industry news outlets as well.

I spend quite a bit of time on Twitter and Facebook reading domain industry news and updates. I also have active Google News alerts for many domain investing related terms and companies. This means that I read many news articles and press releases that might impact my business or be of interest to me, and that is what I use as a gauge for writing articles.

Despite the amount of information and news I read, there are many things that I miss. For instance, yesterday afternoon I was out of the office when George Kirikos tweeted about the Power.com sale, and that would have been a topic I would likely have written about. There are many interesting news stories that I miss, but it’s generally not for lack of interest on my part.

If your company has

Find a Buyer By Checking Toll Free Numbers

Recently, I was contacted by a prospective buyer who wants to purchase one of my domain names. During the course of our discussion, I learned that he owns a toll-free 800 phone number with my keyword, and he would like to own my keyword .com domain name to go along with his phone number. This gave me an idea.

If you own a short keyword domain name, perhaps you can find a buyer by seeing who owns the corresponding toll free phone numbers. You can search 800, 877, 888…etc phone numbers online or simply by calling those companies directly and getting contact information for the respective companies. You may even find some local companies who bought keyword phone numbers in their area code.

Some of the phone numbers

Find a Domain Buyer via Google ccTLD

I like to do my own research to find prospective buyers for some of my domain names, and I thought of a way that might be useful to find new leads. Typically, I use Google.com to search for companies that use the keywords of the domain name I am selling. I thought perhaps using a ccTLD where Google operates could bring additional prospective buyer leads.

Google operates many localized search engines using its ccTLD domain names. Google.co.uk, Google.com.do, Google.ca, and Google.ie are all examples of Google’s search engines that  are geared towards local searches in those particular regions.  For instance, if you look up London dog walkers  on Google.co.uk, you are likely to find more local results than if you would do the same search on Google.com.

I’ll give you an example of how this might work using

Do Your Homework Before Making an Offer

When I am interested in buying a particular domain name, I often do research to learn about the history of the domain name. Using insight I can glean from public and private sources, I may be able to learn something that will guide my offer. When I make an offer, I want to be reasonable, but I also don’t want to look uninformed.

There are several things I look for prior to making an offer, and I’d like to share quite a few of those below. Sometimes, I will do more or less research as my research dictates. I have also provided a bit of color for each of the things I look at to try and make it more clear about why I do this and what it could mean to me: