What I learned from looking at inbound offers on my domains earlier this year

Below is a screenshot of the inbound offers I received on my domains parked at DomainNameSales.com for the month of May. I currently have my domains parked between DomainNameSales.com, Efty and Afternic. As most of my readers know, I don’t make millions with domain names, instead I sell between 0 – 2 domains a month. That being said, the majority of my sales do come through services like DomainNameSales.com, Efty, and Afternic so I’m a big believer in the value that they bring.

That being said, everyone once and a while something like this happens. A domain that I own, CCV.me is getting a steady stream of offers covering a wide range from $250 up to over $50,000 – but none of them seem real, nobody responds, and it just clogs up my inbounds with what really feels like pure junk offers.

domain-offers-may-2017

I haven’t had this happen to me before, sure I’d say about half of the inbound offers I get are junk offers, but this is non-stop and all junk. So I pinged a few friends that have a lot more domain names than I do and asked them what they would do in a situation like this.

The best recommendation I got was to put that name specifically on a parking service that requires an upfront payment to make an offer, this would definitely filter for only the most serious buyers. So I decided to put the domain on DomainAgents.com, here’s what the landing page looks like now:

domain-agents-landing-page

As I expected, immediately the inbound offers stopped, and to be honest, I haven’t had a single inbound on the domain since I moved it over. While in some cases I think you might be inclined to think, “hey that killed my inbounds!” the reality is…it’s not a great domain name, and I don’t think a name like this would get more than one or two inbounds a year. I do think that this landing page is doing a great job of filtering for only serious buyers because I honestly do think this domain has many serious buyers.

Domains like ClosetDesign.com, Friending.com, STAA.com, etc. are the ones that typically get the most real inbounds, i.e. one and two-word .COMs. So if you ever find that you have a pretty mediocre domain that’s getting a ton of offers…don’t trick yourself into thinking you’ve struck gold. Those inbounds aren’t really, you just need to apply a filter to prove it.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton