question How do you get "eyes" on your GoDaddy, Namejet, Sedo auctions?

[WhoaDomain.com]

How do you get "eyes" on your Godaddy,Namejet,Sedo auctions?

I'm asking because my last Namejet auctio was DISASTROUS!

depressing too. I was told by Namejet. It was too much too many and I overwhelmed potential bidders.

That it's best to space it out.

But I couldn't help thinking my domains just "sucked".

many said so too. (tough love!) lol

That said. We've all seen some crazy domains sell for tons of money. most don't even make sense!

is it all just a crap shoot? or is there a science to getting domains to sell for so high? I guess that's what we all hope for here.

I mean yea people sell to endusers all the time and it's announced on here. but when auctions go for big money? We usually ask "What?"

Or we usually say "Somebody paid too much!"

Nonetheless these domain owners did something to get "eyes" on their auctions so much so that the right person was in the crowd and they saw value in the domain to bid high.

In thee end it's all about quantity of "eyes" on a domain auction.

How is it done?

skip the whole

"advertise on namepros"
or
"advertise on Namejet"
or
"list your domains here on Namepros in the external domains section"

That's all understood so let's not waste time saying all that.

What's the "other stuff" besides all that?

Social Media but I've been to all the Facebook domainer sections.

It's just tedious. It's just people trying to sell each other stuff. lol

What about Twitter?
Instagram?
youtube?
Linkedin?
Snapchat?
Wechat?
QQ?
TikTok? lol jk
Reddit?

DNF? That's dead. I don't see anyone posting on there like here.

Quora?

Any success with these?

What about Domaining.com?

What about email marketing? How does one do that without just ending up becoming a spammer?

I had asked one time over at Godaddy if they would allow me to instead of giving them 20% commission on my auction I'd give them 25% but in exchange I'd want the Featured listing in the exact match keyword section for my domain.

that's worth losing 5% of the sale I think.

paying upfront simply is not an option for some.

I mean Godaddy can even choose to be picky if they want on whom they would give that 25% commission offer to in exchange for Featured listing. I mean it's not like you are twisting their arm.

This can be applied to Namejet or even Sedo.

Never understood why these auction companies choose to make you pay upfront for featured listing.

I guess if you are confident you can pay the fee because you know you'd get it back because your domain is awesome.

but still who here is really THAT confident all the time with their domains. There's always that fear and apprehension that maybe my domain sucks. or is it just me? so we hesitate on paying up front for the featured listing.


Anyway's me rambling so what are your secrets to get eyes on your domain auctions?

 

[Michael]

Some great comments here so far.

Spending too much money on advertising your domain name auctions is always a delicate balance if your domains are not too worthy of a $x/$xx/$xxx advertising expense. You have to be honest with yourself and figure out which ones are worth $5, $10, $50, ad expense.

Outbound Marketing is #1.
(2) actual end users who need/want the domain for their business is the best you can hope for and worth the work. Of course, 900 domains is impossible to do that with.

I would start with a few of your best names and try that route if you want the most bang for your buck. That is free but a lot of work. The more work I put into my sales, always translates into more sales for me.

I also agree with Ategy that the image you show here will affect peoples image of you which translates into loss of money when dealing with other serious domainers. Might be worth a few sales to you, if you try a re-brand.

As for the specifics of where to advertise your auctions, I believe I have done 99% of every available advertising opportunity possible. Here are a few I have used that I believe have been helpful to me in my domain sales.

1) NameBio.com - Ran by @Michael - NameBio is the most read site when it comes to all domain name sales and they always have their auction picks for the day.

2) TLDinvestors.com - Ran by @equity78 - Ray has a list posted every day of domain picks and his blog has a lot of eyeballs w/money. The promoted domains really pop at the end of his list.

3) DSAD.com - As people including @Domain Shane have said here in this thread, They also have a domain auction list everyday and a lot of eyeballs w/money. Also, whoever is writing the list there that day, usually has a nice comment to go along w/your domain.

4) Whatever Social Media you have. Paid promoted posts/tweets, BUT you have try to target your audience as specific & tasteful as possible. Think how your domain name can be helpful to them when posting, and not just a slam fest saying gimme your $ for my crap. Many domainers just spam the hell out of their social media and it immediately turns the blinders on when doing so.

Hope this helps a bit.

Great post, and thanks for the mention. As you said some domains simply aren't worth promoting, and Shane will tell you that before you purchase. Our system is totally automated so we don't do that, but I respect that he's looking out for others more than his bottom line.

While we are the highest traffic site you can advertise on like this, Shane's posts have a really strong following. If I only had $10 to promote an auction I would buy Shane's one-day listing over ours as he'll probably send more traffic for the same money in that period. I rarely auction off domains, but when I do I still buy a DSAD listing even though I can obviously promote it well on NameBio. It's a great value, and so are the TLDInvestors listings.

Where ours makes more sense is for multi-day listings or if you have a membership. Ours gets as cheap as $4.17 per day for the 30-day package even without a membership, and if you're a Business member it gets as low as $2.07 per day. So while Shane can probably deliver more clicks for $10 spent, we can deliver more for $50 for example, because it would get you ten days instead of five even without a membership, or 20 days with the highest membership level.

I think we offer a good value because 41% of customers have come back and bought more than one listing, our top five customers have bought 281, 76, 70, 59, and 57 listings respectively, and our top 30 customers have bought a total of 1,003 listings combined. I can't imagine they'd be doing that if it wasn't worth it. Plus our listings are stickied all over our site not just the blog, and with an average session duration of 16 minutes and 43 seconds (very long!) your domain will be burned into their brains.

Shane's advice on strategy is gold. It's extremely important to promote in the early days of your auction, even more so than the end, because that gets the bids started. Most people sort at the auction houses by number of bids because it saves time, so even having just one bid gets you *way* more visibility and it snowballs throughout the entire course of the auction.

As far as domain quality versus number of clicks, it's actually a bell curve. A really bad domain obviously won't get a lot of clicks. But I've found that really good domains don't get a lot of clicks either, probably because a majority of people can't afford it so they don't bother clicking. The sweet spot for promotion is really the mid tier domains. Although that said, on the high end domains while you might not get as many clicks, an extra bidder could drive the price up by thousands of dollars, so it is still worth an $xx listing.

 

[likeslikes]

I've paid for the featured listing on namebio a few times. It depends a lot on the quality of the domain if it works though.

@Daniel Lorentsen do you recommend it? I'm debating it with a couple names now, but they're likely mid to high xxx names only.

 

[Bima Priyo Sembodo]

Ok i dont know is it accident or luck, but i advertise several domains in namebio first is i advertise my domain in auction with start at $500 i got only 50 clicks theres no bid but in 2 weeks i got sale from afternic from domain i advertise i get profit $xxxx second is i advertise 5 domain in there and guess what,2 days before advertise end i got one pending sale even tough its not be completed sale

but i think its worth try, to do

 

[gericsb]

Targeted outbound marketing to end users. That's where the real money is (if you're not selling liquid domains). The ultimate goal being to start a bidding war between 2 or more end users who want the domain. The price will go far higher than if you were to negotiate one on one with a buyer, who doesn't see any other interested buyers.

Too many domainers get stuck in the domaining bubble. They spend all their time here on NP and reading other domaining blogs and twitter accounts. When it comes time to promote their auctions, they think those are good places to promote their auctions, but the only people there are domainers who want to pay low wholesale prices, to buy the domain and resell for a higher price.

That also goes for paying for upgraded or featured listings, that is not always helpful because most end users will not be on the auction site to begin with, as they are not domainers. You need to do the outbound marketing and bring them to the auction.

For me, NamePros is a fun place to casually buy and sell domain names, but I don't ever list any of my high end names here, as I don't want to sell it to another domain seller, I want to sell it to the end user.

How to do outbound marketing is a whole nother thing, with many different areas. It would be better to read up on it on marketing forums and other places.

I like the idea of starting an auction at site X, let's say Sedo for example.

Have a few end user companies in mind.

Once auction starts, email these end user companies about a domain name auction they might be interested in.

You could be a customer of these companies, maybe they dont even need to know it's your domain. I am not saying yo misrepresent yourself so not 100% sure aboyt this point.

Include link to the auction.

Get multiple end user eyeballs on your auction to hopefully drive competition.

Even better if respected domain name blog features your auction in a post....

Just some ideas

 

[equity78]

I like the idea of starting an auction at site X, let's say Sedo for example.

Have a few end user companies in mind.

Once auction starts, email these end user companies about a domain name auction they might be interested in.

You could be a customer of these companies, maybe they dont even need to know it's your domain. I am not saying yo misrepresent yourself so not 100% sure aboyt this point.

Include link to the auction.

Get multiple end user eyeballs on your auction to hopefully drive competition.

Even better if respected domain name blog features your auction in a post....

Just some ideas

You have to spend some time and formulate a gameplan. Having end users in mind is the right approach here.

 

[WhoaDomain.com]

I like the idea of starting an auction at site X, let's say Sedo for example.

Have a few end user companies in mind.

Once auction starts, email these end user companies about a domain name auction they might be interested in.

You could be a customer of these companies, maybe they dont even need to know it's your domain. I am not saying yo misrepresent yourself so not 100% sure aboyt this point.

Include link to the auction.

Get multiple end user eyeballs on your auction to hopefully drive competition.

Even better if respected domain name blog features your auction in a post....

Just some ideas

The problem i see with this is getting in touch with the right people in the end-user company

Me? I'd endup going to the end-users website a few filling out their "contact form" and God only knows who ends up reading it much less pass it up to the right people higher up.

I suspect such messages get screened and just get deleted.

Your assumption is its simple to just auction a domain and just shoot over an email to the enduser. Good luck getting that email go the enduser. Lol in time before your auction ends!

 

[gericsb]

The problem i see with this is getting in touch with the right people in the end-user company

Me? I'd endup going to the end-users website a few filling out their "contact form" and God only knows who ends up reading it much less pass it up to the right people higher up.

I suspect such messages get screened and just get deleted.

Your assumption is its simple to just auction a domain and just shoot over an email to the enduser. Good luck getting that email go the enduser. Lol in time before your auction ends!

Hi WhoaDomain,

You bring up a good point. You are probably better off connecting with an executive of the target company on Linked In.

And I didnt mean to make this sound easy. I expect it's not....I haven't tried it yet!

Just was brainstorming ways of getting eyeballs and generating competition on a public auction.

Obviously, first starts with a good domain name ( I don't think it has to be great to make a decent sale) that has some characteristics favorable to an end user.

What else??