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:

Down Market Could be Good for Domain Buyers

A down market could be a good opportunity for domain buyers

If we see a prolonged bear stock market, it could be good for people looking to buy high quality domain names at better prices. People who have owned domain names for a long period of time might be more inclined to sell as the stock market goes down.

I have been doing quite a bit of outreach in an attempt to buy excellent keyword .com domain names. My efforts haven’t been fruitless, but it seems to be getting more difficult to buy great domain names at reasonable prices. Names that would have likely sold for $5-15,000 now seem to be priced at $25,000+.

For the most part, I have been

Due Diligence: Subtle Email Address Changes

There are many different facets to doing due diligence when buying a domain name. I use DomainTools’ Whois history tool to verify as much information as possible before buying a domain name. I will often call the phone number listed on the Whois record, and I may even call previous phone number listings as well. I don’t think too much due diligence is possible.

One area that may tip people off to a potential issue is a subtle email address change. When I see a very subtle change in the listed email address, it sets off alarm bells in my head. For example, if a Whois email address for 10 years was FirstNameLastName@yahoo.com and it recently changed to FirstNameLastName@hotmail.com, it makes me wonder if the change was legitimate. This change could be used for social engineering or to make others think the domain name has not changed hands.

I have seen and heard of domain name