- Impact
- 3,133
If so -
Is it working for you?
What are the benefits?
Did you DIY?
If not,
Why?
Interested to know your thoughts....
Is it working for you?
What are the benefits?
Did you DIY?
If not,
Why?
Interested to know your thoughts....
Oh you're so right. We should all just quit right now . The doom and gloom of developing one's own site, the horrible good feeling it gives us, the sheer bewilderment that we can keep 25% more of the money the buyer pays, the depressing feeling of sharing the work one has done with others, the total feelings... of being back in the Y2K.Owning your own domain sales site is so 2000 or something like that.
What's the point? There is none.
List at afternic + activate fast transfer and you sell a lot more.
If you don´t like to park with afternic, use sedo or something like that.
maybe if you own 100 000+ domains, it has some point.
Or maybe if you sell some country .tld-s. And you need the marketplace to be in specific language
Oh you're so right. We should all just quit right now . The doom and gloom of developing one's own site, the horrible good feeling it gives us, the sheer bewilderment that we can keep 25% more of the money the buyer pays, the depressing feeling of sharing the work one has done with others, the total feelings... of being back in the Y2K.
...doom ...depression ...thunder clouds... etc...
If you are cheapskate you will always be a cheapskate!
In order to make money, you have to spend money.
Think about it.
You cry about 25%, id say afternic is worth every penny of that 25%
I think it is important to keep in mind that everything in your sales process gives an impression.
My foremost reason for creating a marketplace/portfolio site was for cost savings. At the point where I put together a marketplace, I had 1-2 sales per month and I felt it was really dumb to give away a percentage of my sales to commission, when the traffic originated from my domain in the first place. I still don't mind spending 20% on commission when the traffic comes from elsewhere because they are adding a lot of value, but if the sale comes from my own traffic, it makes no sense.
At this point, with 1-2 sales per month you are at about 18 sales per year, around $25k in revenue, and $5,000 per year in commissions @ 20% (ouch).
I started off cheap with nameimprove.com as the domain and a simple website where I listed my portfolio. What I noticed over time is that the offers I received via the site, and negotiations, seemed to be low-ball more often than not compared to what I previously received on sedo/afternic/parking sites. So then you need to wonder, how much are you really saving when your overall offer amounts go down because of the impression you are giving? So I bought BetterNames//com soon after for $1,700 and paid a designer to come up with a better site design for about $500 (which now is now 10 years old and needs a redesign).
Before I upgraded the site, I started looking into marketing ideas much more and found that there are some small things you can do to give yourself a stronger position in negotiation and establish your authority in your industry with very little effort. By establishing a sense of Authority in the industry, you are much less likely to receive random low ball push-back from serious buyers. For me, the basics of doing so were the following:
- Domain Name - to sell premium domains, you at minimum need a domain that is not "bad". Mine (NameImprove.com) wasn't horrible, but I knew it wasn't great, and to sell higher end names I think you are far better off with a good or great name.
- Web Site Design - Whether using a template, a service, or doing it yourself just make sure it looks like a good professional website. As a developer, I've learned I'm not a designer and avoid coming up with designs from scratch even after 20 years of development and design editing.
- Logo - similar to your domain, the logo matters. Unless you are a real designer, I would avoid doing it yourself. Hire a designer, or you can generate some good ones via logoshuffle.com or logojoy.com. At $30-$50 it makes no sense to use a bad logo.
- Email Address - (myname@betternames//com) gives a much better impression than [email protected] did, and much better than a personal email address.
It is much harder to recover negotiations that have started with the customer trying to cut away at the value of the domain. If you establish your authority early in the customer engagement process, I've found that it is less likely that a knowledgeable buyer will take this path.
- Email Signature - come up with an email signature that makes sense and give yourself a title. I would avoid "Owner" or "CEO" unless it is obvious that your business has multiple employees.
The items above are some simple ways you can start establishing authority and help you negotiate from a stronger position.
As a side note, if you are not going to have an end result that is "great" for the items above, you should probably just keep your 20% commission landing pages as your end result will likely be better, or use one of the landing page services that keep you anonymous. For me, the process was going to save me a few thousand dollars a year in commission to start, so investing $2-3k was an easy choice.
I agree with that, no one comes to my site and looks around for a purchase. I've done zero SEO work for BetterNames//com because it doesn't really matter if people find me searching for "premiums domains" or something like that. I did it for landing pages only. The only reason I have a marketplace is so the buyer sees it as a big store and is more likely to think that I know what I'm doing.
I'm currently receiving 8,000-8,500 visitors per day via my custom landing pages, and over 120,000 page views per day, though it is likely many of the page views are from bots and crawlers. The other thing I've noticed is that search engine crawlers do not get forwarded via registrar URL forwarding. So for years and years my website and domains weren't indexed by search engines at all. I switched to my own custom DNS servers (ex. ns1.buy-this.com). Now, if you look up any of my domains on google (ex. search for "comerelax//com" and it will be the first listing in the search engine). This makes a significant difference when you have thousands of domains.
The huge advantage that you have with a custom landing page over the offer coming in via Sedo or Afternic is intelligence. In most cases I can figure out who a buyer is before responding to them if it comes from my website. From Sedo or Afternic, I have no idea. Imagine how your negotiation goes when you know who the buyer is as opposed to not knowing anything about your buyer.
I only get about 35% of my sales from landing pages in regards to upfront, buy-now sales. The other 65% come from external marketplaces (afternic).
But it is important to keep in mind that once you have your own site, you can implement any idea you want and because of this 100% of my lease-to-own agreements come via my landing pages as well. There were 9 in the last year and I currently have about 30 active lease-to-own agreements. So if you add these into my sales numbers above, about 50% or more of my revenue comes via my custom landing pages.
So while I originally put up a portfolio/marketplace to cut down on my $5k commission costs, it is now a vastly different situation. I would say in terms of negotiation advantage and lease-to-own deals that never would have existed otherwise, the amount of extra profits that are generated from my portfolio/marketplace are at minimum $17,000 per year and more realistically about $25,000+ per year. So, I'd say the initial investment of $1,700 for BetterNames//com wasn't too bad.
I don't show my portfolio on the platform website. I only show basic info.
I understand this. While not giving it quite the importance I did in the past, my thoughts were that giving a potential buyer access to your “strategy” in acquiring domains by listing all of them in one place, gives them the idea that there are may alternatives to the domain you are trying to sell to them! You don’t want the buyer who typed in your domain to suddenly reconsider a buy it now purchase due to huge list staring them in the face.That's a strange idea. Why do you NOT list your domains on your portfolio website? Isn't that the whole point of having a portfolio website?
I understand this. While not giving it quite the importance I did in the past, my thoughts were that giving a potential buyer access to your “strategy” in acquiring domains by listing all of them in one place, gives them the idea that there are may alternatives to the domain you are trying to sell to them! You don’t want the buyer who typed in your domain to suddenly reconsider a buy it now purchase due to huge list staring them in the face.
Which is also, conversely, a great reason to have your names listed on the various other venues (Afternic/Sedo, etc) in addition to landing pages of your own. I suspect many of my sales have been as a result of my names being sold as the better choice (price & or quality) due to a keyword search performed in the major marketplaces. Lots of your perfect buyers will never directly type your domain before hitting “buy-it-now”. They didn’t even know it existed.
My ideal: Landing page to my own marketplace, but also have them listed (most with buy-it-now pricing) on the majors.
Yeah, I reckon you'd find a fair bit of demand.Nice thread. Lot's of interesting approaches being highlighted.
It really isn't that hard to build your own landers and marketplace. I've been pondering on this idea of doing a tutorial on here that'll cover some basics, you know just to get you going.
Nothing too fancy so even if you're not that technical you can do it but just enough so you can build on it and expand if you like.
Do you guys think there's enough interest in something like this to make it worth my time? Should I poll it to see where we're at in terms of demand?
Hi @stub, I’m interested to know – is it just that you do a much higher % of sales through Afternic, or do you actually know that customers have come to your own website then chosen to buy through Afternic afterward? {I assume you'd know this if you have links giving them either option.} If the latter, what sort of value range domains are they doing that for (choosing to pay an extra 25%)?... ThanksI always make the buyer pay this 25% at Afternic, over and above my asking price on my own website. From my experience, the buyer chooses to buy from Afternic rather than from my website, most of the time
Hi @stub, I’m interested to know – is it just that you do a much higher % of sales through Afternic, or do you actually know that customers have come to your own website then chosen to buy through Afternic afterward? {I assume you'd know this if you have links giving them either option.} If the latter, what sort of value range domains are they doing that for (choosing to pay an extra 25%)?... Thanks