How I turned a false spam email into a $7500 sale

As promised yesterday, today’s ‘big news‘ is that I turned an email inquiry – mislabeled as ‘spam’ – into a sizable sale.

I don’t park all of my domains; some of the better ones I build into temporary placeholders, with a designed logo and an email address to be contacted at. Some of them are actually reserved for future projects, but I can only work on so many web & graphics development projects at a time.

This method is useful for the following reasons:

• I can see who is visiting the domains and web sites, as logs are been kept.
• I can rank really high in Google for the keywords.
• I can pique the interest of serious investors.

A week ago, I was checking the emails of one such web site, a two word, aged .com. These are the qualities I look for, when I invest in domains long term; flipping is not something that I’m interested in, as there is little value and very low ROI.

Out of 100 or so spam emails, one message stood out, because it listed the domain in its title.

It was an inquiry that had been sent two and a half months prior, asking whether the domain was for sale. The sender and its corresponding email matched a real person, unlike numerous spam emails from opportunistic idiots that annoy me with lowball offers daily.

Concerned about whether that dated inquiry was still valid, I responded with a link to the Sedo sale page for the domain.

From there on, the negotiation proceeded very rapidly; an initial offer in the four figures was quickly upped. A couple of emails later, I sent my final counter-offer which was accepted. The buyer paid within a day and details about the domain will be mentioned in DNJournal tomorrow.

Having turned a three and a half year old $xxx acquisition via NameJet into a solid sale, I can’t but thank my good luck for picking out the inquiry email that was buried inside a ton of spam.