Manufacturing a Sale on a Name with no Views

I’ve been working on avoiding portfolio bloat as my domain name portfolio has grown. I’ve been more aggressive about buying lower cost inventory-quality domain names, and that means some of these domain names aren’t worth keeping after a few years of not selling. I want to share how this effort helped me close a $1k deal last week.

The first thing I did was sort my Afternic-listed domain names by views. Specifically, I looked for the domain names that had no views at all over 365 days. If nobody is searching to buy a domain name, it’s less likely the domain name will sell. It probably would have been helpful to track this for a longer period of time, but I haven’t so I am left with somewhat limited data over a one year period. I then isolated these names on a spreadsheet.

I then input all of these domain names in a bulk search at DomainLeads.com. If nobody was searching GoDaddy for these domain names, I would try to do some outbound marketing to operators of websites on alternative extensions. I did outreach with a brief note about reducing the price for the matching .com domain name. The price was either $997 or $988.

My thought process is that if a domain name is not searched on GoDaddy, and outbound emails to website operators on alternative extensions didn’t yield a sale, I should probably consider dropping the domain name(s). There’s no sense in paying for renewals on a domain name that may have looked good a few years ago but has few prospects now.

While I spend a considerable amount of time finding domain names to buy in totality, I often spend just seconds on researching individual names. There’s a very good chance some signals are weak, and I took a chance on a domain name that has little value. Instead of renewing domain names in perpetuity, I can drop them and take the loss.

Through the outbound efforts last week, I closed one deal using the GoDaddy checkout link. There were a couple of businesses on alternative extensions, and one made the upgrade. The email address listed on the other website bounced back as undeliverable.

Notably, with the bulk search tool at DomainLeads.com, I can only see the matching domain names in alternative extensions. This means I can’t see similar domain names. For instance, if I was searching DomainInvesting.com, I wouldn’t see Domain-Investing.com or DomainInvestingLLC.com. I should probably do individual searches for some of those domain names this week before I decide what to cull, but I was looking for the lowest hanging fruit.

The final step will likely be using Claude and Chat.com to review the domain names I opt to not renew to ask if anything stands out. Perhaps these AI tools will see something I don’t see and suggest I renew them.

Before letting domain names expire, I want to make a good effort to sell them. If people aren’t searching for these domain names at Afternic, I’ll send an email to the best prospects before deciding whether or not to renew. If all of that doesn’t yield additional sales, it’s not worth the time or effort and better to not keep renewing domain names I probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place.