Over the last seven years I have hopped around from parking service to parking service. First let me just say that I don’t make much money parking, most months it averages out to between $200 – $300 so at the end of the day it just helps cover renewal fees. Most of the revenue I generate from domain names comes from selling domains to end-users, not other investors, but real people who put the domains to good use. You can see a shortlist of some of the domains I’ve sold here and learn more about how I built my business here.
When I look at a parking service what I am the most interested in is how I can get the most inbound offers from end-users. Sure one service could make 10% more or 15% less but at the end of the day my parking revenue is so low that it honestly doesn’t matter. What does matter is a 10% increase in inbound offers, that makes a real impact.
There are three parking services that I think are the best for generating inbound offers – DomainNameSales.com, SmartName, and TrafficZ. While I like all three of these I personally use DomainNameSales.com for most of my names as I’ve found some great ways to tweak the platform. Below are three things that I have done myself to increase the number of offers I receive through DomainNameSales.com. One that I’m not going to include on here because it should be obvious is that you of course need to have a for sale banner at the top of the page, but you knew that one already right?
- Put a phone number on your for sale banner – this change takes less than a minute and can instantly increase your inbound leads by 20%+. If you don’t want to use your own phone number try a service like Grasshopper and get an 800 or 888 number. The concept here is simple – make it as easy as possible for someone to contact you the moment they are interested in the domain, because ten minutes later they may have moved on.
- Don’t make your minimum offer absurdly high – want to only hear offers from people in the $5,000+ range, say goodbye to 99% of your offers. I’ve seen $500 offers turn into $500,000 deals, you never know what bid someone will start with. I recommend setting your minimum offer anywhere between $49 up to $199, if you find you’re getting too many low quality offers you can always increase the number. Still I think you’ll be surprised by the solid deals you can close with people that start with a relatively low bid.
- Enable and configure all the automated email follow-up – what I like the most about DNS is their automated email follow-up settings. You can have the system automatically follow-up with people who have inquired and set it up to work however you’d like. I personally set three follow-ups wherever possible starting 7 days later, then 14 days after that, and 21 after that. According to DNS as much as 50% of sales come from following-up with past buyers (see more below).
As always I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to share your own tips or comment on any of mine.
