Yesterday I wrote a post with some advice on addressing end users. I think a personal email goes a long way, and it’s far superior to a bulk email or an email that has a generic greeting. Someone asked me how I find the name and email address of a potential buyer, and it’s a good question. Here are some suggestions, and I welcome your additional suggestions as well.

• Management page on a website. For small to medium sized businesses, contacting the president or CEO of a company is a good way to open  discussion  about a domain sale. You may also want to email or cc the person in charge of marketing or business development. For large or very large companies, I don’t recommend emailing the CEO since it will likely get filtered by an administrative assistant and not make it through. Management pages often have the email addresses of the executives, so that’s a bonus.

• Contacts page. This is probably the most obvious way to get in touch with someone at a company. Use the contact form or contact email address on the website. For added effectiveness, address the email “Dear John” or “Hi Jim” to the President of the company or someone in marketing. If it’s a larger company, something like “Dear Mr. Smith” would probably be best since there will likely be more than one person with the name, and a more formal greeting may be appropriate in getting your email forwarded to the right party.

• Whois look up. The technology decision maker or executive is often the contact on the Whois. If you are unsure of whether the Whois contact is the correct person to contact, do a Google search for that person’s name to see where he or she ranks at the company. This will also tell you whether the person works for the company or is a web developer who will likely delete your email.

• LinkedIn. You can use a site like LinkedIn to find the name of the contact at a company. If you have connections in common, you can try to get an introduction, or you might be able to contact the person using other means, like Facebook. You can also guess the person’s email address, trying something like john.smith@company.com or a variety of other options. I like to try and find a random person’s email address in a press release or something else to see how the company uses email addresses and try to send an email to the owner or marketing contact that way.

• Press release archive contact. Look at a company’s old press releases to see if the president’s contact information is listed. Sometimes it’s a press agent, which doesn’t usually result in good leads for me. However, if the person is labeled as a marketing manager, you might have luck with the domain name decision maker.

I am sure there are many other ways to get in touch with the right person at a company. Please share your ideas on ways to contact a decision maker.

I read a report this morning on iGamingBusiness.com that announced the sale of OnTheBox.com and ForExSpace.com for £250,000 in cash for the pair of domain names. London-based Media Corporation was the seller of the domain names, although the registrant information for these two domain names does not appear to have changed yet.

According to this morning’s report, the company appears to have done very well with the sale:

“Media Corporation revealed that the domains were on its balance sheet at £130,000 with the sales representing a profit of £120,000 while it estimates annual staff and associated savings of approximately £350,000. ForExSpace.com was only recently launched and had yet to generate any material revenues while OnTheBox.com came in as a loss-making enterprise for the financial year to September.”

Because these domain names seem to have websites built on them, it’s questionable about whether the sales will be reported as pure domain sales or not. I guess it depends on what the new owner plans to do with the domain names post-sale.

One interesting tidbit from the article indicates that Media Corporation is doing what many domain investors have been doing these last couple of years: selling assets that aren’t making money to increase the amount of cash on hand.

I’ll keep an eye on the Whois information to see who bought the domain names.

Thanks to Chris for the tip.

I am interested in knowing your feedback about a topic I’ve discussed in private with a few people during the last few years.

“Double dipping” is where an intermediary (can be a broker or marketplace) takes a percentage commission from the buyer of a domain name as well as the seller, and each person believes he is the only entity paying the commission. Similarly, this can also mean the broker or intermediary is pocketing the difference between a buyer’s price and a seller’s offer, and taking a commission on top of this.

I want to share two hypothetical examples to illustrate what I mean.

• A broker contacts me on behalf of a buyer and offers me $10,000 to sell ElliotsBlog.com to his client. I agree to the terms, which includes my paying a 15% commission. The broker also told the buyer he needs to pay a 10% commission for closing the deal, without mentioning that I am paying, too. Instead of making just $1,500 or $1,000 total on the buy or sell-side commission, the intermediary is actually making $2,500.

• I list ElliotsBlog.com for sale in a newsletter or on an aftermarket site for $10,000. Later, I am informed that an offer of $8,000 was made, and I accept it. The intermediary tells the buyer that my price is firm, and he agrees to pay $10,000 to buy the name. The broker pays me $6,800 after taking my 15% commission from the supposed $8,000 sale and also keeps the $2,000 difference between what the buyer paid and what I thought the sales price was. In total, the “commission” was $3,200 instead of $1,500 on a $10,000 deal.

In both of these cases, the buyer and seller are willingly accepting a deal that’s presented to them, so it’s not entirely unacceptable since both parties agreed to the deals as presented. However, neither would likely be happy if they knew that the broker wasn’t presenting the full offer or was charging double commission.

There aren’t as many legal regulations on brokering domain names as there are with real estate, where this would likely be prohibited.

If the buyer and seller are both happy with the deal as presented to each, is there an issue with this happening? What are your thoughts on this type of thing?