Be Mindful of Time Zones

This morning, I received a phone call at 1:30 am. I didn’t recognize the phone number, but after doing a bit of research this morning, I saw that it was from a domain registrant in India. There was no voicemail, but I can assume the person was trying to sell me a domain name.

When you are trying to do business with people in various time zones around the world, you need to be mindful of the local time of the prospects you are trying to reach. While domain investing isn’t a

Finding The Decision Maker is Critical

A number of times during the TRAFFIC conference, I was asked how I am able to close end user deals. I would never claim to be exceptional at this because I don’t do deals with end users in large quantities, I have had good luck reaching end user prospects to at least get an answer for them. I’ll share a few tips for how I find out the decision maker.

In my opinion, sending highly targeted emails is the way to go and worth the extra time. There are people out there who send hundreds of emails to a huge prospect list, but I can’t imagine that has a high success rate on a good quality domain name. If I was looking to sell Speechwriter.com, I wouldn’t send emails to speech recognition companies just because they share the word “speech.” I would send emails to companies that offer speech writing services.

Similarly, I don’t like to send

Guide to Changing a Website URL

After several years operating my blog under the ElliotsBlog.com domain name, I recently changed the website url to DomainInvesting.com and rebranded this blog. I wrote this free guide to changing a website url to advise others on what they need to do to mitigate traffic loss and to retain search engine rankings. By no means am I an expert on how to change a domain name on a website or blog, but hopefully you can learn from what I did if you ever need to change your domain.

The most important piece of advice I would give is to create a list of the things that are needed and share it with the web developer and anyone else on the team who will be implementing changes. If they don’t all work for the same company, be sure to send an introductory email and set up a phone call for them to discuss. Any issues that come up, should be addressed right away, especially as it relates to issues that could impact search engine rankings. All members of the team should be in constant communication before, during, and after the url change.

Listed below are the steps I took to when I changed the domain name for my website. As always, your comments are welcome.

Step by step guide to changing a domain name for a website:

Another Reason to Use a Domain Broker

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There are plenty of reasons to hire a domain broker on outbound domain sales. Domain brokers know how to contact buyers who might be interested in certain types of domain names, most have extensive lists of domain buyers, and all professional domain brokers should be skilled at negotiating.

For many domain investors, inbound domain sales are something we like to manage on our own. Negotiating can be exciting, especially in the case of a $50k offer turning into a $1.35 million sale, which is what happened with Rick Schwartz and his eBet.com domain name. I have found that most people who are domain investors enjoy the art of negotiating as much as anything else in this business.

Personally, I don’t really like to

Be Patient With End Users

When you are selling a domain name to an end user buyer, you need to exercise patience. There are a number of opportunities for deals when making deals with end users, especially if you are doing a deal with a large or publicly traded company.

I want to discuss the three areas that cause the most delays when selling a domain name to an end user buyer. Sometimes all three of these areas cause extensive delays. The key is to not get upset about these delays and to expect them before becoming frustrated, as the decision maker may not be able to cut through the red tape any quicker.

Good Time to Contact End User Buyer

The other day, I read a report about a large deal that had recently been transacted (outside the domain space). The medium sized company made hundreds of thousands of dollars on a deal, and it had been reported in a trade magazine. I own a domain name that could be of interest to this company, and I sent them an introductory email.

After a company closes a significant deal, it might be a good time to approach them about an excellent domain name that the company might have an interest in owning. They could