Owning any domain name can result in “somebody” wanting to buy it for various reasons, so if for some reason out of the blue, somebody contacts you with interest in buying your domain name, it is vital that you do research into who may be the interested party with interest in your domain name.
What research methods do I suggest you do?
Know who is contacting you! The person/company contacting you could be a domain buyer broker, it could be the company directly or simply your average joe and often times these entities will try there best to hide who they are. That is ok, because there are reasons behind it, mainly price. If Facebook is contacting you to purchase your domain, you are thinking money bags! If you don’t know who it is, maybe your only seeing $ $ signs instead of huge bags of money!
Search Email Address
If you are contacted via email, research the “name”, “nicname” and email address via a search engine like Google. Use quotes with the email address “[email protected]” . The same with the “name” used. See what you see! You are looking to start a pattern, so note what you are seeing.
Whois
If a domain name is used in the email address, I’d suggest using a whois service to see who owns it. If the email address used is a general one, like @yahoo or @gmail, then using a search engine is your best bet.
Check other TLD’s of your domain
You can do this via whois again. Often times, companies well get ahead of themselves and register other domain names in TLD’s (.com, .net, .org) that match the domain name you own! This can tip you off as to who the interested party may be.
Try searching whois for “similar” domain names to see if somebody registered those recently and by who.
Google The Term
Do a Google search using the exact term as your domain name, in quotes and see what you see! “your term here” do it together, “yourtermhere” etc. Check recent news, in the news tab etc.
What should I sell it for?
This is solely up to you. Putting a “value” on a domain name is hard. Even the person contacting you likely doesn’t know, but I’m sure they have a budget. Go with your gut and what you would be happy with selling the domain for no matter who the interested party is. Clearly you do not want to leave money on the table, but keep in mind that everybody has a budget. You don’t want to regret the sale later, so again, pick a price you will be happy with no matter what. Does this mean $500, $5,000 or $50,000? Again, this is up to you! Domains sell often in the low four figure range, some for five figures and some for even six figures or seven.
The Transaction
It is best to be safe and selling a domain name includes some risk! Do you just transfer the domain to the buyers? Accept Paypal payment and give them your login details to your domain account? NO! Using an escrow service is your safest bet. Escrow.com is likely the most popular, but there are several services for selling domain names and each will help you. Agreed.com, EscrowHill.com, eCop.com and I’m sure many more.
Overview
Many times, no matter how hard you search to find out “who” the interested party is in your domain name, you may not be able to find out! That is OK, because if you price your domain with no regret as to who the buyer is, then you should be happy with the sales price! Just because you ask for a certain prices, also doesn’t mean the interested party will be willing to pay it, so keep that in mind when you set your asking price.
I had an inquiry this week on a domain name where the buyer started off with a low $XXX offer stating that was all they could afford. I offered to lease the domain and their reply was that their client didn’t want to lease. OK – your client. I then asked what they planned on doing with the domain and then finally admitted they were a young company which just happened to have the same name as my domain keyword. The service they offer – corporate video production I believe sells for far more than their measly low $XXX offer.
Congrats on getting them to reveal more info than they should have! Hopefully you can find some middle ground and work out some deal.
Good one Jamie!
But on some occasion, the buyer is very smart in hiding the identity by contacting through newly created email ID from @outlook.com, @gmail.com and it’s difficult to catch them unless they reveal some info about themselves by their own like Leonard Britt did.
Doing research is always good so one must not regret later of leaving money on table.
Thanx for blogging again! Nice article!
Louise 🙂