I’ve decided to take Afternic landing pages for a spin

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of different solutions for putting “For Sale” landers on my domain names. To-date, Efty has been my favorite, what I really dig about Efty is that I can customize the landers, they have a great dashboard, and I get all the contact information for my buyer so I can follow-up directly.

While I’m super happy with Efty, I also enjoy running experiments, and after reading Abdul’s ongoing series about Afternic, I decided I’ll take their landers for a spin for a few months.

One of the reasons I want to run this experiment now is that work has become so insanely busy I’ve found I haven’t been great at following-up with inbound leads. There have been more than a few times over the last few months where I followed up much later than I normally would, and with sales, usually great communication wins the day.

What I like about Afternic is that they have a sales team that can manage my inbounds whether by email or phone, get back to people quickly, and negotiate on my behalf. I’ve had the chance to meet a handful of people at Afternic over the years and have always been impressed with the team over there.

Recently, Michael Lefebvre has been super helpful getting everything organized and sharing some best practices. The timing is perfect also as I’m getting ready for a four day backpacking trip so I’ll be completely disconnected from email and phone until Sunday, so it’s nice to know there will be someone to respond to inbounds while I’m gone.

So what do these landing pages look like? Here’s what the “For Sale” landers look like if you opt for the direct lead capture pages:

Afternic landing page

Since Afternic does charge a commission I increased my prices on the domains I’m selling through Afternic. That way, if one of their salespeople does sell a domain for me, I still get what I would want for the name.

One little detail I learned that might be helpful to other people who are thinking of trying out Afternic is that you need to use NS3.Afternic.com and NS4.Afternic.com if you want the lead capture page (as shown above) to show up directly. If you use NS1 and NS2 you’ll get a parked page with a “For Sale” banner at the top.

I’ve never made money parking and I think parking pages can turn away potential buyers so I’m in the process of updating my name servers to NS3 and NS4.

So far the only real negative issue I’ve had with Afternic is the fact that they don’t have two-factor authentication. Abdul brought this up in a recent blog post and shared how this, coupled with fast-transfer, could be a bad combo:

2FA is a must which no one can deny and should be implemented. If somehow your password is leaked or device got hacked, it’s easier for the hacker to login and change the sale price of your domain and buy it. Especially with Fast Transfers enabled, the domain will simply transfer out of your registrar swiftly.(Source – AbdulBasit.com)

Josh Reason recently brought up this issue up on Twitter and Paul Nicks followed up saying that the feature could be coming within the next few months, here’s the tweet:

Two factor authentication on Afternic

For now I’m going to keep Fast Transfer turned off just to be safe. I think the jury is still out on Fast Transfer, I’ve heard good and bad things about it, if you want to really do a deep dive into the debate, check out this post on TheDomains.

Okay, I’ll leave it at that since I’ve gone some DNS changes to make tonight and I need to get to it! Huge thanks to Michael Lefebvre, he’s been amazingly helpful and is one of the reasons I’m making this move.

Oh and if you think I’m just writing this post because Afternic is a sponsor, they aren’t. I’m not being paid to write this, but hopefully I will be paid by Afternic after I get some sales through their landers!

If anyone wants to share their experience with Afternic or any tips/tricks/optimizations I should know about, feel free to hop on into the comment section below.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton