Afternic

Afternic emailed its customers yesterday to let them know they could now more easily set up landing pages without pay per click (PPC) links on them. These types of “for sale” landing pages make it more obvious that a particular domain name is for sale rather than having a smaller “for sale” notice on them. These landing pages give visitors the option to call a toll free number to speak with an Afternic sales representative, or they can fill out an inquiry form. The asking price is not listed on the landing page.

An example of the landing page Afternic customers can implement on their domain names can be seen below:

Prior to yesterday’s news, customer were able to forward their domain names to this type of landing page, but it took more effort setting up forwarding for each domain name. This nameserver change option will allow users to set this up in bulk.

Commenting on this change, Afternic’s Alan Shiflett shared the following information with me:

I was chatting with Adam Strong, and he let me know he has had some success selling domain names through Afternic. He just started listing some of the domain names from his portfolio a couple of months ago, and he has sold five figures worth of names. On one of his sales, he was chatting with the buyer, and she mentioned that she learned about his Afternic listing after receiving an email from GoDaddy.

I had not heard about this outbound sales tactic, and I have not received an email like the one that was described. With Adam’s permission (and encouragement), I emailed Afternic’s Alan Shiflett to learn more about this email campaign. He confirmed that GoDaddy sends out occasional emails to prospective buyers, and he was kind enough to share two examples of the email for me to share with readers. I asked Alan to mock it up using one of my own domain names because I don’t have permission to use someone else’s domain name listed on Afternic, so these two emails are samples: