Many domain investors rely on outbound marketing to sell their domain names. Domain investors have many methods for scouting for prospective buyers, and one way that is popular is to find registrants who have similar or complementary domain names that might benefit from buying another domain name. Some people use lead generation tools found via tool providers like Estibot and Dropping.com, and others find leads on their own.
I want to share a tip to help people find prospective buyers for their domain names, and I think it can be helpful whether using lead generation tools or if searching by hand.
When I am looking to find leads to sell specific domain names, I often start by searching Google and DomainTools for registrants with domain names that have my keyword. For instance, when I want to sell Pulmonology.com, I would try to find medical practices, labs, doctors, and businesses that have “Pulmonology” in their domain names already. Perhaps a business that operates on GeographicPulmonology.com or PulmonologyLab.com would have an interest in my domain name. That’s obvious.
What I also like to do, which may be less obvious to some people, is look at different variants of my keyword. Searching for alternative words in domain names like Pulmonologist, Pulmonary, and even Pulmo, can help find additional prospects. By looking at the root of the keyword (Pulmo in this case), I can find many more prospective buyers in the field that might have an interest in owning the category name.
Taking it a step further, because Pulmonology is related to the study of diseases respiratory tract, I can look up other keywords like lungs, respiratory, respiration, and more. A med-tech startup may be in the field of pulmonology, but they use a different term for their website.
One thing people definitely need to keep in mind are the anti-spam laws in different jurisdictions. Sending a whole lot of emails to as many “prospects” as possible is a great way to end up having an email address labeled as a spammer or worse. When I do outbound outreach like this, I only send emails to the best prospects and I personalize my emails when possible. In addition, I don’t waste my time doing outreach on hand registered names that aren’t really worth anything.
Thanks for sharing the tip. Also, when doing outboud emails try to reach the right person in the organization. I sold a domain last year to an organization by approaching the decision maker through a personalized email. I wasn’t able to persuade his staff to buy the EMD for their business from 2015 to 2018.
Hi Elliot! Good stuff, as always. Have you used estibot premium lead service“domainleads com”
Thank you
If I did, it was a while ago. I do not currently have a paid Estibot account. I do use a lead gen tool on Dropping.com though.
Another excellent read Elliot. Only yesterday I launched a new (minimalistic) face to my new website, https://ReallyGoodDomainNames.com . Your perspective is spot on and leads right to a “tool” I’ve used for some time reaching out to prospective customers: that is, a message on my front page, says, “You may already have a well thought out Website that would benefit from a more memorable, relevant, keyword rich Domain Name. Simply get a better Name and forward it to your existing Website, you’re in business. Advertise the new Name immediately and convert content at your leisure if you like.”