Buying Domain Names

When you are looking to acquire a domain name, it’s important that you get in touch with a decision maker, who may not be the Whois contact. Oftentimes, someone in tech support or the IT department will be listed as the domain registrant, and that person may or may not forward your email to the appropriate party.

When I send an inquiry email for a domain name (usually that is unused), and I don’t hear back from the person I emailed, I think about why I didn’t hear back. I will search the company’s website to find out who I emailed and what their role is within the company. If it’s someone on the IT staff, I usually try to find the CEO’s or President’s contact information to get an answer.

As you probably know from your own email inbox, owners of good domain names are usually pounded with inquiries. It’s likely that a tech person deletes these emails since he or she doesn’t often have a say about whether they’re for sale, and there isn’t an incentive for them to pass the email along to the right person. 99% of the time, domain investors will simply not follow up, and oftentimes, end users won’t either or they won’t make an offer that’s worthwhile for someone to reply.

If you are able to get in touch with the decision maker, you’ll likely get an answer to your inquiry far more expeditiously, obviously depending on the size of the company and who that decision maker is. The thing I’ve learned is that the people who are persistent and make reasonable offers will get the courtesy of a reply and has a greater chance of closing a deal.

It’s probably silly for me to give away insight related to how I find contact information when Whois lookups fail, but I guess that’s one reason why my blog is helpful.  Here’s another tip to get in touch with a domain owner.

One giveaway that a domain owner might be willing to sell his domain name is when a website is taken down. There are many reasons why someone would take down their website, but if they are no longer using the domain name, it might be for sale, whether it’s listed anywhere or not.

If the Whois information isn’t public or is outdated, you can use a tool like Screenshots.com to find more accurate contact information. Many websites list their email and/or phone number in the footer or home page, and if you search for the previous iteration of a website, you may be able to locate contact information for the owner. The domain name might resolve to a parked page or a registrar landing page, but Screenshots.com can be helpful to you to find valuable information.

Another tool you can use for this is Archive.org. I prefer to use Screenshots.com though because they support my blog and are a part of the domain industry.

I have been trying to track down the owner of a domain name that was registered to DNStination Inc. I’ve seen that company in a number of Whois lookups, and I am pretty sure a number of large companies use them for domain registration and likely other services. I am quite certain they don’t actually own the domain name, but they are the registrant.

I’ve shared a number of ways to find domain owners in the past, and I want to share another method I used to find the owner of this domain name.

The domain name was sort of developed, although it wasn’t extensive enough to consider a business. I used Screenshots.com to see that this particular website hadn’t changed much in the last couple of years, so it’s possible that the project is no longer a priority for the owner.

As I previously recommended, I had a look at the privacy policy and terms and conditions pages, and the email addresses were @domainname, which didn’t help me because it hadn’t worked in the past. In the privacy page, it listed the name of the company that operated the website. I was then able to search Google for the LLC name, and I found a site that had quite a bit of legal information about the LLC, including the company’s registered agent.

I recognized the registered agent’s name and have his contact information on file already (he’s an attorney and owns the domain name). This person isn’t involved in the domain industry, but I know of a few names he has sold in the past, and this will be helpful when contacting him directly.

I have no idea if I’ll be able to strike a deal, but it is always nice to be able to contact a domain owner directly instead of stopping when the trail goes cold. From my experience, going the extra mile is the difference between acquiring an awesome domain name and skipping over it like others have in the past.

Last week, I shared 5 factors I consider when buying a domain name, and I want to expound on two of the factors because I think they’re great indicators of value for the .com domain name you are thinking about buying.

When acquiring a domain name in the aftermarket (private purchase or auction), I always look to see how many other TLDs are registered. As I mentioned before, the more extensions that are registered, the more valuable the .com is because there are other prospects that would want to upgrade and/or it shows that the keyword is valuable to someone else.

If you have time, I recommend that you analyze who actually owns those TLDs, too. I used the word “analyze” here because it’s not always easy to see who actually owns the domain names just by the Whois information. What I mean is that if you are buying a RealEstate.com domain name and the .net is owned by Joe Smith, you should see who exactly Joe Smith is because that information is important. If Joe owns the largest real estate company in the city, he might have the money and interest in buying the .com should you want to sell it vs. Joe Smith who is buying cheap .net names at Go Daddy as investments.

I also think it’s important to note how long the other extensions have been registered. If a .net, .org, and other extensions have been registered for 12 years, it means someone has been paying $10+ a year for quite a long time. They may even be paying legacy pricing. There’s probably a reason they’ve sunk $100+ in renewal fees for these domain names.

The key takeaway aside from the insight is that there’s much more to do when buying domain names aside from entering your credit card information. If you treat domain names like lottery tickets, that’s cool, but it’s probably going to net the same result as going to the convenience store and buying lottery tickets. However, if you invest the time into researching good domain names and buy some good ones, that’s an investment you’ll probably find to be financially rewarding.