Changes I Made After Watching Paul Nicks Keynote

Like many of you, I watched Paul Nicks’ NamesCon keynote speech yesterday afternoon. I thought there were quite a few helpful and interesting nuggets of information that he shared, especially for people who list their domain names for sale via Afternic.

Earlier today, in response to the keynote, I made some changes to a large group of domain names I have listed for sale. Here are a few:

I added the Afternic phone number to my parked domain names that I have listed for sale on Afternic. Yes, I would need to pay a commission if they help sell the domain name, but I have already committed to that by listing on Afternic. If their brokers can provide a lift over the phone vs. emails with me, it will be worth the commission fee. You can see the for sale message I am using by visiting Colonel.com.

I added BIN prices to quite a few names that were not priced. This should make it easier for brokers to sell, especially if a buyer is looking to buy right now.

After reviewing the bulk appraisals from GoDaddy, I adjusted some of my pricing down. When I list my names for sale on Afternic, I have a tendency to price them based on how I feel at the moment. If I had a good week or month, the prices may have been substantially higher than they could ever achieve. I brought some of them down to a more realistic price and adjusted some of them higher.

I think it is a good idea to look through a domain portfolio regularly, and this was a great time to do it. I made some parking page adjustments, particularly related to capitalization that got messy and some better targeting on keywords. I don’t have a huge portfolio, so whatever happens to my names as a result will probably not be meaningful to others, but I will try to provide an update at a later date.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

13 COMMENTS

  1. Most domain aftermarket venues want to meet certain sales quota per quarter. It looks good for investors. Sell more domains fast at lower prices – a piece of advice – or sell at your own pace, and at higher prices? Overall, I don’t see how a particular domain aftermarket’s approach should affect your own strategic decisions. E.g. I don’t send inquiries to Uniregistry brokers automatically, I peruse the intel the system provides me with.

  2. > “After reviewing the bulk appraisals […] I adjusted some of my pricing down”

    I hope you did not make a mistake with that. I am confident in only two people who could tell you if you did: me, and the king himself. There may be others, but these are the only two I am sufficiently confident about now, just as the king is the only one I am confident enough in to have us talking about a nine figure deal for one like golf.com, or at least close to it. And I think that will probably be the only time I am bold enough to suggest a favorable comparison of myself alongside the great one.

    Normally I might have just said “thanks for being part of the problem,” but I realize you are just trying to make a good living and save for retirement. And I don’t know which domains you did that for. So all I can say is that I hope you only did that for ones I would wind up concurring about.

    • A broad example… a 3 word name I bought for under $100 that I listed for $8,000 would be better suited at the $5,000 mark. Would rather sell it for $5k than keep it forever. None of my higher value names were re-priced lower.

  3. I can see your logic in dropping prices for lower quality inventory into the sweet spot Paul Nicks mentioned of up to 5k, especially if the acquisition cost was <100.

    For high quality domains it would be great to see a study which looks at the message a 50% difference in BIN/min offer sends to a potential buyer.

    Would an astute buyer perceive the seller to be saying I reckon it's worth 49,888 but I'll probably accept 25K or slightly more if you offer me that?

    Following on what Acro mentioned about selling at your own pace and at higher prices, would it be preferable to price a nice generic at BIN 49,888, min offer 40K? Qualified end-user buyer gets a built-in 20% discount, seller is not required to justify why buyer should be paying more than the 25K min offer in first example.

    To hit one out of the ballpark for a good generic needs The Mann style pricing, BIN 79,888, min offer 64K, lol

  4. Could you please be specific about capitalization? Are you using intercapitalization to distinguish words from each other in multi-word strings, or are all of your Afternic listings entered in lowercase letters?

    Intercapitalization looks better to potential buyers, IMO, so I use it, but have found that the domain search feature on Afternic will not always recognize (i.e., include in search results) an intercapitalized SLD that is otherwise an exact match for a SLD.TLD query.

    Searches on GoDaddy.com have never been found to distinguish between capitalized versus all-lowercase versions of the same string, at least in the tests that I have run. Likewise on Sedo and Uni.

    On Sedo, capitalization and intercapitalization of SLDs is rendered as such (is supported) in domain listings and search results, but not for TLDs.

    Uniregistry supports intercapitalization on both sides of the dot, which helps make their landing pages and search results more compelling than either Afternic or Sedo. nTLDs that begin with an uppercase letter can appear more compelling on Uni than the flat, all-lowercase renderings of the exact same strings on Afternic and Sedo. Uni’s support for intercapitalization makes domain listings pop.

    Afternic (or whoever your host is) blocks my IP address from accessing Colonel.com, so I cannot see if you are showing Afternic’s inbound telephone number on a landing page or a sales-listing page (one click beyond the landing page). Could you please be more specific about where you might be showing an Afternic telephone number?

    You are lucking that you can access and review your landing pages on Afternic. Their blocking policies do not allow me to do so, which means that potential buyers are being blocked as well.

    • Sorry for any confusion. Regarding capitalization, I just mean proper capitalization. When looking through my Uniregistry parking control panel, I saw some names weren’t capitalized properly and I fixed those. For example, SanJoseDogWalker.com was SANJoseDogWalker.com and a few others had no capitalization.

      The Colonel.com example was to show the sales message I am using on the top of the Uniregistry parked page. I added the Afternic phone number.

    • Thanks for the clarification. Uniregistry blocks me (and others, obviously) from accessing Colonel.com and SanJoseDogWalker.com.

      Oh well. It’s 2018. Humans can land a robot on a fast-moving asteroid, but some of us are still struggling to understand basic website security practices.

  5. Kinda handing money away. Put your own phone number on the landers. Every offer I receive gives me name, email, phone, ip address and has one of my 800 numbers listed. Sending inquiries somewhere where all of this information won’t get back to you puts ya in blind negotiation status along with paying commissions ya don’t need to as most offers come in direct from the landing page.

    • My landing pages still link to offer forms I control. I added Afternic’s phone number because I am sure Afternic brokers are far superior to me on the phone and I have no interest in having phone conversations with people I don’t know.

    • RE: I am sure Afternic brokers are far superior to me on the phone and I have no interest in having phone conversations with people I don’t know.

      I share both of those sentiments!

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