An Easy Way to Find End Users to Buy Your Domain Names
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
A dead simple way to find qualified end users to buy your domains.
End users, end users, end users. Everyone in the domain name industry wants to be focus on selling domains to the “end user”. This is essentially anyone other than a domain investor. But finding these elusive end users can be a challenge. Fortunately, the easiest way to find them is sitting right under your nose: people who have registered your .com domains in other TLDs.
I recently scanned my list of domains to find any .coms for which someone else registered a .net or .org after I registered the .com. To my surprise, a good number of domains I registered in just the past few years now have corresponding domains registered in other TLDs.
I decided to e-mail five of the registrants of .net domains for which I have a corresponding .com. I let them know that I registered the .com several years ago, which is probably why they settled for the .net. I offered to sell the domain to them for a reasonable amount. Of the five emails I sent, one has resulted in a sale and another one is under negotiation. The other three didn’t respond.
Be smart about who you try this with. If your domain sounds like a company name, you might get a nasty letter back from the company you approach (even though they have no legal standing). I’d do this only with clearly generic domains. In my case, most of the domains were geo-related.
To find out which of your domains are registered in other TLDs, use a bulk domain checker at your favorite registrar. First you’ll first have to strip the .com off all of your domains. There are plenty of tools out there to strip everything but domains out of a list, but this is a bit different. I pasted my portfolio into Excel and then did a search and replace, searching for “.com” and replacing with “”. This stripped all of the .com’s off. Then it was as simple as cutting and pasting the list into a bulk checker and checking for .net and .org domains that weren’t available.
Related posts:
- Two End Users Buy 3 Letter Domain Names
- Use Valuate.com to Find Targeted End User Buyers for Domain Names
- Domain Auctions aren’t for End Users. Get Over It.
Tags: end user domain sales
An Easy Way to Find End Users to Buy Your Domain Names – http://tinyurl.com/mk8phf
Great technique!
Another thing to consider is using development to approach end users. For example, if a local business owns a .net or .com of the same name I do. I publish a site, outrank them on the search engines and contact them with a few suggestions.
Most of the time they end up hiring me or buying the site and domain.
Hi Andrew,
When you say:
“I offered to sell the domain to them for a reasonable amount.”
without revealing the actual amount are you talking:
$xxx
$x,xxx
or what?
@ Patrick – in these cases just under $1,000
You can also check for similar but worst domain names.
I.e. if you own DomainName.com you can try to contact end users of DomainNames.com, DomainsNames.com, Domain-Name.com, Domain-Names.com if they exist (just modify you own list with excell and check availability and whois).
You can also make a search with your domain keywords on Google and select possible end users websites but this takes more time.
@jeffcool – go ideas
“Patrick – in these cases just under $1,000″
Thanks Andrew.
Follow up is who named the price?
Did you specify a particular $ amount in initial contact or just indicate domain
was available for purchase?
Patrick, I offered a specific price. Usually around $850.
I’ve been following up on your articles and have to tell you that I’ve learn from you a great deal. I’m a web designer and developer and a domain “flipper”. I’m preparing to launch dnwired.com. I own a vast number of domains and plan to use the platform to sell domains to end users, and develop websites. Yours is a source of news which I plan to use to educate potential buyers about the domain industry, via RSS. ( read ” I’ll send you traffic”).
Just wanted to make sure that I wont be stepping on your toes by using an abbreviated version of your domain.
I’m sure you’ll hear more about me in the near future. I’m hoping to bring a fresh perspective about domains into the industry.
Keep up the good work.
[...] a quick tip from DNW; Do a WHOIS search to see if your domain has been taken in any other extensions (.net, [...]
[...] a quick tip from DNW; Do a WHOIS search to see if your domain has been taken in any other extensions (.net, [...]
“There are plenty of tools out there to strip everything but domains out of a list”
Can you post a link or two to some online ones?
Thx!
Richard – here are a couple:
http://www.ohashi.us/domaincleaner/
http://www.ovtcheck.com/cleaner.php
Thx Andrew. Posted a link to the ovtcheck one at http://www.DomainManager.com (not least of all so I don’t forget where it is myself – lol)
[...] August I wrote about a successful end user domain sales strategy I’ve employed. Basically, you look up domains you registered a couple years ago to see if [...]
From the above comments, it seems that a mixed strategy may be superior to either. However, it requires some analytics starting with defining successful. This can lead to a business opportunity beyond enhancing personal sales revenue.
It is well known that in a number of selling situations, an auction is superior to negotiations. You might say that the major auctioneers have rejected your domains or, as the related post suggests, you would still need to pick up the phone and start dialing. Well, that’s a second business opportunity.
Whether auctions are better suited for end-users or for investors, it is a strategy the domain owner has to analyze. However, it needs to be adjusted based on domain name market conditions. For example, with riding a bubble strategy, a high sales volume strategy can be superior to targeting end-users.
[...] August I wrote about contacting owners of .net and .org domain names that you own the .com version of. It’s an easy way to find end [...]