Selling Domains To End-Users: Where To Start and When To Stop

End-users, they are the holy grail for the Domain Investor when it comes to selling domain names. As someone that’s been in sales for 6.5 years I’ve always enjoyed not having to sell when it comes to Domaining and focusing on passive income. Still, after selling over 10K in domains over the last six-months I’ve definitely got the selling bug.

Selling to end-users is important if you want to get top-dollar for your domain. Many full-time Domainers sell to end-users however their methods of selling are often different than that of new Domainers. I have a number of good friends who are full-time Domainers and the #1 piece of advice they’ve given to me about selling domains to end-users is simple, they say, “I get hundreds of offers (or in some cases thousands) on my domains every month. It is by negotiating with the people making offers, where I have all the leverage, that I can get the best sale price.”

If you do have truly premium domains, (and no, not everyone that sends an email saying “premium domains for sale” actually has premium domains) then end-users should be contacting you. Now that doesn’t mean that if you aren’t getting offers on your names you’ll never sell to an end-user, but it does change the process, and leverage entirely.

Let’s face it – if you are contacting a company or individual completely out of the blue either by telephone or email, they have the leverage. This doesn’t mean you can’t negotiate a reasonable selling price for your domain, but you’ll really need to either have a great domain name or some excellent sales skills…or both.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I am not an expert at selling domain names, and definitely far from an expert when it comes to selling domains to end-users. I do know people who are experts and ask them for advice all the time and listen and try to absorb as much as I can.

So where do you start?

Well it all starts with first having a good domain name. Trying to sell HotelsAreCool.info for $5,000 to every hotel chain you can think of probably won’t turn-into much. The best starting point is a good domain. Use the Google Adwords Keyworld Tool and make sure there’s some search volume behind your keywords. Also know that if you just registered the domain yesterday, it might be worth the $8 you paid for it, but probably is worth nothing to anyone but you.

Next the best advice I’ve received is to start by reaching-out to the people on Google that are advertising for the keywords in your domain. It’s the best if they actually use those keywords in the ad title itself. If you do a search for your keywords and notice that nobody is advertising…that’s not a good sign.

So when do you stop?

Just like in Poker you have to know when to hold em’ and know when to fold em’ – at some point you need to determine if you’ve made a mistake, correct your course, and start moving in the right direction again. If you send-out 100 emails and not a single person gets back to you then you probably failed to get a good domain. If you do have a truly great domain name at least a few people should respond. I sold an expired domain last year I bought for $100 for $5K and a total of six emails were sent – if it’s the right name, sent to the right people, someone should be interested…then it all really comes down to price.

Once again, I’m not an expert and instead am just trying to give you some advice based on what I am currently learning. I’ve talked a lot on my blog about monetizing domains which is my main focus but want to also give some love to selling domains since that is something I’ve been enjoying learning more about and had some recent success with. A vast majority of my revenue still comes from monetization but I do love the thrill of a good domain sale just like the rest of us, and now that I’m focusing on .COM I feel the sales bug growing!

As usual I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton