Domain Inquiry Sounds Better vs Domain For Sale

There has been talk on the forum boards about the best way to place a notice on your website that your domain name is for sale. Fabulous.com does a good job combining PPC ads with a domain for sale announcement page and developed a type of hybrid between a parked page and a sales page. With that said, ‘This Domain Name is For Sale’ notice does a fairly good job of getting people to make offers, but there appears to be a better way.

That Fabulous page is a good approach but I would like it even more if the banner said “Domain Inquiry” since I believe “This Domain Name is For Sale” notice will detract from the the visitor experience and potential visits to your advertisers (at least to to a degree) since the page may have has less crediblity due to the site/domain being offered for sale. The words “Domain Inquiry” has a less obvious negative meaning to a web-surfer, imo.

Any reviews, comments or ideas you have about how to effectively and professionally sell Internet domain names or websites would be appreciated. Thank you.

Do Websites & Traffic Add Major Value to Prices?

There has been discussion on domain-name forums and blogs about developed websites adding significant value to domain names, and also making the domains easier to sell plus sell for a higher price. Agree to a degree, a developed web site with traffic is of high overall value. However, with that said, based on hands-on experience, I can say end-users rarely if ever care about the traffic your domain or its website gets, and in fact don’t ask for any statistics. Even if you offer them your stats, they don’t want to see it.

In view if the above I am unfortunately somewhat dubious about a developed website (with good traffic and typeins too) being more appealing to end-user buyers and the price they will pay for the domain, at least much beyond intrinsic value. Potential end-user buyers may actually be a bit negative about an existing web site and as a result its pre-branding.

Please note that my comments do not indicate I am negative about developed websites, or do not greatly value traffic. The exact opposite is true, since I have a number of developed sites which I am very happy with, most of which get good search-engine traffic, enjoy the benefits of high SEO rankings, plus receive natural typeins (from Internet users like President Barack Obama, pictured below, likely looking at a health website)…

Domain/Website Resale Markets Are Depressed

A domain name forum menber asked about more than unusual numbers of non-forum threads and posts lately and was wodnering why that seems to be taking place? My answer is maybe it appears that way because the domain name/website resale market appears to be declining big time and since so few are successfully selling (with the notable exception of the many which somehow almost magically sell in the DNjorunal.com sale reports each week for surprising prices) forum members have little to do all day except pass time with the non-domain related posts.

An example of how hard it is to sell at forums these days I was checking yesterday and see a majority of believed dubious or marginal value names I let expire (and got zero responses on via the Forums, or thru the Whois contact information and at other venues such as my Websites) were in fact puchased by others at places such as Snapnames.com, for example, and at for high prices vs the small amounts I would have quickly taken for them (even though I rarely offer names or websites for sale). I also see BuyDomains.com ended up getting many of my cancelled names. Really odd the marginal names appear to rarely sell at forums and via for-sale-listings at auction websites for a fraction of the prices many domain sellers would have accepted. Anyone know why?

LiveApp.com and LiveApps.com domains for sale

Two very high profile premium domains for sale, LiveApps.com and LiveApp.com. Registered since 1999. Available as a pair or individually.

There are more than 65,000 app developers and well over 100,000 apps already developed. I believe Apple Computer purchased AppStore.com last month for a ton of money.

The domains are not being sold by a broker at this time. Please contact me direct for more details or with any reasonable offers.

P.S. also interested in finding a good domain broker to market and sell these 2 great LiveApp(s) domains. Willing to pay substantial commission upon sale but not paying upfront fee as unfortunately was done before. As a side-note, domainers can be warned to avoid paying a fee in advance to a broker no matter how legit he seems, or well known he is. That’s because there’s always a possibility of a falling-out and you losing the money (since the broker already received his money, with the potential sales commission perhaps not really being his main goal but you did not realize that aspect) and thus the broker may not do much ‘work’ for you or be slow at the marketing (possibly because he already has his money) so you may end-up in a dispute and ask for a refund but the broker may not want to refund your pre-paid money, been there and done that, unfortunately! Another issue which casts doubt about how legitimate the up-front fee model is you have to ask yourself why if the broker can really get a buyer he simply does not do so regardless of getting money in advance, especially since his commission will normally be far greater than the up-front fee he wants?The answer to that question should be obvious.

It’s Always Tough Giving a Buy Price or Sale Price

One of the the most frustrating things about the domain name and website business is that in the normal course of business (even if the name or its website is not listed for sale) there will be occasional unsolicited offers to buy your domains and/or websites but most everyone has great reluctance to make the first move regarding a sales price.

In all likelihood, the typical great reluctance by both buyers and sellers to name an agreeable price results in the large majority of web site or domain-name potential transactions failing.

A prospecive buyer does not want to give a specific offer because of two reasons:

1. The prospective buyer is thinking the offer may be more than sellers expected price so seller will accept it right away and he would pay more than was needed.

2. Conversely, buyer is thinking his proposed price is too low so seller may act negative and not respond at all or else act insulted replying with a sky high price of say $50,000 for a domain he really would normally sell for $5,000 or less as an example.

A potential seller does not want to give the buyer a specific buy-it-now price due to two reasons (this is especially applicable if the buyers full identity is not known):

1. Seller may be thinking the accepable buy price is lower than what buyer was really willing to pay. Thus buyer will accept the price and domain or website would get sold for less than its potential price.

2. If proposed buy price is perceived as too high by the potential buyer it may turn buyer negative and buyer will nt reply at all. That would be unfortunate since seller may in reality accept much less than the quoted high price but never has a chance to negotiate the price since buyer already walked away or went on to an alternative name for sale or a newly registered domain.

Not really sure what solutions there may be to this ongoing problem, which in-effect stands in the way of a great number of sales. Anyone know a way to avoid this?

The Secret Identifying an End-User vs a Domainer

A “domainer” is a person or business who invests or trades in domains with the goal of reselling them for a profit, flipping them, or buys domain names mostly to park them with a domain parking firm running so called “Pay-Per-Click” advertisements on the web-pages with generating income (getting paid when a visitor clicks on ads on the page) in mind. Some domainers are also developers in the sense they develop a number of so called “minisites” which are small websites (often 5 web-pages or less).

A major intent with minisites is also to receive PPC income (typically from Yahoo or Adsense ads appearing in the pages), or from Affiliate program sales. However, some minisites may also offer various products and services for sale, often accompanied by advertising. Sometimes the minisite may be developed to help enhance the value of its corresponding domain name and bring traffic to it since it has been developed and may be listed well in the search-engines as a result of development and search engine optimization (SEO) work.

An end-user is much more likely to pay a significantly greater price for your domain vs much lower price offers you will get from domainers. That is to be expected since the end-user buyer is much more serious about putting the domain name to good commercial use compared to a typical domain-name investor or domain speculator.

Now for the secret to being able to successfully say with good accuracy the sales inquiry you received is from an end-user vs a domainer. The obvious way to figure it out is what is commonly done such as “googling” the persons name or email address and looking for other clues involving the identity of the person who has inquired. Those methods may or may not work well and often are unreliable.

The secret we have discovered over the years follows Occam’s Razor theory in that sometines the most simple answer is the correct answer. For more on Occam’s Razor please visit Occam’s Organization. So our secret is a true end-user will rarely if ever ask questions such as how much traffic or how many visitors does the domain or website get? What is its revenue? Where do the site visitors come from? Does it get typein traffic? How consistent is the site traffic? etc…

If you get questions like that it is quite likely you are dealing with a domainer or domain investor. If those question are not asked it is real likely the inquring party is a true end-user, who will in all likelihood be prepared to pay substantially more for your domain name or website vs the average domainer.

As to why it matters that much to know you are dealing with an end-user, it’s based mostly on the fact an end-user buyer is significantly more likely to pay far more money vs a domain name investor. That more than likely scenario is to be expected since the domainer wants to buy at or near a wholesale pricing level compared to the retail price range end user buyers often are willing to pay. That variation makes a major difference in the domain/website selling or not selling and in its final sales price .

Start Making-Money Online with a Good Website

We have now completed out latest health related website based on Whypark which we feel is an excellent new site as far as helpful content goes combined with beneficial features such as a free newsletter and RSS feed in addition to other interesting functionality.

Please visit Arteries Tour to view the completed minisite which website quality I believe you will appreciate a lot, especially if you know this potential money-making new web site was both designed and hosted basically free of cost (except for a small monthly fee which allows for unlimited numbers of sites both small and large sites). Keep in mind it only took about 1-hour to make the cool ArteriesTour web site from start to finish.

Go-here to open a free WhyPark acct and start making some great looking multi-page websites like ArteriesTour.com Free Website Development

Be sure to visit the artery tour site Arteries Tour

Lowball Offers are Not Necessarily Starting Points

Some folks claim lowball offers for domain names are simply a starting points and a negotiating method to initiate negotiations, with an assumption both parties realize the real value of the domain.

The “starting point” view doesn’t work too well with me. If I start out with a reasonable offer of say $800 (not desiring negotiations) for a name which I feel is really worth no more than $800 (especially without any known traffic) and the seller counters with a price of say $11,000 I know right away an eventual sale is most unlikely, if not impossible.

Actually had that scenario happen recently when the owner later wrote again asking me to make a new higher offer but I countered with a new lower offer of $400 due to the declining economy and lesser desire for the name vs originally. He then indicated maybe he would take a price much closer to my original offer after all if I had not gone down in the offer, to which I said no more higher offers and the domain sale negotiations were therefore finished.

Certificate Of Authenticity, new COA’s needed

Webdesigner/Programmer needed. Currently working on our web site CertificateOfAuthenticity.com and also trying to find a good designer/programmer who can make new COAs and also do customization of the certificates offered.

Please note the website/domain name is also for sale with reasonable and substantial offers are being considered. It certainly could be a unique opportunity for a company to dominate the popular certificate-of-authenticity market by owning such a category-killer name as CertidciateOfAuthenticity.com most definately is.

For more information, or to make a serious offer to buy (or possibly advertise on this web-site) please send us an email to the graphical address below, or give us a toll-free call by clicking on the ‘contact us’ link located near the top of this web-page.

Potentially Dominate Kids Category of Websites

A very rare and perfect combination of two common words "Young Children" is now available. It’s an amazingly good term to those who would like to make a portal web site for parents dealing with young children, or for use by kids themselves.

After all, can you think of two better words for information on raising young children, education of young children, young children learning, and young children’s games, fun and lids of all ages activities!

YoungChildren.com has been registered since the year 1999 but unfortunately its been lacking a nicely developed website (with lots of content pages and useful functionality) until fairly recently when it finally had its own developed web site, but with much more work needed to eventually make it a large kids and children’s portal.

However, that past years slow web site development is a golden opportunity for an Internet entrepreneur who invests today in this fine domain name and develops a large content-rich kids website. The popularity of the site can increase dramatically with the domain name eventually likely being a leading children’s and parents presence on the-web especially with its category-killer name.

The last time we checked, a Google search reveals the words “young children” have more than 38 million results, which is an extremely high number.

Our server statistics program reveal the most popular search terms used by web-surfers who find youngchildren.com are these terms: young children, recipes for young children, youngchildren.com, www.youngchildren.com, how young children learn, recipe for young children, young children food, young children recipes and children.

However, the majority of site visitors arrive by direct navigation to the website which mostly involves typing n the domain name into their internet browser address bar window (and bookmarks). In fact, over the latest few months we looked at a strong average of 70% of all the visitors to the web site arrived that way. Direct navigation means free visitors to your web site with no promotional work, marketing or advertising costs involved. It’s far and away the best way to get “eyeballs” looking at your Internet presence.

For more information, or to make a serious offer to buy (or possibly advertise on this web-site) please send us an email to the graphical address below, or give us a toll-free call by clicking on the ‘contact us’ link near the top of this web-page.

Getting Out of Bed for Buyer Offers Under $500

A well-known highly successful large domain portfolio owner and domainer RickLatona.com recently proposed on his blog that buyers make a low-offer such as $50 when interested in starting negotiations to buy good domains.

Personally, I don’t think starting out with a low-ball offer to buy a domain/website is a good strategy, assuming you are seriouslly interested in buying the domain or web site. As evidence of that it certainly would *not* work if you want to buy one of my good domains/sites since most all the time I don’t even bother to respond to low initial offers.

I will never forget a Sedona Arizona real estate investment class I attended 7-years ago which was conducted by a well known local attorney. He said he does not even bother to get out of bed for anything less than $500 (referring to his legal fee). That figure seems to me like the absolute lowest offer which carries at least a little credibility with it involving most non-blue-chip domain names.

That not bothering to get out of bed view (for a small amount of money) is often applicable with buying/selling domains too. If you have lots of expenses and ongoing concerns about revenue issues (as in-fact I do) you really need a substantial sum of money to help financially, or make much of a worthwhile change to your lifestyle. The fact the the offer to buy was a ridiculous price normally indicates (at least in my view) the seller was not a serious buyer.

Federal Income Tax Return Tax Refund domains

Now that it’s tax season for most U.S. taxpayers we have a golden opportunity for anyone interested in acquiring income tax domains and federal income tax financial websites.

Webtrading has owned FederalIncomeTaxReturn.com and FederalIncomeTaxRefund.com since the year 2000, with Federal Income Tax Return name being active on the-web as a developed website during most of that time.

These two domains are rock-solid as far as steady typein and organic visitors are concerned. After all, what names could be more generic and desciptive than these two? They have received ongoing and steady visitors as far back as our statistics go (a number of years), and only getting better this year.

Even though these domains are attractive to a domain-name investor they are even more desirable to an an end-user type of business what with their strong commercial appeal. For example, a local or national certified public accountant could do real well with these highly targeted names as far as attracting new clients go.

In all likelihood an even better commercial use would be for a firm who sells tax preparation software and other tax related products on the Internet. Such a business could easily earn substantial revenue from sales to new clients. That is especially so assuming they made a much larger web site and had nicely developed sites for both tax domains.

The site statistics are looking better than ever this year what with the ongoing good traffic. During the last full-month of data roughly 40% of the FederalIncomeTaxReturn.com site visitors (numbering 2,111 total uniques) arrived by Direct Navigation (mostly by typing-in the name including the .com extension into their web-browser), plus 35% more from search-engines, and roughly 25% more arrived via links (most all from Hasilnet.com and FederalIncomeTaxRefund.com which are both included in sale and forward to the small developed website). No traffic arrives from marketing and advertising. These names attract free visitors.

Even with the bad economy people obviously still need to file their tax returns. In fact, the very poor U.S. economy may actually help the overall popularity of these tax domains since so many tax payers are filing returns with tax refund anticipation in mind for some extra family revenue during these tough times.

For more information, or to make a serious offer (or possibly advertise on the site) please send us an email to the address below, or give us a call by clicking on the ‘contact us’ link near the top of this page.

Internet Intellectual Property domain/site for-sale

The subject of Internet Intellectual Property and IP Case Law is a legal field which is rapidly growing in popularity. Exactly what is Intellectual Property? IP Property is a product of the intellect which also has commercial value, including trademarks, copyrighted property and material such as literary or artistic works, and ideational properties, including patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes.

Webtrading has owned the highly targeted domain name InternetIntellectualProperty.com and its website since January 2000. During that long time the web site has slowly built-up traffic visiting the site and its rankings in the search engines. Our Internet Intellectual Property domain-name could easily be a leading IP Industry Legal Authority and IP Information Source in the future assuming a larger website with far greater content and functionality was online.

This domain name (with the current small website included) is now available to a buyer or internet investor for a reasonable cost. Its value has been estimated to be in the $15,000 to $20,000 price range. Be sure to contact us if you have interest in buying InternetIntellectualProperty.com – a unique internet-domain-name opportunity.

Proposed real-time domain forums daily list

It would be great to have a live real time updating daily list of all domains listed for sale posted by the popular domain name forum boards. This proposal is especially relevant to the more popular and fast-paced forums such as dnforum.com and namepros.com where it can be challenging to locate the somewhat rare good quality but reasonably priced domains of interest to the buyer.

A good approach would be for each forum to run a script which at midnight deletes the previous days for-sale list and replaces it with a new real time list. As threads are started with new domains for sale the domain(s) and link to the thread are automatically added to the days list which is refreshed many times over the course of 24-hours. The price bracket or type of sale would not matter in this proposal as all domains listed for sale would be shown and only listed alphabetically.

Other benefits (in addition to its main benefit of fast access to the domains listed for sale) are avoiding misc clutter, bypassing other posts in the same thread, less background noise (and seller embelishment and marketing copy) with a simple listing of domain-names listed for sale during each 24-hour time frame. Thus, a name of interest could quickly ‘catch your eye’ so to speak by scanning thru the domain list.

By clicking on the provided link to the sales thread you can get more details on the sale. You can then make a fast offer or buy at a ‘buy it now’ price (which is always what I personally prefer doing because I rarely if ever will make blind offers). To avoid search engine indexing of the list (which some domainers feel uncomfortable with) the proposed domain for sale list could use the format example-dot-com

Why am I posting about this? Because it’s so difficult to stumble on the relatively few good names listed for sale compared to all the others. For example, there have been a couple good names I would have loved to buy recently but what with all the ‘background noise’ when I first bring up a forum in the morning it takes a long time to locate those “good” name (especially when using Today’s Posts as I usually do). By the time I see a ‘good’ name which I like it’s often already been sold.

Just one actual example from this week is a name which sold for low-xxx but I would have paid mid-xxx for it if only I had seen the sales thread quicker. If this proposed real-time domain for-sale list was operational I could acquire a domain which I like and is in a category in my business plan, and the domain seller would have received more money for the domain, in this week’s example roughly $200 more in the sellers pocket. That scenario has happened many times over the years at the domain forums.

Futility of marketing & advertising domains for sale

The more and more we look at non-wholesale domain-name sales reports (including a number of believed average or mediocre non-premium looking names) which nevertheless sold for good coin, i.e. as listed and discussed in DNJournal.com the more and more we realized that domain sales success is *mostly* luck if you domain name sells or does not sell.

If you look at the current DNjournal.com DomainSales page you will see listings of 100s of substantail sales. However, if you look closely at all the sales you can tell most came about by being listed in the major domain names for sale firms, places such as Afternic.com, Sedo.com, BuyDomains.com, Namejet.com and Snapnames.com.

These domain venues in our opinion do not sell many domains as a direct result of any marketing or promotions they did but in all likelihood the sale transaction was the result of simply being listed there for sale and found by a link, forwarding to a parked page with a for sale notice, a for-sale page, typeins, or listed in the search engines.

That is based on the law of averages theory. For example, if there are say 1 million names for sale at any given time. Based on domain sales statistics say one-half percent a year successfully sell. In effect, that means roughly 14 names will sell on a typical day (per million for sale) at end-user pricing, irrespective of the strength or amount of any marketing, promotions, for sale websites, advertising, email spams, auctions and domain forum posts.

In other words, what we are trying to say is the typical futility of trying to market (non-wholesale) domain names for sale, especially selling on a web site (without very high traffic, but even then of dubious value) and on forum boards. For example, look at the incredibly dismal looking failed for sale threads on the various domain name boards such as namepros.com and dnforum.com for example.

Again, we are referring to sales which are above the wholesale price level, which by definition tends to exclude most domainer-to-domainer sales which are rarely based on commercial interest and appeal.

Of course, like most things in life there are always exceptions to our “luck theory” such as a domain owner who needs some cash and therefore offers a good name for sale at a price perceived to be low by a bargain-seeking buyer, often a domainer with excess investment money available (assuming the asking price sounds good). Thus seller may achieve a higher price non-end-user sale at a comparatively upper-tier wholesale price area.

How can the domain-forums (and other venues) generate so much quality and highly targeted internet traffic and yet it’s so rare for end-user price level sales to occur (beyond low price domainer to domainer sales and so called domain flips)? The obvious answer is so much of it is based heavily on timing and mostly just plain luck, combined with a shortage of potential commercial appeal level of prospective buyers to those domain-sales venues.

A domain end-user buyer (often a small business) may eventually come looking and knocking on the domain owners door, based mostly on luck as far as the timing of the buyer and their deciding one day they want or must have a specific name, so he/she goes out looking for it, finds it, and finally decides to buy it, for a reasonable non-wholesale price. Luck is without a doubt a huge issue and also the main factor.

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