Advice on Selling Your Domain Names

Advice on Selling Your Domain Names

Many companies are collecting domain names but not using them. You can get rid of unused domain names and recover your previous subscriptions and perhaps even turn a profit. It is useful to understand the process of selling a domain and transferring the ownership so that no mistakes are made and no one gets ripped off.

Domain Names vs. Websites

Domain names that have websites with known audiences and known advertising or ecommerce figures are much easier to value and sell as their worth is basically provable

How do I Sell a Domain Name?

To sell a domain name first you must come up with a figure for its value. Many domain companies these days - thanks to changes in search engines and internet behaviour - go bust without selling their domain because of over-pricing. You can deter interested parties quickly and they will hang the whole project rather than pay over the odds for a domain. Experienced buyers may not give a bid i8f the asking price is too high. A seller should therefore, understand how good the domain name is. What price will he get from a buyer? What suffix does it carry? For instance, .com names are likely to sell fast and will bring greater profits than, say .info names. Similarly, .net, .org and .in domain names are the best to make decent profit.

It is much harder to sell names no one has heard of. Short names have the highest value — they are rare, easy to sell and bring substantial profit. Basic and common domain names, which can be relatable, or arouse interest in the market are the best. General names sell thick and fast and also bring considerably higher profit. Names that are easy to spell will attract buyers, and provide good opportunity to make a decent profit. If you know you have a good domain in your hands, then you are likely to make good profit by selling it.

Sellers should also learn to identify premium domain names. Dictionary names are premium domain names. Domain names with dictionary-singular names are the hottest on the Web, and buyers are willing to pay a lot to purchase them. Names, such as search.com or askme.com, will get buyers more easily than long domain names. It is also important to note that unhyphenated domain names have more value. Even product-related domain names also can enable sellers to earn substantial profit. Once a seller has a certain degree of knowledge about the domain, he can start searching for buyers.

Where to find domain name buyers

Once you decide to sell a domain name, it is important to find the best market to sell it. The best way to sell a domain name is to approach buyers secretly. If you know someone who deals with domain names, it is recommended to contact him without going through the middleman. Chances are that the seller will make more profit, as he will not have to pay the middleman.

Selling on auction sites is another great way to find buyers. Ebay.com is perhaps, the most popular place to sell domain names. Afternic.com is another site that allows sellers to find good buyers. If you have premium domain names, become a member at GreatDomains.com and list your domain name there. The site is a reputed marketplace and brokers deal with thousands of dollars trading domain names. You can also sell domain names through Sedo.com, a site which has its own selling program. Sedo.com has the largest marketplace in the world, and boasts of having a list of the most expensive domain names in the market. It also has a safe and secure escrow service for domain name buyers and sellers.

Engaging and negotiating with a buyer

Once you have how and where you wish to resell your domain name, you must try to drum up as much attention as possible. Engaging buyers is the hardest aspect of selling any domain name. Buyers are often only interested in sellers who have a professional manner and a track history. That said, any good domain well priced can sell quickly to the right person or individual.

Seller

Have you got any good advice as to which actual domain brokerage company to select that you have used historically or do you know of anyone that can point us in a good direction? We have a small portfolio to sell mostly of .info and .us domains but they are good examples which we would be looking to sell in the US exclusively as we believe that would give us the best exposure.

Bear in mind that nearly all domains are not really re-sellable - the only domains that sell for a lot of money are single word or two word .com domains and they are all taken by investors trying to eek out a profit from them since they were bought some 12-15 years ago. Many of the domain investment companies bought into .mobi, .info and .biz addresses and as a result have struggled recently. Since Google updated their search engine to avoid websites that are essentially holding pages the domain name value has fallen somewhat.

We were recently selling on the domains of a liquidated company called stem distribution and there is another company in New Zealand and Australia with the same name but were they interested in buying stemdistribution.com? No they were not, they wished to stay with the au and nz domains. If that is not a domain that should be worth purchasing then I cannot imagine what would be. But the simple truth is that domain names are not viewed to be as important as they once were.

Most of the domain names in any inventory will not be of interest to anyone unless they are a single to two word domain with .com or .co.uk on the end. One of the highest regarded domains we were selling was definitely RecruitmentCompanies.com which an American company evaluated at $55,000 USD but they didn't manage to sell that domain (or any other for that matter) so it is obvious that the market has changed.

Different companies have different ways of selling domains - the old fashioned landing page and wait to see what happens doesn't make a profit anymore - and so the idea of being a domain dealer full time has become a much more difficult profession. Our belief is that buyers need to be found rather than just waiting around to see if they show up, and we find them by tracing them through similar businesses. This option is more expensive than taking your time - we find that we only get about 30-40% of the supposed value but we are contracted to move the domains quickly and so that is what we do.

Many people still favour the landing page saying 'this domain name is for sale' etc. such as here: http://www.schoolsandcolleges.co.uk or http://www.travelandtourism.co.uk and this will work if the prospective buyers have already made up their minds to buy a particular domain but be warned that this is a long term strategy that will work only for extremely good domain names with one or two dictionary words or specific technical terms or product names and that has a .com extension.

Now that the Nominet rules for domains have become so strict on names and contact details it is not as easy as it used to be to change your UK domains owner information to explain that your domain is for sale and this is ultimately now a poor plan. The contact details should explain exactly who your are and have the correct details for who to contact or you may well have your domain suspended. If needs be start a company called UK domain resellers or similar so that you can make it obvious the domain is for sale without causing Nominet any difficulty. As for the questions of WHOIS privacy - this eats into your profits and hides your contact details and if you are trying to sell internet domains then privacy is not what you're after.

Because the actual value of domain names is somewhat of a dark art the actual process of buying by bidding can prevent you getting as many buyers as you might. This does seem strange in a world of eBay and other auction sites but the eBay figures speak for themselves - nearly every item sold is now sold at a 'buy it now' price - so there is some proof to suggest that a fixed price can help you sell your domains.

Now let us discuss the difficult point of pricing.

Now we all know that single dictionary word domain names such as power.com can go for $1 million USD and if you have those kind of domain names then you will not likely be reading this but if you are looking at a domain such as a relatively good domain with specific product references and terms that can be applied to a company with a large turn over http://www.schoolsupplies.co.uk for instance then the value is somewhere around the high single figures of thousands of pounds. Now if you get the right SEO manager on the phone and the directors have had a good month and profits are up then you can get this price and be very happy to do so. More likely you will be prevented from selling that domain by one step of the process not being quite right so what should you be pricing up these domains at for sale on your web page? Well the truth is that most of the buyers going to websites based on typing in the domain are dealers who want to sit on the domain and make a profit. These people are buying domains as internet real estate and await the population to increase and domains to become more valuable and then resell. This is a fine strategy but it is not as lucrative as it once was now that domain names influence search engines less so there is no advertising revenue anymore. As a result dealers pay less than they did and so we find ourselves selling on a domain like http://www.schoolsupplies.co.uk for £4000 GBP instead of £8-9000 GBP. This is not because the domain is worth less, it is because when we are contracted to sell domains we are given a time limit and so we cannot play a 3 year game, our customers want to recover value in the short term, so that is what we do. Most UK domains change hands for less than £4000 unless they are real game changers like http://www.travelandtourism.co.uk where you can move in and take over a vertical market just with a good campaign of SEO and back links and a good website when customer come to buy or rent etc.

So there you have it - sensible pricing, efficiency in responding to enquiries and a decent understanding of how your customers can benefit (we find this to be the most important part) as if you can write copy on a domain holding page that will inspire people to start a business in that market or to buy the doma

How do automated services like estibot work?

I have just done a bit of an experiment - I valued my domain on siteprice and was returned a value of over $5000 USD which I am pretty sure is nonsense.

When I have a look at what the register thinks they recommend Shoutloud.com which as far as I can see doesn't even evaluate domains.

The reason I am asking is that I am trying to work out what my current domain is worth and am not sure anyone is giving me a sensible number - how can I tell?

Estibot is a good product for estimating the value of domain names but perhaps a better tool for websites is siteprice.org as it weighs Google ranking and website content more heavily. Having said this Estibot values more domains every day than siteprice has valued in its entire history so there is obviously a greater public faith in Estibot.

Valuing domains is always difficult as there is no inherent profit other than demand of other buyer and with the seemingly endless flow of pointless new domain suffixes there is no shortage of domains to buy and so little impetus to buy a good one at the moment.

A website obviously has a known cost, a known level of investment and a known profit. If it is a forum it will have a known advertising revenue and if it is a business website it will generate a known number of leads with a known value of return. A domain name is simply worth what people decide to pay for it on the day.

SchoolsAndCollege.com is a great domain name no question and could easily sport an education comparison site worldwide that would be of incredible value but it would still depend on being kept up-to-date and accurate every educational year and holding sensible and unbiased opinions.

RecruitmentCompanies.com is perhaps a better domain as the accuracy of information would not be so keenly scoured and yet would still be perfectly capable of getting you to the top of a highly contested market and with good reason - it is probably worth over $50,000 USD if you have the time and contacts to sell it but the question is do you or would you be better off selling to a domain investor for $30,000 USD in the meantime instead of awaiting a deal that may never arrive.

CourierCompanies.com is another excellent example in this field although perhaps with a lower value because of the lower value of transactions in that vertical market and lower levels of competition for traffic.

Valuing your domain name can be easier than this simply based on what is happening in the market at the time.

Most of the real domain marketers base their purchases on what is currently happening in the industry - the important thing is to make a name for yourself. If you become known as someone who makes profits selling domains or that sells domains worth high sums of money then people are going to start looking into which domains you are marketing. If you can generate interest then you will get more investors looking into your portfolio and increase likelihood of a good profit. You will also pull in less experienced buyers who are seeking to learn from you and who may buy domains at the higher end of their true worth.

Important sources to learn from include sites like:

http://www.dnjournal.com/
http://namebio.com/
http://dnpric.es/
http://www.dnsaleprice.com/
https://www.domaining.com/

Look up the history of ownership on http://who.is for information about why they may have bought the domain and what they were in search of

Look up what else they might own using:

https://whoisology.com

This is a great free service but only works on TLDs

You must pay a $5 fee to download the whole list but you can browse the lists for nothing.

If you can assemble all of this information then you can get a real idea of a domains worth through who is looking into it and why they consider it of value.

Once you watched the market for a while the first thing you realise is that this market is much more predictable than the Dow Jones or LSE because it is so new that there are so few investors who really know what they are doing. This means that the market is not very volatile and so very predictable and so by learning the trade and then getting to know the more valuable domains you can begin to watch Flippa and learn which domains to buy that you can later sell at a profit.

My advice is to watch for at least a month so that you are not too excited when you buy your first domain. This way you will keep your head and not buy too high or sell too low.

http://flippa.com is where to make a fast profit If you already have a large portfolio then you may well be in trouble as now that Google doesn't look at domains anymore they are simply a cost.

Stick to Flippa and buy good domains low and sell them higher.

Following on from my earlier posts on this matter there are a few useful steps to follow when selling your domain that I have not yet assembled into proper order:

Make sure you accurately establish the true value of your domain.

Before beginning accepting any offers or even listing the domain(s), get a sensible appraisal of their value in order to advertise the domain at a reasonable price. There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration when determining the actual value of your domain name. If you are uncertain about the true value then it may be wise to approach a third party that can perform a proper assessment. Some of the major factors include:

•Website Traffic Volume - Assuming that there is a website then this is of course the primary constituent of any domain's value in the short term but if you are selling a website then that is a different matter to selling a domain. The number of visitors arriving at a website from users typing in the URL, searching, or following links will dictate the value, especially if the website is an e-commerce site.

•TLD (Top Level Domains) - The most valuable domains are ".com" domains. These are considerably more valuable than other TLDs (.org .tv .info, .biz, .net, etc.).

•Readability and Compactness - Single or double English word domains are the most valuable of all the domains as the internet is still essentially an American landscape. These domains are especially valuable if they are directly related to an industry (recruitmentcompanies.com, sportsinformation.com, etc.) which read well, and memorable.

Make sure you domain is obviously on the market

If you take a look at www.insurancefirms.com you can see that the fact that the domain is for sale and who is selling is abundantly clear. This is important in case of prospects typing the domain name in to see who owns it. Also make sure that all of the contact details for the domain are up to date as may people in search of a domain will start there to see who is the current owner before investigating any sites the domain may be pointing at. This will also be important when you come to the transfer as incorrect details causes delay.

This whole matter is very much still a dark art. There are people who make consistent and good money from trading domain names but the truth is that they choose very carefully which domains to buy and also make a lot of noise about the fact that they have bought them. Very often you are talking about domain names that have been purchased because of a developing trend or brand and are simply sold a little early and so they are purchased by savvy brokers who will resell them to a more affluent or prosperous company or individual looking to invest in the same market.

Once you have made a name for yourself in the domain broker business and LinkedIn and Domaining.com are writing about everything you buy and sell then the market moves in your favour as people become interested in a share of the money you are supposedly making. This of course means that you can move domains faster and with greater profit.

Domains that can make you a fortune are very rare and you have to either have been buying heavily in the early 90s or be ahead of the game. Most domain brokers that make consistent money are working extremely hard and doing nothing else and that is how they make their money - by working their butt off!

Has anyone checked out domainll.com as a way to sell or lease domains yet? I was looking earlier and the process looked quite complicated but several people have recommended it to me so there must be some definite good points.

The system appears to work by having you purchase points to conduct operations via PayPal but thus far I am yet to discover what kind of audience the site actually receives.