Finding end-user buyers for your domains

[openforsale.com]

I hope this will be helpful to all newbies....

If you're convinced you have the best domain names, you may just be right!

Many small and medium sized businesses online, have poor and difficult sounding names.

If you could show them a better domain name and how they might profit from it, who knows, they may be very interested to acquire it for their business.

The key is to look for domain names that are similiar and/or inferior to yours.

Here's one way you might go about looking for potential prospects.

Use the search tool at domainsurfer.com

Say, if you owned MusicLand.com, just type in musicland in the search box. (also try, music-land, with the hyphen).

This will show you a list of domains that are similiar to yours. You might see a musiclandproductions.com, musiclandstation.com or a emusicland.com. All these are generally inferior to yours.

Click on the domains and see which ones have active websites. Don't spam every domain you come across! You want to limit your interest to those which actually have a proper commercial website. Forget about the inactive sites or those that are parked or those that look like personal home pages.

Lookup the WHOIS info for the owner's contact. The one you want is the registrant/administrative contact.

Compose a proper email regarding your business proposal. If possible, use the owner's name in your email. If you don't want to look like a spammer, don't use free mail like Yahoo or Hotmail. And make sure you include your full name & telephone number

Here is a sample email you can modify and use.

==============================================
Dear (name),

I am selling the rights to my domain name - (domain.com)
and am contacting a few companies that I think may be
able to use this web name successfully.

You can use this domain name in your operation as it has
good potential to increase traffic and business to your site.

Please contact me at your convenience if you are
interested in this domain name.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,
(your name)
(your email add)
(tel)
==============================================

It might be a good idea to also state what's so great about your domain.
Does it have a good page rank? Search engine listings? Link popularity?
And what all these could mean to the prospect. More customers? Better search engine positions for their keyword?

So there you are.

It will take time, effort and plenty of patience.

But if you are at the right place at the right time with the right domain, you'll be pocketing some nice cash.:sold:

All the best!

 

[dirt]

Thanks for posting this, it might be just what I need! I have a couple of domains where this might work. Cheers!

And domainsurfer.com is a great link!

 

[whitebark]

Thanks I didn't know about domainsurfer.com

 

[Preoccupy]

Thank you for good information.

 

[dvestors]

great tool --> domainsurfer.

Thank you.

Just noticed the last update on domainsurfer's DB was Oct. '05. Still pretty useful though.

 

[whitebark]

Now that I found this thread again, I want to bring it back to life with more information.

We've been sitting of a few names we were going to develop, but there never seems to be enough time... anyways, this actively going out and finding end users makes complete sense. Like any sales though, your pitch must work the first time. So in with that in mind, how much of pitch is too much when selling domains?

Should one make mention of the rising costs of premium domain names? Should we use examples of recent sales of similar names? Should we mention the advantages of having more than one sales domain, or keeping your competitors from having good sales domains?

Would love to hear what the old birds have to say. Well, those willing to share anyways!

 

[Andrew Shaw]

The fact is, if someone wants the domain name, they will buy it. Marketing talk is not needed when selling a domain name to a business. Let the domain name speak for itself. Do not mention pricing of other domain names, as they have nothing to do with your sale. Inform them that the name is for sale along with all rights to the name, they will either love it, or hate it.

 

[RazorNF]

I personally have had bad experiences approaching people, so I'd rather avoid the hassel and let them come to me.

Maybe it was the way I wrote the emails, but in the past I have approached businesses using the .net or otherwise, expressing interest in parting with my .com version, and twice I was returned threats of legal action. Nothing became of it, but it freaked me out enough to remove some of my listings from auctions sites.

 

[KingdomHall]

I read somewhere this co in the Cayman Islands says, "Dont call us, we'll call you" and they are buying all these blue chip domains...

So for me I guess its "Call me, I wont call you"...coz I dont want to sound like a greedy salesman.

But nice tip anyway.

 

[dvestors]

Should one make mention of the rising costs of premium domain names? Should we use examples of recent sales of similar names? Should we mention the advantages of having more than one sales domain, or keeping your competitors from having good sales domains?

No. No. No. Keep it short and to the point. Just say something like this:

Hello,

My name is Ross Vegas, owner of the internet domain: primedomain.com. I am currently offering this domain for sale. Please feel free to contact me if you (or their company name) would be interested in acquiring this domain.

Thanks for your time,
Ross Vegas
-phone number-
-email-

Some people also like to set up private auctions for potential interested parties. So you'd write something like the above message and mention that the domain will be on auction from xx to xx and have a link to it.

If your name is primename.com and they own pmname.com - contact them.

If your name isn't better than theirs, don't bother. If it's not a .com, don't bother (IMHO).

Check TM's before contacting any established business. They can still turn around and claim bad faith even w/out a TM.

Most of the time, they'll come to you. arty:

 

[whitebark]

Thanks dvestors!

We've actually been doing pretty well since we started doing it this way. We adopted the KISS model - keep it simple stupid - as suggested above.

We do .ca so we target existing Canadian companies or foreign companies whose presence here could use a boost with an identifying .ca name.

Biggest lesson so far - be ready to answer just about any question under the moon. The phone is your friend and a little persistence can pay off.

Would love to hear from others - it seems some don't like this approach, but for others it works well.