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Buying Domain Names

Domain Negotiation Tip: Justifying Your Offer

Elliot Silver
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10

When you are in the midst of negotiating to purchase a domain name on Sedo, one of the prefabricated replies you can select is something like “justify your price.” It’s always made me laugh a bit to see that reply, but when you think about it, justifying your offer or price is a great way to get the price you need.

Oftentimes when I am negotiating with a buyer or seller, the price we both have in mind is different. For times when the price gap is significant, there’s usually little reason to engage in a discussion. Why waste time on a name I want for $2-4,000 and the seller wants $100,000. Either he’s crazy and/or doesn’t need the money, or I am not as enamored with the name as he. Whatever the case, it would likely be a fruitless discussion.

However, there are times when we are just a few thousand dollars away from a mutually agreeable price, and the actual negotiation is critical in getting the price I want/need for the domain name. Discussing why you value a domain name the way you do can lead to you getting your pricing, or at least seeing the flip side to why the name is worth more or less to the other party.

One thing I like to include in my negotiation strategy are favorable comps (using DNSalePrice.com, DN Journal, or NameBio.com). By favorable, I mean that the names have similar results in Google, similar search volume, and are in the same vertical (ie: two real estate domain names).  It helps if you have more than one comparable and they are recent comps.

Another thing I include is information about developing the website. When I am the buyer or the seller, I let the other party know my plans with the domain name and why I think it’s worth what it’s worth. I give them a bit of insight into my development plans and justify why I can’t offer more money or offer to sell it for less money.

I know that some sellers get annoyed when a buyer asks them to justify the price, but I think it’s a good way to discuss a domain name’s value and possibly come to terms.

What types of things do you discuss when you’re trying to buy or sell a domain name to bridge the gap?

WuFoo Bought for $35 Million: Should Now Buy WooFoo.com

Elliot Silver
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8

WuFooThis afternoon on TechCrunch, I read that popular online form website, WuFoo, was acquired for $35 million (cash and stock) by SurveyMonkey. I’ve used WuFoo before, and I like how easy it is to create and implement forms on websites.

One downside of the WuFoo branding is that it can easily be confused with WooFoo.com. According to Compete, WooFoo.com doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but it does get up to a few thousand visits a month, likely misdirected type in traffic. The owner isn’t monetizing this traffic, but does have a for sale notice on the landing page.

Now one might suggest that the owners of WuFoo file a UDRP for WooFoo.com and be done with it, but not so fast on that. WooFoo.com was registered in January of 2005 and WuFoo.com was registered a year later in January of 2006. This quite obviously means that the domain owner did not register the domain name to capitalize on the WuFoo brand since it was non existent, and bad faith registration would be difficult to prove.

I have no idea what the owners of WooFoo.com want for the domain name, but I think the companies should work out some sort of deal. Any buyer of WooFoo.com would very likely know that WuFoo exists, and it would be likely that WuFoo/SurveyMonkey would file a UDRP for the domain name if sold.  Additionaly, the current owner would be  hard pressed  to monetize this domain name without  infringing  on the rights of WuFoo.

Most importantly, WuFoo is losing some traffic to this typo. Of course, some people will then go to Google to find it, where WuFoo will have to compete with other companies either with sponsored ads or with SEO when the visitor searches for something like “online forms.” This is probably not a lot of money, but over time it may be, and it’s something that can be avoided with a relatively inexpensive acquisition.

If SurveyMonkey is willing to spend $35m on WuFoo, the company should reach out and try to buy WooFoo.com. The owner likely can’t sell it to anyone else, and there likely wouldn’t be a better buyer for it.

Yext Tags to Rebrand on an $1,800 Domain Name Purchased from BuyDomains

Elliot Silver
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4

YextI learned a couple of things when reading TechCrunch yesterday. First, there’s a company called Yext that helps small businesses add and enhance (tag) listings across a wide variety of popular websites like Yelp, Yahoo, CitySearch, YellowBook, and several others. It’s a pretty cool service that I didn’t know existed.

In the same article, I learned that the company is rebranding its Yext Tags product name tomorrow, and it will be called PowerListings.  The PowerListings.com domain name rang a bell, and I did a bit of research, where I confirmed that BuyDomains recently sold PowerListings.com for $1,800. It was included in the April 5th Afternic sales report.

This is one of those times where you wonder if having a listing price may have hurt the company. Had the domain name been unpriced, perhaps it could have resulted in a higher price, assuming Yext had settled on the branding. The other side of the argument is that the company may have had a list of domain names available at a certain price level, and this was the best of the bunch. Who knows.

Anyway, if you have a local website, you should certainly check out Yext Tags / PowerListings when you have a chance. It can be a powerful marketing tool.

Some Recent Acquisitions

Elliot Silver
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66

This seemed to be a pretty popular type of article last time I posted it, so here goes again. Below are some of my recent acquisitions (private purchases and auction wins) and hand registrations. Feel free to share yours as well if you’d like.

  • StuttgartHotels.com
  • BoracayHotels.com
  • BikeTours.com
  • IndiaOutsourcing.com
  • CollegeBaseballNews.com
  • HumorForum.com
  • Sweet16BirthdayParty.com
  • InternationalCustodyAttorneys.com
  • DinnerSuggestion.com
  • GoToMonaco.com
  • ElementarySchoolTutors.com
  • InpatientRehabs.com

I also bought a name I would normally be hesitant to purchase: PaulTsongasArena.com. The concert/sports arena in Lowell, Massachusetts was named after Senator Paul Tsongas. Last year, UMass Lowell purchased the arena and renamed it Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell. The previously used domain name, PaulTsongasArena.com, was not renewed and went to auction last week.

Prior to this auction, I contacted the director of the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell as well as the University’s director of communications, advised them of the dropping domain name and strongly suggested they renew it. They weren’t  interested  and I let them know I was going to try and win it at auction. It cost me a few hundred dollars, but I am going to redirect it to my Tsongas Center page on Lowell.com. At least it wasn’t bought by someone else who would park it.

Get The Long Tail Names for Your Website

Elliot Silver
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23

I know there are a lot of domain investors who have developed one or more websites, and many have seen success in terms of traffic and advertisers for one or more website. I want to make a suggestion to those of you who may have local directory sites for national services or products, and I will use DogWalker.com as my example.

If possible, you should consider hand registering long tail domain names to help drive traffic to your site. You can either build mini sites (which I do not do) to drive traffic to the main site, or you can do a 301 redirect, which won’t give you much SEO value, but they could drive traffic to your site.

I own domain names like PhiladelphiaDogWalking.com, LasVegasDogWalker.com, CharlotteDogWalkers.com, and many other large city names that are related (all hand registered). These names are all forwarded to the main page on DogWalker.com for each city, allowing type in traffic to find the page they want.

Here’s my rationale. I pay under $10 for a hand registered domain name. I also pay Adwords somewhere between $.75 and $1.75 or so per click, depending on the keyword. Assuming I get 8-12 visits a year, the names pay for themselves. It’s great because when someone types in LasVegasDogWalker.com, it’s very targeted traffic.

In addition, these names also have intrinsic value to others as well, since they’re descriptive domain names. In other words, I could sell any of these names if that will be beneficial to my business. Perhaps I could sell a name like BrooklynDogWalking.com to a company in Brooklyn for $1,500 and an annual listing on DogWalker.com + a link back. I haven’t done this yet, but it’s a possibility.

To be totally truthful, I don’t have a way to track the traffic from these domain names since they are 301 redirects. However, when I had them on WhyPark, most did receive a few visits a month, so I can assume that traffic has continued.

I recommend you look into doing this. I know some of my competitors are doing the exact same thing, and I am sure yours are as well.

My Current Strategy With Hand Registrations

Elliot Silver
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35

I am feeling a bit more bearish about the short term domain aftermarket than I have in a while, so I’ve found myself hand registering domain names more frequently than in the past. Aside from privately acquiring domain names like BikeTours.com, TaxConsult.com, MonthlyPaymentCalculator.com, and HumorForum.com in the last month, my  acquisitions  and inquiries have been fewer than in prior months.

Instead of spending significant amounts of money on domain names with plans of quickly flipping them, I’ve been focusing on hand registering domain names I think are pretty decent, and I’ve changed up my strategy on what I do with hand registered domain names once I buy them.

I am not aggressively looking to re-sell these domain names, but I am doing something passively that I haven’t done before: I am immediately listing them for sale at Sedo. I am not simply parking them with a message that says the name may be for sale. I am actively putting them on the market right from the get go.

I will likely begin listing these names on Afternic as well, since they have a pretty broad footprint with BuyDomains. The downside from my perspective is that the BuyDomains brokers generally prefer names that are priced, and I don’t want to go through the trouble of doing that yet.

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Please help me raise funds for the  Ronald McDonald House

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