- Part 4: Contacting The Owner
Contacting the Owner
In some cases, the domain name you want to buy may simply not be on the market. This may be due to a number of things. First and most commonly, the site is already developed in one way or another. Maybe the owner is a corporation running the website. On the other hand, it could just be someone’s hobby site. Another likely scenario is that the owner is a domain name entrepreneur like yourself and he or she has done slight development, like put ads on the website to redirect you to another site.
In any case, just because the domain name is not advertised for sale does not mean that you can’t buy it. If a company owns the site and it’s been up and running for quite some time, you might have a hard sale. They don’t want to retrain their customers to type in a new site, nor do they want to transfer their site design to a new site. Unless you have a good reason for wanting the name, it’s probably not worth it. If the site is a hobby site, you might faire better, especially if the current owner got the domain name just by registering it. If he or she isn’t generating much traffic, it doesn’t matter to the owner if they switch site names. It’s easy money! If you have a similar yet no-so-good name that you can offer in return, the owner will probably sell without much hassle, although you still might pay a bit more than if the site was already up for sale. In the third scenario, remember that you are dealing with someone who knows the ins and outs of domain names. Make an offer, but don’t look like you want the name too badly—that will only cause the owner to drive up the price.
You can find out who owns any domain name fairly easily. All you have to do is visit www.whois.com and do a search on the name you want to buy. If it’s claimed, the contact information for the owner should appear and you can go from there. Whois also provides brokerage services if you don’t want to go after your desired domain name yourself.
