Domain Sales

I don’t do a ton of outbound marketing to sell my domain names. Not only can outbound be a bit disheartening, but it’s also generally not the best way to get top dollar for domain names. Obviously, I prefer to negotiate with prospects who have expressed an interest in my domain names.

That being said, I used Grok and ChatGPT to help me sell a descriptive domain name a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to share the prompts that I used to find buyers, contact information, and to craft an email.

Yesterday, I thought I would try something a bit different. I did some outbound marketing to attempt to sell a .AI domain name I have listed for sale via Atom.com. In the pitch, the call to action was directing prospective buyers to the Atom landing page:

“You can visit [Redacted].ai to see the purchase price and payment options.”

I have been in a negotiation with a buyer, and it seems like we are close to an agreement on a domain name sale. The domain name is priced at $4,999, and I sent the buyer a GoDaddy checkout link to help expedite the sale. That’s where we ran into a payment snafu.

The buyer needs additional levels of authorization to approve a purchase above $5,000. With GoDaddy and its checkout link, the $21.99 domain name renewal is tacked on to the $4,999 purchase price, bringing the total amount over the $5,000 level. After a phone conversation, I understood the buyer could seek that approval, which would take an unknown amount of time, or the price could be modified. I opted to reduce the purchase price to get beneath the threshold.

A few years ago, I privately closed a very substantial domain name sale. Following the sale, the buyer did absolutely nothing with the domain name. The Whois was made private, but the nameservers remained the same as before. To this day, the domain name resolves exactly where it resolved prior to the sale.

Around that same time period, I sold a different domain name for $12,000 via Afternic. Within a few weeks, the domain name was relisted for sale on Afternic for around $15,000. My guess is the buyer chose a different brand name and relisted it for an amount that would make him whole. The domain name is now being used, but I don’t know if it sold again or if that buyer decided to use it.

I generally don’t report my domain name sales for a variety of reasons. Had I shared either sale publicly, some people probably would have claimed that they were fake sale or that the deals were not completed and I didn’t want to provide an update.