As a domain investor – it’s easy to put more time into buying than selling

Buying domain names

As a domain name investor, I’ll be the first to admit, the thrill of getting a good deal on a great domain never gets old. One of the things that makes domain investing so interesting, beyond the insanely high ROI, is the sheer number of buying opportunities that exist, every single day.

From expired domains, to private auctions, direct sales, and hand registrations, once you start to get a little traction investing in domain names, it’s easy to get hooked.

While adding new inventory to your portfolio is important, heck, it’s really important, balancing that with doing things that generate cashflow is a careful balancing act.

Here’s where you can easily lose track. If you’re like me, and you don’t do outbound, that means when you buy a domain you typically get a landing page on it through a service like Efty, and then list it on a marketplace like Afternic, or submit it to a brandable domain marketplace like BrandBucket.

At this point you might feel like you’ve done your job and it’s time to get back to buying. And yes, you should still be re-investing your profits and adding new names to your portfolio, like I said above, this is important.

But don’t forget that, like a garden, tending to your portfolio can make a difference, and some of these activities while you might not think of them as “selling” per-say, are activities that help you sell your names.

Here’s an example of some things you can do to balance out all the time you spend buying domains.

  • Optimize your landing pages, tweak the wording, check your name servers, make sure your for sale landers are nice and polished
  • Update your prices on marketplaces – things change, maybe you haven’t sold a domain in months, you could lower your pricing on a handful of names, my point here is updating your pricing can change your sales velocity
  • Take a name or two from a normal domain marketplace like Sedo or Afternic and move it to a brandable marketplace like BrandBucket or Squadhelp, this is a great way to get your name in front of more buyers
  • Reach out to a domain broker and see if they have any buyers looking for a name in a specific niche or with a specific keyword in it
  • List some names on a wholesale marketplace like DNWE or NameLiquidate
  • Is there a conference or auction event coming up? NamesCon holds a domain auction usually twice a year and plenty of other companies hold domain auctions regularly

One thing you’ll notice about every bullet point on my list is that none are outbound. Of course you can do outbound and that’s probably the best way to increase the liquidity of your domain names, but my point here is that even if you don’t do outbound, there are ways you can balance the time you spend buying domains with activities that can help you sell more domains.

So next time you’re up at 2am bidding on names, think to yourself, when’s the last time I did something to help me sell more names, and if you’re imbalanced, there’s some ideas here to help you tip the scales back in the right direction.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton