Chapter 7
Tips and Tricks for Selling
So we've already discussed how SEX.com sold for 14 million. Everyday thousands of domains are bought and sold. There are so many different ways to sell domains. The pro's use alot of techniques and I will explain everything. The places where the more expensive sales usually take place is sedo, afternic, tdnam, and ebay. Ebay is a good place to sell domains for lower prices. Every once in a while I see odd domains that would seem like they aren't worth anything sell on ebay for thousands of dollars each. But I usually use ebay as a way to double my money on lower priced domains.I will use the Elimination Process that I explained earlier in this guide to find good names, and I will usually register them for $7-$11, then turn around and resell them the same day for twice what I paid. At least once a month one of my lesser quality names that I am only trying to sell for $20 or so will sell for a couple hundred on ebay. One of the tricks the guys on ebay use is to set a reserve price and start the bidding very low. Many domain resellers on ebay start the bidding at .99 cents because they know they will get at least a few bids at that price, and that bidding may cause other people to think that the domain is worth alot and cause them to bid on it too and sometimes the bidding gets out of control and just keeps going higher and higher.
I have started many domains at .99 cents and they ended up going intothe hundreds and selling for 100 times what I paid for them on the same day I registered them. But my goal is usually only to double my money. I register domains and then sell them for around $30 each. If you can sell only 2 domain a day at that rate, you will be making between $800-$1400 a month. Once in a while I have trouble selling a name or 2. If it doesn't sell, then I put it on a list.Then I bundle the names that don't sell with my best names when I am ready to sell my best names. This will ensure that you will get paid alot for the best name, and just adding the best name into a bundle will usually help the price increase. So let's say you have the domain name buy-in-bulk.com and you know that you can sell that domain for $350. Try taking your names that didn't sell and adding them into the listing. Sell buy-in-bulk.com with 2 other names that aren't selling and you may get $400 for it instead.
Sales Leads
Two of the best ways to sell domains involves actively selling them. This is where the big money comes from. The names that sell for big bucks are usually older, more well established names. But if you try to actively sell a domain name to companies who may be interested, you have better luck at making big bucks with your new domains that you just registered for the first time.The first way to do this is to actually go out in the field to get people's attention. Start an auction on auction sites such as ebay or onlineauction to create urgency. When people see an item on auction that is ending at a certain time, it makes them want to purchase the domain name more quickly rather than thinking about it. So start an auction for your domain name. List it on one of those sites and make the auction for 10 days. Now, begin to build a mailing list. Start gathering email addresses of people and companies that may be interested. Here is how to do this.......Let's say you have the domain buy-in-bulk.com. It sounds like a wholesale domain name.
The type of people interested in this domain name would be wholesalers. So I will go to google.com and type in the word "wholesale suppliers", "wholesalers" or maybe just "wholesale" and maybe I will add the phrases "contact us" and "email" into the google search (putting quotation marks around a phrase will help the search and narrow it down to only websites that have the exact phrase "contact us" instead of websites that may have the words "contact" and "us" but not used in the same phrase.I have 1,510,000 Googleresults after performing this search. Now I will go down the list and check the "contact" section of each websitefor the email address. Each one of these websites should bring you right to the contact/information page.So you can easily copy email addresses and paste them into wordpad to save so you can send out a mass email list later with your sales pitch. In the picture below you will notice that I underlined in red a couple obvious emails. If you are trying to save time you don't even have to click on each website to get the emails. Many of the email addresses are visibile directly after doing the google search and I'm sure that the ones that are visible are enough for you because there's no way you can check all 1,510,000 website pages for the individual emails on each page.
Another group of people that may be interested in this domain is whoever owns the other extensions of it. If you own the .com version and the domain is older, there is a good possibility that other people own the other extensions such as .net, .info, and .org........If someone owns buy-in-bulk.net and they are making money with the .net extension, they would probably be interested in my .com extension because .com is the most popular extension. You can find out who owns a domain name by using WHOIS. WHOIS checks who owns a domain. Sometimes people make their registration information private so you can not find out who they are. But most domains are not private and you can check them using the whois tool at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp . If I see a domain name that is expiring that is a .com, then I might check to see if the .net or other extensions are taken and what kind of company has taken those extensions.
If I see richkits.com is expiring and I find out that a very profitable company owns .net, then I will try my hardest to catch richkits.com when it expires so I can sell it to the company who owns .net. When checking WHOIS information, it will tell you the email address of the domain owner if they have not made it private. So you can add those emails to your list. When sending out emails, it is best to use a professional looking email extension. Hotmail. Yahoo, and Gmail emails are not very professional looking and many people will delete your emails as soon as they see it. When you sign up for hosting with your domain, you have the option of setting up your own email for your website. If I own the domain richkitz.com and I pay for monthly hosting on it since it's my website so when I send an email out, it says CJ@richkitz.com.
Create a Monopoly
If you have money, then making money with domains should be a breeze. I know it's a low down dirty thing to do, but for people who really want to be sharks in the domain pool, you might want to consider creating a monopoly. This is how the major stock traders do it and the same goes for domain investors. Here's what I mean....Earlier I discussed a person who purchased all the 4 letter .com domains. Here, I'll quote myself just to remind you of what I said: "In October of 2007, there was over 1000 four letter domains available (Example: ldxv.com or qzdu.com). By December of 2007, 2 months later, those 1000 domains were registered by people and there were none available. In October you could have registered all 1000 domains for around $8.00 each.In December prices for each 4 letter domain name on ebay were a minimum of $40.00 each. (Whoever regged all 1000 domains made a nice profit. They had to have made a minimum profit of $32,000.)The person who did that was smart because they created a monopoly. They bought up everything that was left of a certain type of domain, just to drive prices up. The day that all the 4 letter domains were bought up, the value doubled andjust kept rising from there (although this was affected by the economy and some people couldn't afford to re-register all their domains when the new year came. So many of these 4 letter domain names were dropped and now they can be found on ebay occassionally at cheap prices once again. But the original person who registered them all and sold them definitely made a nice profit. If CaliforniaHomes.com is taken but MontanaHomes.com is not taken, then you can register MontanaHomes.com for the first time at (include godaddy/dreamyhost).
If OhioHomes.com is available too, you can register that for the first time. If you register all the states like that, this may increase the value of them and the worth of these names may double the same day! There will be no more domains like that left, so you will be holding all the cards. If it's a very popular subject, people will pay lots of ridiculous money. But this can also be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. Don't be wreckless. Only invest big money in that many domains after you have done enough research to make a wise decision.
Getting Paid
In the domain industry, paypal and escrow services are the 2 ways to pay. Paypal is usually used for domains that are sold at a cheaper price (less than 1 thousand). If you sell domains for higher prices (for thousands or millions of dollars), then most people will prefer you go through an escrow service. You can use Escrow.com for this..... If you are selling domains on Sedo.com, tdnam.com, or any other large domain aftermarkets, many of them have their own escrow service. But as far as auction sites such as ebay or onlineauction.com, you will want to mention in the listing that you prefer to go through escrow if you are selling a domain that is very valuable. The way escrow works is kind of like a middle-man. You transfer the domain to the escrow service, and the customer transfers the money to the escrow service. Then the escrow service, after receiving both, transfers the money to you and the domain to the customer. So you will want to make sure that if you go through your own escrow service, that they are a reputable company.The Big Boys:
All of these tips can make you money and if you use them correctly and use a little of your own style or creativity, you could definately become very wealthy. But if you want to really think "outside the box", you may want to consider starting your own parking company. You can build up traffic to your parking company website and get people to park at your website. You can either learn how to build your own parking website or pay someone to do it. You can find people who will design this for you by describing what you want done on www.GetaFreeLancer.com and letting people bid on it. This way you get the lowest price. Once you have a parking website ready, you can negotiate with affilliate companies or advertisers..and then start putting ads on the pages. I've never personally had the time to do all of this but it's something to think about.Domain Industry Advice and Things to Be Careful of:
Start Small:
When I first started, I thought of all these "catchy names" that I was sure would sell. I got stuck with alot of worthless names that I ended up selling for a few dollars each. Don't get carried away when you are registering domains. Don't just buy domains that make sense to you either. If you live in a small town called "Wibby, Florida" that nobody's ever heard of and you decide to register the domain wibbyflorida.com or wibbyrealestate.com, it's probably not worth anything to anybody else but you. MiamiFlorida.com or MiamiRealEstate.com would be millions because everybody knows Miami.Scammers:
If you own domains, you may receive phone calls or emails from scammers. They use the WHOIS tool to find out information about who owns domains such as email and phone numbers. One of the tricks they use to scam people out of money is that they act like they are interested in a domain. They will send you an email and say that they are interested in paying you thousandsfor your domain. Then when you send an email back saying that you will sell it for that much, they tell you that they want it to be appraised. They will tell you that they only trust 1 appraisal company and they will try to trick you to get you to appraise your domain for them through the appraisal company. Well you pay $40 for an appraisal and they come backand say they are not interested in the domain name. What they did not tell you, is that THEY ARE THE APPRAISAL COMPANY.They just made $40 off of you to tell you that your domain is not worth anything. You still have the domain and they have your money now. I own about 500 domain names and they have tried to scam me with this twice now in 2 years. So it doesn't happen that often, but be careful. If they are really interested in your domain, they should be willing to pay for the appraisal, NOT YOU.Independent Appraisals and "Advice"
Another thing is independent appraisals. Sometimes they are right, but alot of times they are not. Im referring to these "domain gurus" who chat on forums like namepros.com. There is an appraisal section and when I was a newbie, I asked for advice from them. I asked the namepros community to appraise some of my domains and many of the ones they told me were worth nothing, sold for hundreds of dollars. They even told me 2 of my domain names were worth "less than reg fee".Well one of those names I sold on sedo for $150and the other I sold on ebay for $190. But the people on namepros said these names were worth nothing.Google Indexing
Whenever you type something on the internet, it's very probable that google is going to index it. Google indexing is when google includes parts of the internet in it's search results. If I go to youtube and watch a video and decide to comment on it, I can type a comment in the box underneath the video. Well, later that day, my comment will probably be indexed by google. So if I said in the comment box "Wow that's a cool video, the dog in your video is funny", that comment will be indexed. So when someone searches for "funny dog in video" in google, they may see my comment in google results. This is the worst thing for a domain sale. Imagine you go on namepros and ask them how much your domain "fungidgets.com" is worth and they tell you that it is only worth $100. Now you try to sell that domain on Sedo for $500 and someone searches google for the term "fungidgets.com". They will see that comment you left and they will also see the independent appraisal for $100 and they will offer you $100 instead of $500. Your average person will not think about this, but people in the domain industry always search google results before buying a domain name so they can see if people ever talked about the domain on forums etc. So when you sell a domain on ebay or any forums, or if you mention a domain name of yours, you may want to type "gidgetsfun(.)com" or even "gidgetsfun DOT com" instead of typing "gidgetsfun.com" because then when people search for "gidgetsfun.com" they will not see it in the google search results. When you sell a domain on ebay, this is not necessary.You do not need to do this because after the sale, the listing page disappears eventually (it usually takes about 1 month though). But you may have customers who choose not to leave feedback because the feedback stays forever as long as you are a member on ebay. So if you sell domains on ebay or anywhere else, please keep this in mind. Your customers may not want you to leave feedback because they may want to resell the domain they bought from you to someone else again. I usually leave feedback after customers leave feedback first for this reason.