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Passive Aggressive Approach to Selling Domains

Elliot Silver
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3

When you attempt to sell a domain name, you are generally in a weaker position than when someone sends you an unsolicited email to buy a domain name. In the first situation, you are trying sell a domain name on your terms, and you need to find a buyer who can meet them. In the second situation, you hold the domain name that someone else wants, and you can choose the terms. This can make a big difference when negotiating.

When you want to sell a domain name, but you would rather not start out in a weak position, I recommend attempting a passive aggressive sales approach. One idea to do this is to reach out to a domain owner who has a similar but different domain name, and ask him if he would sell his domain name. In your email, you should mention that you own XYZ.com and you would like to buy ZYX.com from him.

If you receive a reply to your request, there are generally 4 possible versions:

1) Yes, the price is $
2) Yes, make me an offer
3) I won’t sell XYZ.com, but will you sell ZYX.com?
4) No. I am not interested in selling

You can then make a sales pitch responding to each of these replies.

For the first option, if the price he names is higher than the price at which you would sell your name, you can reply, “That’s a good price, but it’s out of my price range for this name. Would you be interested in buying ZYX.com, a very comparable domain name, for the same price?”

With option two, if you reply with an offer, you should be prepared to buy his domain name if he matches your price. Assuming he says no, like 99.9% of domain owners who would say no to the first offer no matter what, then you can turn around and let him know you would sell yours, a similar name, for that price if he is interested.

For the third option, you have moved into the drivers’ seat, as you are now in a stronger position with him asking you to buy your domain name.

Although the final response isn’t always appreciated, it does show you that the domain owner is alive and answering emails. You could tell him that you had hoped to acquire XYZ.com to enhance the value of your name, ZYX.com, but since he won’t sell, maybe he would be interested in acquiring yours.

I have not sold a domain name in this manner before, but I have had the third option happen to me in the past. I was not inclined to sell the domain name, so I turned down a significant offer for it. Unsolicited domain sales via a variety of methods can be more difficult than fielding inquiries, but that’s how I sell a majority of my domain names. This is one more tool to add to your cache.

Obviously the one caveat is that your name is of equal value or better than the person who you email.

WorkOpportunities.com Now For Sale

Elliot Silver
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0

With America’s work situation getting worse, now is a good opportunity to buy a job-related domain name.   I am selling WorkOpportunities.com for $7,800. Of course the name JobOpportunities.com is a better domain name, but I also think that is easily a low to mid 6 figure domain name. People are looking to find work as the unemployment rate creeps higher.   In fact, according to CNN today, unemployment is up in 98% of cities across the US.

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can see there are about 60,500 searches per month for “work opportunities” and slightly more than 7x the number of searches for “job opportunities” at 450,000. Pretty good numbers if you ask me, and I priced it under $10,000 to move it even faster.

Additionally, there are 1,840,000 Google results for the exact quoted term “work opportunities.” There are also plenty of advertisers for this phrase as well.

I am going to list this in a couple of other spots, and as always, the first person to tell me they want it will get it.   I don’t think this deal will be around very long before someone grabs it.

One idea for the site is to do build a white label automated job search site, similar to what I did on Lowell.com and Burbank.com.

DomainFest Auction Wasn’t All Bad

Elliot Silver
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1

I think we can all agree that the Moniker live auction at DomainFest was pretty much a bomb, but I don’t really think this is a bad thing for the industry. There weren’t many bargains in the live auction, which shows that domain owners aren’t necessarily losing faith in their investments and selling their domain names for whatever the market will yield as a consequence.   This shows that there is strength in domain assets, especially those that are of high value.

For the most part, it seemed that the high priced domain names that were listed were priced far too high for other domain investors to purchase.   Sure, they may be worth the amount to someone with a solid business plan, but most domain investors don’t have business plans for names they plan to buy.   Many have them for names they own, but it can be fruitless to build a business plan around a name that isn’t owned by us.   This coupled with just a short amount of time between the final list publication and the auction, it’s not very likely that a plan can even be built.

Also, many of the names up for sale at auction have either been listed at other auction(s) recently or had been privately marketed recently.   There were a couple of names I made private offers on in the last couple of months, and I decided against bidding on both (even though my offers would have equaled or superseded the reserve).   Personally, I don’t like to buy at public auction, and I’ve only done so once.   With a market in flux, I didn’t want to be the price setter – especially in a public auction.

So how can live auctions be improved?   Mike and his readers have some good suggestions. I’ve also made a few additional suggestions in the past, mostly related to end user education.   I still think it would be wise for a domain ambassador to attend a non-domain tradeshow and run small group sessions discussing the importance of generic domain names.   Every single industry has tradeshows, and most tradeshows have opportunities for educational seminars.   Why hasn’t any company made in-roads with end users yet (with the exception of when an end user already knows that he wants to buy a particular domain name)?

Over the past several years, it always seemed that live domain auctions would yield seven figures no matter what.   Well, this isn’t really a reality any more.   Domain owners are more picky about what they buy in this tight market, and without domain owners continuing to be speculators, it is much more difficult to produce eye popping auction results with domain investors being the primary target audience.

Times are changing, but I don’t think this is a bad thing for our maturing industry.

Fly.com Sold for $1,760,000

Elliot Silver
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2

According to a news release this morning, Travelzoo purchased Fly.com in an all cash, $1,760,000 deal brokered by Sedo. Travelzoo plans to launch a site on Fly.com in February.

TrickOrTreating.com Sell or Develop

Elliot Silver
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10

I decided I am either going to sell TrickOrTreating.com in the next few days or I am going to develop it.   First, here’s a brief sales pitch. The keyword “trick or treating” appears to be highly searched, according to Google’s Keyword Tool.   As one can imagine, most of the searches are done from September through the end of October, as people are looking for trick or treating costumes and seeing when their city permits trick or treating.   The BIN price is just $7,250 for this great top Halloween domain name.

If it doesn’t sell at this price, I am going to develop it.   I figure I might as well layout my ideas for a site here, and the buyer can use this as a reference, or I can email this to my developer and tell him to follow the plan laid out here.   Either I am generating some revenue to offset tax costs, or I am saving myself an email to my developer!

Now for the development pitch. I think most of the searches are for people looking for information about trick or treating in their community.   Most of this information can usually be found on the city website, and there generally isn’t much to discuss aside from the permissible times. Sometimes, like in the case of Burbank Trick or Treating, there is a special event to coincide with trick or treating, which is great because it usually means more people are searching for this info.

For the template, I want a very cute Halloween themed logo and header.   On the side or top menu of the template, I want spaces for 2-4 banners of various horizontal sizes (maybe of cute shapes), each connected to affiliates that sell Halloween costumes and Halloween candy.   Below this, I would like a link of resources, some external, but many internally created pages, such as “Trick or Treating Safety,” “Popular Halloween Costumes for 2009,” “Trick or Treating History”…etc.

Now for the meat of the project…   On the home page (in the middle), I want text that says, “Trick or Treating Times for:” and below this, 2 drop down menus – one for state and one for city.   When a person chooses a state, the city list populates and they can then choose the city and hit the “Go” button.   It will take them to a page that has the time for trick or treating for that city, a link to the city website where it mentions trick or treating, and any additional special information.

Most people will find the site through search engines, when they are searching for something like “Lowell Trick or Treating Times.”   Because the site will launch 7 months prior to Halloween, it will gain trust in Google and continue to rise in the rankings. Additionally, because the site will look very professional and have good information, I presume there will be links to the site from bloggers and other websites who post trick or treating times.

I won’t add Adsense to the site until July or August because there probably won’t be a lot of traffic, and Google might think it’s “spammy” if a large site is launched with Adsense.   I will launch each state/city separately – slowly, so Google doesn’t see a 500 page site go up over night, and because it’s going to take a bit of time to get all the data. If I can figure out a database option, I will use it to make the data load easier.

The site will be built on WordPress, and the actual site skin and logo should be fairly inexpensive, depending on the style customization.   The difficult part will be finding all of the trick or treating times, but I did some checking and the information is readily available.   If the project is started ASAP and built over the next few months, I think it will lead to big rewards every Halloween.

Bensalem.com – Reduced Price

Elliot Silver
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2

This domain name is now pending sale – to be completed on Monday.

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