- Part 3: Marketing & Advertising Your Name
Marketing and Advertising your Name
Even if you don’t develop your website at all, you still have to market it in order to sell it. It’s like trying to sell your house. It is very rare that someone will just drive by your house and say “Hmm, that looks like a nice place to live. I’d like to buy it.” That only happens with the very best houses (and domain names) or when a person specifically wants the house (or domain name) for some reason. In most cases, you have to put your house up for sale and advertise in order to attract buyers!
The first approach to marketing your domain name is the easiest, although you may not be able to immediately find a buyer. With this easy approach, first show that your domain name is for sale by indicating this on your whois report—log in and after you contact information simply type “This name for sale” or “Contact me to purchase” or something similar. If you have an amazing domain name, like www.Cars.com, that might be enough to pull in buyers. In fact, you might already be receiving offers without ever listing it as for sale. However, in most cases, you should put your name in an auction at the very least. Ebay is a great place for this.
You’ll make more money, however, if you’re willing to put more time into marking your domain name. Advertise the name to draw in traffic using the aforementioned efforts. Sign up for lots of affiliate programs. Give your domain name a real presence on the Internet. Then, put it up for sale. You can send out press release, advertise the sale on auction sites, talk it up in chat rooms and forums, and send notices to domain name buyers and final users who may be interested in the site. You can facilitate a private sale if you get a good offer or put the sit up for auction to let the buyers battle it out amongst themselves.
The bottom line is that when you market your domain name, you are telling people that it is worth something. If your domain name isn’t valuable to you, why would anyone believe it could be valuable for them?
Looking for Final Users
When it is all said and done, domain names will sometimes just surprise you. You name is only worth what someone will pay for it, remember. It takes luck to some degree to sell a name for the optimal price, especially if the name isn’t that great to begin with.
However, for the best value, look for final users, also called end users. Domain name entrepreneurs like yourself will pay for a domain name they find promising, but they’ll be looking at the name in respect to how they can resell it. In other words, when you’re buying to another domain name entrepreneur, he or she is banking on the fact that it can be resold for a higher price. The person who will pay the highest price is the final user.
A final user is the person who will develop the domain name into a website and use it to promote a service, advertise, sell items, join affiliate programs, redirect traffic, or provide information. The final user is not looking to resell the website, so he or she will pay top dollar for the domain name. When you get your domain name appraised, the value you are given is what a final user will probably be willing to pay—if you sell it to another domain name entrepreneur, the price will have to be much lower. Try to be the middleman for the final user instead of one of the middlemen in a long chain of middlemen until it reaches that last owner.
