I still occasionally do outbound marketing to sell some of my domain names. When I am having a slow month or made a big purchase and want to drive revenue, I might spend some time looking for buyers for domain names I own.
A Google search is probably the most effective way to find prospective buyers, and I want to share a more specialized search that can be helpful in finding buyers.
When you use Google and search “inurl:[keyword keyword],” the results that are returned all have the keyword(s) in their url. For example, if I wanted to sell DomainInvesting.com and decided good prospects would be those who have “domain investing” within their url, I could search Google with this search term “inurl:domain investing” and any website with “domain-investing” or “domaininvesting” would be returned.
The reason this may be helpful is that businesses that focus on that keyword would likely have the keyword within the url. The top results could be the best prospective buyers for the exact match domain name.
One word of caution is that this search, like other searches, will likely show a ton of websites that would have no interest in the domain name. For instance, someone may have written an article called “Domain Investing Sucks,” or something along those lines, and if their url had “domain investing” in it, that would be returned.
Another tip for this type of search – don’t simply rely on the exact match keyword for the search. You might find other prospects who have “domain investor” or “domain name investing” in their url as well (keeping with the DomainInvesting.com example).
One final tip – be knowledgable about spamming laws when sending emails or making phone calls, and be respectful if you do contact prospective buyers. People who send emails are naturally intrusive and recipients are not always receptive or appreciative of the outbound effort.
ZFBot.com is a great service that shows registered domain name that include keywords as well. Google will only display “indexed” domains/URLs, so in addition to your search, it is likely a good idea to find all registered domains with the matching keywords included.
For Domain Investing, ZFbot shows 26 registered domains that “start with” the term and 20 that “end with” the term.
Thanks for sharing, Jamie.
I can’t believe you never heard of ZFBot. I’ve covered it extensively through the years both on Acro.net and DomainGang.com.
The best feature is the matching string option (“Length: Min-Max”,)that searches across all gTLDs for just the string you entered. E.g. “domaininvesting” returns 9 TLDs.
Heard of it but not familiar with it.
Let’s say you own example.com. if you contact a prospective buyer who owns examplesite.com, doesn’t that give them ammunition to come after the domain through UDRP?
Potentially, but it all depends on the keyword and how generic it is (in my non legal opinion).
Thank you for this info Elliot. After reading this post, I went out and tried the “inurl” to find a few possible end user / prospects to market some domains to. Returned some good results in the search query.