Nobody likes competition. Especially the guy who receives an email that clearly states just that.
A few weeks ago I received an offer at Sedo for a financial term, a dot net that I registered “by hand” in 2003. As the story goes, I hold domains until the Rapture occurs and since I am not a Catholic, this might take a full lifetime.
But back to the domain – a two-word compound term that returns 700k results in Google.
The domain was at Parked.com due to its higher PPC for financial terms, but I had also listed it for sale on Sedo. As with most Sedo offers these days, the negotiation started in the low hundreds. I was dealing with an aggressive US buyer that left me with little room to raise my asking price.
The final offer was closer to my expected price but still, I felt I was being short-changed. Don’t get me wrong, $1500 is still good money for a domain I spent $8 to register and another $50 in renewals over the years. But why not expand its potential, if I could?
After all, the sale of 360.org a year and a half ago taught me that if you don’t ask, you don’t receive.
So I sent the domain to auction on Sedo, with the final offer I had received being the reserve.
What I did next was a first for me.
Personally, I am sensitive about receiving emails from companies or individuals that I haven’t solicited. However, in this line of business, a legitimate contact of a person or company related to the product or service on offer, might lead to a potential sale.
I crafted an email that announced the domain name and the fact that it was in a live auction that the recipient could participate in. Then, I searched ZFBot - a great tool for domainers - looking for domains that matched mine – either starting with or ending with the exact string. Once I had these domains, I extracted their contact information from the WHOIS using DRT – Domain Research Tool.
It’s important to mention at this point that ZFBot can narrow down your target recipients by sorting the domains according to their parking status: in my case, I wanted to avoid contacting any domain owners that simply had parked domains instead of legitimate companies.
I double-checked every email to ensure there was no junk, “do not contact” or WHOIS shield emails; then proceeded with contacting them – a total of 50 or so – with a description of what I had to offer: the opportunity to obtain the keyword domain most closely related to their business.
I made sure that I explained what was on auction, where and when the auction would end. As part of the sales pitch I described the importance of generics and keyword domains, using simple words. When you sell to an end-user, you don’t simply sell them technology and gimmicks; you are offering them an extension of what they already have.
The only thing I did not foresee was the fact that I sent the email right before a long holiday weekend; Monday was a holiday and that took away a day from the remaining days of the auction as most recipients’ businesses were closed!
Twenty-four hours before the auction end I followed up with another similar but shorter email, announcing the ending of the opportunity and its imminent closing; in doing so I used a bit of a provocative subject: In 24 hours new competition is born.
With a few hours remaining, two new bidders started bidding up along with the original offer. The auction was extended several times, as bidder #3 battled with bidder #1 – all the way to a very nice $3350. I’m definitely happy with the outcome and especially with the fact that the buyer is a person from the term’s industry who will put the domain to good use.
Had I attempted to sell the domain via cold calling, I’d probably be given the runaround. But since nobody likes their competition to get an advantage with an asset that’s being openly auctioned, the domain sold at an end-user price.
The application also keeps track of the count of registered .com’s in total and broken down by letter combinations. Currently, there are approximately 80 million registered .com domain names.
