Making money outbound selling domain names

When planning to profit from a domain names’ sale, it is important to stay proactive not only during the search for the TLDs but also in the search for the potential buyers.

The goal of outbound selling is to create the same type of interest you receive to purchase a domain name from a customer who initiated the inquiry, but not wait for the potential end user of your domain to have the idea. You’re trying to pre-solicit a future customer and not wait for them to decide to look for your domain name, your jump-starting their interest. The key is whether the name is a good fit.

A marketplace like the one on Cloudname.com is the perfect platform to check on what’s on the table, to fill in the wallet, and to sell. With the development of the Blockchain environment during the last decade, the platforms for domain trades have become very popular as a way to invest. Even the biggest and oldest hosting companies have developed their own Marketplaces. They created tools to evaluate the domains and are heavily investing in social media in order to communicate what’s new with their followers.

The above-mentioned tools represent a great way to get familiar with the industry. However, this approach is passive, one only sees and decides upon what is published online.

To become successful in acquiring and selling the domains, a proactive approach is needed and it is related to marketing research on different levels.

What is an outbound selling?

Outbound selling is when contacting and selling directly to an interested party. And to do so, you’ll have to know your buyer.

On one side there is the portfolio – what are the owned domain names, under what keywords are they grouped, what industries do these domain names target, what is the domains’ value, and so on.

On the other, there are the potential buyers. Outbound selling comprises a direct and personal contact in order to offer the interested parties a potentially valuable in terms of their business domain names.

Here is what to bear in mind when selling your domains directly

Selling directly to different end-users what they might need is in fact a business-to-business (B2B) communication and therefore a B2B tactic is needed.

Know who you to approach and why

If you have in your disposition domain names that lead to a specific activity or industry and you want to sell them, you’ll have to be sure to contact the right person. Your research should include:

• – What domain name(s) the party of interest/Company is currently using including to what URLs their website’s pages may be redirecting – all this will give you ideas what domains to offer them;

• – What are the fields the company operates in, what are the competitors, get familiar with the industry, the PR activities, any social responsible marketing so you could offer a domain name with keyword(s) to help them better position and better advertise & communicate their ideas;

• – Select the person(s) of interest whom to contact first. This must be a decision maker, most probably from the Marketing or the PR team in the case with the larger companies, or the CEO in the case of the smaller ones. Check all available database and tools like WhoIS and LinkedIn, and remember, often you’ll have one shot, you need to be sure you are getting to the right people!

• – Know the value of your domain names for sale. There are different tools that help evaluate a domain name like for example GoGaddy’s Domain Evaluator. The important factors to bear in mind when setting the approximate price are:

1. The popularity of the domain extension.

2. The length of the domain. Remember, not always the shorter – the better. It all depends on what kind of public will be interested in visiting a website with the domain name in question.
   
   If the visitors are people in their late 20s, early to mid-30s, they’d go better with a domain that is chic and trendy and is not that literal while people in their 40s+ will respond better to domain names that are straightforward and much more clear in their description of the service and/or product.
   
   
3. Stay away from the special characters. Avoid hyphens and be careful with the homophones like flower and flour. If you add an accent, the url will transform it to another symbol like Ã.
   
   This especially applies to the French keywords lovers who are aware that the presence or the lack of an accent can create different nuances of the meaning and therefore can lose the main idea of the good domain name.
   
   
4. Single-word domains usually rank high and even better if the word is globally recognised with a nice phonetic sound. Do not be perfectionist about finding the perfect single-domain name as normally they are becoming less available.
   
   
5. Domain names evaluation would also depend on whether they can be used globally or on a local basis. For the doctors and the HoReCa (Hotels, Restaurants, Cafeterias) supplying businesses, for example, there is no need to look for a globally recognisable domain. Knowing this, you’ll be able to offer a better deal to your potential clients.
   
   
6. Other crucial parameters are the amount of the pay-per-click, the amount of the bids for the domain keyword, recent sales of comparable domain names, the number of competitors within the same industry and the number of owners of similar keywords. The higher the numbers of all the four components, the better as they can lead to a price in the upper five-digits range.

How to contact the buyers

First, create a corporate email address and do not use your personal, free account. No Gmail and Yahoo accounts! This is the first impression you’ll make, the chance for your email to be read and not to end in the Bulk/Spam folder of the recipient.

In order to make sure your message will indeed reach the inbox of your prospective clients, you can send some test emails to other recipients close to you like to other personal email accounts of yours, to family members, and colleagues. Then ask them, in case your email ends up in the Bulk/Spam folder, to mark it as -NOT SPAM- and then reply to you as well as forward the email to another recipient. In brief, create a busy communication with a number of recipients so this email account gains credibility.

Second, get visible on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great platform to understand the structure of a company and to know its management team which will help you when trying to reach the decision-makers who could give green light to acquire your domain name. These would be, apart from the marketing team’s managers, the CIO (Chief Information Officer) who will know the strength and potential of a TDL or even the CFO since the potential deal will have to be approved by the Financial department.

Next, prepare a landing page with the domain(s) for sale and add a contact form and a phone number, in brief everything that clearly shows what is for sale and how to get to you. If you are also passing through middle players like sav.com and have decided to list the price, make sure it’s the same price on their marketplaces too.

Send the emails. The chance to get a reply is between 1% and 3% according to the domain broker Joe Uddeme, so you’ll really have to focus on the right way to present yourself and the message you want to pass to your potential buyers. Think of a subject – clear and short. Add the recipient’s name too. Be proactive. Chances to get a reply after sending one email equals zero. The first email is about introducing yourself and your idea. Try to describe in a couple of sentences why you think the domain would help this particular party.

Keep sending letters. Do not give up if you are not receiving a reply and unless you’ve received a negative answer, keep sending your letters.

Call them. It is important to get to the decision-makers but most probably if you call the Company you’ll enter in contact with a secretary or an office assistant and the conversation will be cut there. Try to call after the working hours. Since you need the managers, it is highly possible that they are still in the office and that the office assistant is gone.

Sell your idea. In the case of selling to end-users, you are not selling a domain, you are selling an idea of which the decision-makers have not thought yet but which will have them pay a four-digit price at least, so forget about the domain name for sale. Talk about opportunities.