This is Part 4 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 3, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #4:

Email “hell” leads to heaven!

I had a domain that I was going to put a mini-site on recently and one of the steps I always take is to have an email address for that domain. I use that email for domain sales emails, contact info on the site, etc. BTW, GoDaddy used to, and maybe still does give you a free email account with each domain so I have lots of email accounts waiting to be used for just this situation.

Domain Name sales email

I set the email up one night and logged into the following day to send out a couple of sales letters and there were several emails waiting in my inbox. Now, normally that isn’t a big deal since spammers send email to domains, domain registrant contact info and the like, but these emails were all in Spanish and about half of them looked legitimate so I used the translate tab in Google and verified one of them was legitimate.

The Google translation also revealed the email chain and this one had been forwarded so I could see the history and the person had typed the address incorrectly. The address they really wanted was somebody@mydomain.com.es. I always set the email up as a catchall so I got these emails and realized the company might want the .com and this would give them a concrete example as to why.

I crafted a quick email to them and forwarded an email I had received and within a few days we had worked out a deal. The great thing is I never had to do much research of potential buyers or anything so I didn’t waste any time getting the sale! Just wish I had done it sooner!

Who knows if this method will ever work again, but I plan on setting up several more email accounts this weekend.

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #5 is here now!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

This is Part 3 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 2, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #3:

Recognize odd traffic patterns for parked domains

Whenever you park domains you should get some traffic from type-ins (if you don’t, you might not have a very good domain but that is off topic.) Oftentimes you will see heavier than expected traffic and many domainers look for these type of domains. Usually they were previously developed and have backlinks that are still driving traffic to the domain. This post is not about that

What I’m suggesting here is to look for traffic that is new and increasing or is steady and the domain was never developed. You can find this information easily by looking at your parking company month over month stats. Oftentimes this will not be because you hand registered some fantastic domain, but in reality someone is developing a site and people are typing in your domain name in error. This is especially true if you own the .com.

Domain Parking

Late last year one of my domains went from about 30 uniques per month to 100 to consistently over 500. A quick Google search found that a site was developed and was advertising heavily for another tld. Great for me because I was getting additional clicks, but it still wasn’t a lot of money so I sent exactly one message to the site owner through their contact page and had a sale closed very quickly.

If I hadn’t parked the domain or kept up with the stats I never would have been able to make that sale because the owner thought that once a domain was “his” it was always “his” and applied that same logic to the .com I had parked – he had seen the site, but missed the “this domain may be for sale” link on the parked page I guess. Maybe he would have figured it out eventually, but at the very least I expedited the sale!

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names! Domain name sales method #4 is here now!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

If the first 3 weeks of the year are any indication then 2011 is going to be a great year for Domain Name sales! 

I’m already closing in on the same number of sales I had all of Q4 last year and interest has been very high on several other domain names I have for sale.  It has slowed down my blogging and development projects, but I’ll take that any day!  I have Part 3, 4 and 5 of the surprising sales series almost done so be on the lookout for those tomorrow!

I hope your domain name sales or however you make money online is picking up as well.  I’d love to hear how other areas of online sales are going so drop me a line and let me know!

This is Part 2 of 7 in my series on 7 surprising Domain Name sales methods. If you missed Part 1, you can find it here.

Just to recap, this is all about Making money online with domain names by selling your domain name in unique ways – we’ll cover other monetization methods in another series.

Domain name sales method #2:

Use the “Tell-a-Woman”

Now this is not specifically about networking and building relationships in the traditional sense and before you send that complaint email or post hate comments please realize this concept has been around a long time and was coined by Tex Williams back in the 40’s. Cue the twangy background music:

“DON’T TELEPHONE, DON’T TELEGRAPH, TELL A WOMAN”

If you want to spread the news
There are lots of ways to use
But the ordinary ways are much too slow.

There is just one thing to do
Here is my advice to you
Confidentially it’s the fastest way I know.

Don’t telephone don’t telegraph
Tell a woman and the news will get around.

This holds true today even in the times of FaceBook, Twitter and Texting where you can communicate with hundreds or thousands of people in almost real time. It doesn’t even have to be a woman, but generally it is someone who you may know who fits the following… You’re having a conversation at dinner with a group of people and you are interupted 3 times in an hour by someone stopping by who saw person X at your table – they literally know everyone… or it could be someone you go to when you have a question because they “know everybody”…

Domain Name Networking

These people are invaluable friends, but they can also be a help in your online business and in selling domains. If you are like me, you’ll buy some random domains at some point because they have great search numbers/CPC, but you have no idea what you’re going to do with them. I had one like this that was about to expire and even though I liked the name I hadn’t actively tried to sell it and I wasn’t going to renew it because I just knew it was going to take a while and a lot of work/time to get the necessary contacts.

Well, we had dinner with a few friends recently and two of them are the classic Tellawoman, including being female, and they were chatting about someone taking a new job and it was in the exact area of my domain. They were able to put me in contact with that person and effectively lent me their authority and network of people and I sold a domain that I would otherwise have dropped and just lost the money.

Once again, this took almost no effort on my part and you can’t beat that for simplicity because it only took a few minutes time. Now, I wouldn’t suggest overusing this one – mostly because I hate pushy people and I surely don’t friend/choose to hang out with people I know are just pushing me to buy their junk, but used sparingly I think it is surprisingly effective… Just don’t be “that guy/girl” – nobody likes that. Oh, and if you are offended by the reference, I apologize in advance – doesn’t make it any less true though.

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names and look for Domain name sales method #3 here!

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Making money online with domain names has to ultimately end with the sale of your domain name. Technically, not true, you can monetize it, but that is another story. 

This article series is all about selling domain names to make money – ie, buy low and sell high! More specifically, these are 7 tips for selling you might not have heard of and even if you had, you didn’t try because they sounded too simple. My criteria is that they are not the normal channel of researching and contacting buyers and more importantly you can implement them very easily – 10 minutes or less in most cases! 

A little background… Many people are good with finding domain names available to register, catching expiring domains or buying names that are decently priced. There are also tons of tools to help you find a good name as well as very creative people who can make up a name and just hand register it. There are always new trends emerging you can capitalize upon by buying names early (bluray, hdtv, iphone, etc).

The problem comes when you get ready to sell your domain name. Most people are just not good at it – it is a lot easier and a lot more fun registering names than it is researching potential buyers, making sales calls and negotiating with people. 

So the following list of 7 sales has come from my direct experience and is much easier than the normal sales process – ie, not as much work. Not saying you can get rich with domain names this way, because I don’t think you can. What I am saying is that these were pretty easy to do and took very little time and I actually sold domains that otherwise wouldn’t have sold at all or at least not as quickly. 

Domain name sales method #1:

Domain Name Whois lookups

Generally people who are running whois lookups on your domain are either researching it to see when it will expire or to contact the owner in some way. Often it is for spam, but many people interested in buying a domain will have their techies look as well and many of those people will look at your whois. Why not make it easy for them and list your domain for sale as part of the contact information in addition to making sure your real contact information is correct, which it is, right? 

Just last week, I had someone check the whois and saw that I had “This domain is for sale. Email me now!” on the second address line. We chatted briefly and a sales price was agreed to in a few minutes. Payment was made and the domain was transferred within a couple hours of the first contact. 

Domain Name DNS Entry with sales text

You can’t beat that for simplicity because it only took a couple seconds to add that line to all of my domains with GoDaddy as you can do a mass edit of the dns entries. Here is an example of one of my listings – like I said – it is simple, but in this case effective! Not that I want to sell this domain so that is only an example, but you get the idea. 

Good luck if you try this tip for selling domain names!   Part 2 of this Domain name sales method series is now out! 

~~ DomainNitro ~~

Recently Shane had a great post about how to make money with 5L domain names.  What I found even more interesting were the comments and domain names that people had registered.  Some were ok and some were just bad.  I think Shane has a good grasp on what sells in that arena and he gives some good feedback in the comments.

Domain Name Narcissism

If you Google “Narcissism of small differences” you’ll see that in most cases people point out small differences to feel unique, ie important.  In some cases you’ll find that in domaining, but usually only in negotiations where the seller is trying to make a point for more money.  However, what a small difference can be in domains is ultimately huge – do you think Google would be as dominant as they are if you had to Goggle them or Guugle them?  Domains, and more importantly, brands rely on small differences.  Memorability, uniqueness and brandability are huge factors in domain names.

What I can say is that most of what Shane wrote is true based on my experiences.  I registered probably 50 5L .com’s and .net’s and I have a couple of additional tips:

1. Stay away from 5L .net’s, org’s etc unless you know EXACTLY how you are going to sell it or monetize it.  There could be some links and history that is useful or you might be able to sell it to the .com owner if they accidentally let them drop, but in general stay away.
2. Your 5L hand reg is probably worthless.  There are almost 12 million, yes MILLION, combinations of 5 letters not counting numbers and dashes.  Unless you can hand register something like AAAAA, XXXXX, myxxx, lover, hoser, golds, rings or something like that (you can’t btw), your hand registered domain is unlikely to ever sell.  There are some that are worth buying and keeping and Shane has a list that he has for sale that are pretty good.  I did keep a few I had picked up that dropped, but eventually let over half of the 50 go.  I’ve sold a few, but small in relation to the percentage of 5L’s that I owned.

The important point of “Narcissism of small differences” that you can leverage is the fact that people generally want, and do care about the domain name.  They become invested in the domain name and that is why a company will spend hundreds of hours and countless dollars to get just the right domain name.  They will then notice the difference in other, less worthy, domains and spend quite a bit of their resources on a perfect (for them) domain name.

I have just over 20 5L’s right now and there are a few that I really like and here is my narcissistic evaluation of a few:

• WhyFy.com – Well, this one is probably the most obvious because it sounds like wifi.  In my spare time I’d like to start a forum on wifi… or sell it to Rob over at Epik to go with his WiFi.com
• Vampd.com – Anything vampire related is hot right now and has been for quite some time.  There is/was an online magazine called vampd so there is some traffic.  I’ve had several offers on this one over the last year and I’ve turned down offers of 500+ so that is a good sign. 
• GabMe.com – I really like this one for a social networking/chat site.  That isn’t really my cup of tea, but someone will want this gem – Two real words in a 5L that actually make a phrase is pretty brandable, imo.
• Dezyl.com – Sounds like Diesel and there is pretty interesting traffic to it for some reason.  Plus I just like it.
• Aceis.com – This is a single word in Spanish and there is a developed site on another extension.   Also, it has 2 words if you make it Ace Is – as in “Ace Is Good” or something like that – I’m a poker buff so that is the way I see it.  Since it ends in IS it could be Ace Internet Services and I’m thinking about creating an branding my development arm under that name next year so I may hold onto this one as well.  Always looking for offers though.
• Finally, I’ll throw in this one that I actually found and hand registered without much of a real plan, but I think it works…  FAAAQ.com – sounds like Fake which I think is funny and I wanted to use it for a parking lot of Q/A’s I have – so it would be Frequently Asked, And Answered, Questions.  Goofy, I know, but for some reason it just clicks with me and a FAQ site can get decent traffic over time.

Anyway, good luck with your domains and if you have any insight or commentary on what I have listed feel free to let me know.

~~ DomainNitro ~~