LinkedIn Search Stats Can Help ID a Prospective Buyer

I was looking at LinkedIn this afternoon, and I realized their search stats tool can be invaluable in helping to identify a prospective buyer for a domain name. LinkedIn shows users the number of times their profile appeared in their search stats. It also shows “Where your searches work.” This can help identify a prospective buyer.

Let’s say you own Example.com. One day you look at LinkedIn and see that someone from a company called Example Capital found you in a LinkedIn search. Assuming your name is in the Whois record, it is very likely that the company was doing some due diligence to learn more about you in an attempt to buy the domain name.

I have found that larger companies tend to use brokers and/or brand protection companies to acquire domain names. This is done to stay stealthy. The point is to ensure the domain owner doesn’t have any idea who is behind the inquiry. If the domain owner saw

Providers.com Sold for $100k via Buckley Media Group

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According to a tweet from domain broker Kate Buckley of Buckley Media Group, her company brokered the sale of Providers.com for $100,000:

I reached out to Kate to ask her about the sale of Providers.com, and she told me the domain name was acquired by a company called Clearlink. The seller of the domain name is Nett Corp, Inc., the company operated by long time domain investor Roy Messer.

Once the sale is confirmed and archived in DNJournal, it will rank just outside of the top 20 public domain name sales of 2018 (year to date), tied with the $100,000 sale of Jones.com. It is the second largest publicly reported domain name sale of the year for Kate’s company. Last month,

Canadian Tire Acquires Triangle.com from McClatchy

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In early April, I noticed that the Triangle.com domain name had changed hands. I had made a couple of offers to buy the domain name, and when I went to do a follow-up, I saw that the domain name was no longer registered to the company that owned it for many years.

The Whois record for Triangle.com shows the Canadian Tire Corporation is now the registrant of the domain name. The McClatchy Company, a publicly traded media company had been the registrant and was using the domain name for a North Carolina news publication. When I learned the domain name had changed hands in early April, I reached out to a few people at Canadian Tire, and they said they could not comment on the acquisition.

Last week, Simeon Tuoyo mentioned

F.org Sold by NameFind

It looks like the F.org domain name has been sold by NameFind, the domain portfolio company owned by GoDaddy. I noticed the domain name changed registrants in my daily email from DomainTools. The new registrant of F.org is a company called Fincubator VC, a venture capital firm that invests in FinTech companies.

The website for F.org has already been launched and it is home to an entity called FinTech Labs. There seem to be multiple companies with a similar name to that, so having the F.org domain name should help them stand out.

In January of 2017, Jamie Zoch reported that GoDaddy sold

Google Plus Can Help Identify a Prospective Buyer

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Some people don’t like dealing with prospective buyers who use a free email address like Gmail. The thinking is that it could be a corporate buyer with a big budget trying to go under the radar to get a better deal. I happen to like dealing with buyers who use Gmail addresses.

An “anonymous” looking Gmail address like BostonMAGrandpa787@gmail.com may seem to make it difficult to identify the prospective buyer. This is especially the case if the prospect fills out the form with the name “John” and doesn’t include a phone number. The first thing I do is search for that email address within my Gmail account. This will identify if the person has emailed me before, but more importantly, it will also show their Google Plus page if they have one.

On quite a few occasions, I have been

Tip for Using DomainTools’ Domain Search Tool

I use quite a few tools from DomainTools. One of the tools I like best for prospecting is the Domain Search tool. This tool allows me to see all of the domain registrations in a specific keyword, making it easier to target prospective buyers who own domain names with a keyword similar to mine.

To give you an example, I own KitchenConsultant.com. I think other businesses with longer tail domain names might want to upgrade to KitchenConsultant.com. For instance, if someone owned BestKitchenConsultant.com or KitchenConsultantNYC.com, they might want to purchase the domain name my company owns. Searching “kitchenconsultant” will yield all of the registered domain names with that particular search term.

One thing I like to do when using this tool is to alter my keyword a bit to broaden the number of prospects. Instead of searching