WarStrategy.com – For Sale

Elliot Silver
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1

Domain Name for Sale: WarStrategy.com
Buy it Now Price: $4,500.00

Creation Date: July, 2001
Domain Registrar: eNom

I really like this domain name and think it would be the perfect site for either a MMO gaming website or a portal for war strategy games. Incidentally, Name Administration owns the longer tail WarStrategyGames.com.

Both WarStrategy.net and WarStrategy.org are registered by others. I have not changed the DNS since buying it a couple of months ago, so I don’t know if there’s any traffic. I should probably change it though, so perhaps by the time you read this the DNS will already be changed.

This will be listed for sale in a couple other places, so the first one to post “sold” will get it.

Sales Suggestion for Fabulous & Others

Elliot Silver
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When I am looking to purchase a domain name in the aftermarket, one thing I try to research is whether the domain name was on the market before, and if so, the price listed on other websites. When I want to flip a name for $25,000, there’s nothing worse than a potential buyer telling me he saw it listed for sale for $15,000 on another website – even though it may have been a very old listing.

One piece of advice I have to Fabulous / Dark Blue Sea – as well as other domain investors who may do the same thing – is to NOT list the asking price in the Whois information. When a company like DomainTools archives Whois lookups, it archives this information forever, and I can see what Fabulous or Protopixel (a DBS subsidiary) had it listed for at one point when I am doing my due diligence on previous ownership.

Although many buyers don’t really care about a previous sales price when they want a particular domain name, it can never help in a negotiation (unless of course you got a significantly better price). When selling to other domain investors, this can be used as a negotiation point for a lower sales price.

Hand Domain Registration Today, Hoping for Sale Today

Elliot Silver
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40

Maybe I will look smart with this, and maybe I won’t.   We’ll see…

I was looking for a long tail domain name to register today with the hopes of re-selling it to an end user later on today. One domain name I found was PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com, and I registered it at Godaddy this morning. I chose Godaddy because almost anyone who buys domain names has heard of them, and the trust factor for an easy domain transfer/push is there and could reduce any anxiety.

I chose PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com for a few reasons:

  1. Philadelphia is a historical city with plenty of tours
  2. There are a whole lot of tour guides in the city, especially with a bad economy.
  3. There are very few barriers to entry to be a tour guide, so having a good domain name can propel someone to a higher search engine ranking, generating more business
  4. Large companies own other big city TourGuide.com domain names (ChicagoTourGuide.com is on sale for $2,388
  5. It’s a .com and .com is still king 🙂

FYI…Sorry for going back and forth with past and present tense in this post. As I am writing this, I have not yet sent out any emails, but I am in the process of finding people the email.

I am going to send the following email to prospective buyers of this domain name:

Dear XYZ,

I saw that you are a tour guide in Philadelphia, and I think you might be interested in buying PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com, a domain name my company owns but doesn’t have plans to develop. When someone is looking for a Philadelphia tour guide, they are likely to search Google/Yahoo/Bing for “Philadelphia tour guide” or something similar. Have a website built on the exact match domain name can be very helpful to your search engine ranking for related searches.

Additionally, I believe it would be cool to be known as the “Philadelphia Tour Guide,” and that can be done more easily with PhiladelphiaTourGuide.com. You can build your brand with this great generic domain name. I am offering this domain name to several Philadelphia tour guides and tour companies over the next few days, and the first one to agree to buy it for $1,800 will get it. The domain name only costs around $11/year to renew at Godaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar.

I hope you consider buying this domain name. Please get back to me ASAP, as it will sell to the first person or company who agrees to the asking price. Payment can be easily made using Paypal or a trusted escrow service like Escrow.com.

Regards,
Elliot J. Silver

I am going to search Google and Philadelphia’s Craigslist to find people who are advertising themselves as a local tour guide, and I will send them an email about this offer.

Should I not be able to sell it, I plan to park the domain name at Parked, and I will have a for sale notice on it in case people are interested in buying it.

Does Your Domain Name Suck?

Elliot Silver
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Al lot of people (myself included) look at some of their domain names and wonder why end user companies aren’t interested in buying certain domain names. Instead of thinking like a savvy small business owner or corporate titan, we think like domain investors, which isn’t always a good thing when it comes to selling domain names.

I think we must put ourselves in the shoes of our potential buyers. Ask yourself the following question about a domain name you’ve been trying to sell, and maybe you’ll see why you’ve been unable to sell it.

“If I was in the _____________ business, would I want to pay a domain owner $x thousands of dollars to buy the _________.whatever domain name, when I can hand register ____________.whatever for just $10 from that company with the hot girls in Super Bowl commercials?“

Many (if not most) business owners don’t tend to think of domain names as essential elements of their business. Not even business who predominately work online always think that a good domain name is critical to the success of their business. Most want to build a solid brand online, and that is different from using a generic domain name.

Think how a business owner would think, and tailor your sales pitch appropriately. You may find that your sales will increase.

Summer Doldrums

Elliot Silver
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3

Lately, domain sellers always seem to be asking each other if others are experiencing a slow down. I haven’t had a bad year, especially considering last year was my worst year by far, but this summer has been pretty slow in terms of domain sale.

From my perspective, it seems that many domain investors aren’t investing as much as they have previously invested in the aftermarket. A number of my clients are in more of a hold mode right now, presumably waiting out this economic storm. This has caused a slow down in my business, and as a result, I am buying less after market domain names. It’s a trickle down effect.

End user companies are still buying domain names as their needs necessitate. Because these needs are demand-based, it is more difficult to close domain sales. It also seems that deals that do close are taking much more time to complete, likely a result of tighter spending.

Because many companies need to spend their entire marketing budget before year-end in order to justify the same (or an increased budget) for the following year, we may see an increase in activity in a month or two. That may be wishful thinking 🙂

In the meantime, I am continuing to build out the websites that I have and continue to market those sites that are operational. Bahamas.co is nearly ready to launch, and I am excited about these prospects.

What have you been seeing in the domain sales market lately?

QuinStreet Paid $35.6 Million for Insurance.com

Elliot Silver
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15

QuinStreet announces purchase price of $35.6 million for Insurance.com in earnings call

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Allemann reported that QuinStreet was the buyer of Insurance.com, although the price was not revealed at the time of the news release.   In today’s Second Quarter earnings call with analysts and investors, the company reported that it paid $35,600,000 for Insurance.com. Although this includes the content, I believe the domain name was the primary asset that was acquired, and the content is good for search engine rankings.

A replay of today’s conference call will be available at 8pm EST until August 16, 2010. You can access the recording by calling (800) 406-7325 in the US and Canada, or by calling 1-303-590-3030 elsewhere in the world.   Use passcode 4328774 to access the call. In October of 2009, QuinStreet paid $16 million for Insure.com.

When I worked in one of the direct marketing groups at AIG, our group had millions of dollars to invest, and I recommended that we look into Insurance.com.   My thought was we could offer the insurance products we had access to (accident and health insurance products) while “selling” the other leads to other divisions for products we didn’t have (such as auto insurance).

Ultimately, an investment was made in other infrastructure and the Insurance.com acquisition was never really explored. My group was small-ish for AIG (9 figures in annual revenue), and it hadn’t really used the Internet for sales when I was there, so it would have been a considerable risk.

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