Just about every day, I send emails to domain owners with the hope of buying their domain names. This morning on Twitter, someone asked me about approaching a domain owner to buy a domain name without coming across as a scammer:

“How do you reach out to a domain owner, looking to purchase his/her domain without coming off as a valuation scammer,” I was asked.

I thought I would share some fairly simple advice to people who want to buy domain names directly from the owners.

I think the most important thing is to make a reasonable offer. Money talks. You can be the nicest, smartest, wealthiest, poorest…etc person in the world, but if you don’t offer the domain owner something of value, it isn’t going to get a deal done. There are many things that can be offered, such as cash, equity, collateral, tax deduction, products, services and perhaps other things I can’t think of off the top of my head.

An offer is the

With most domain name privacy services, an email that is directed to the anonymized email address will automatically be forwarded to the domain owner’s email address. The sender won’t know the email address until the owner responds.

Yesterday, I was sending out some domain name offers and inquiries, and one of the emails bounced as undeliverable. This email happened to be a privacy service email, and I found a bit of a surprise when I opened it. The bounced email report showed the email address of the domain owner, and that gave me two important pieces of information that may prove to be helpful.

First and foremost, the email address will