Selling a Domain Name
59While registration companies are the first ones that people turn to when getting a domain name, you can also sell yours directly to buyers, without having the domain name registration lapse. Say, if you owned yahoo.com, you can probably sell the domain name to someone who owns a gazillion dollars.
Selling a domain name can be easy or hard, depending on the value of your domain name. Domain name golds like yahoo.com, google.com, or maybe travel.com and jobs.com will sell easily and at a hefty price. These are obviously valuable domain names that can be developed towards its target market. Selling a domain name like these will be like a walk in the park. However, it may be a bit more difficult for names such as kindalikegoogle.com or yahoowannabe.com.
The domain name resale market is not that strong of late. A main factor here is the burst of the dot-com bubble. At the same time, the consistent addition of top-level domain names, you can always just get your preferred domain name under a different and new domain name extension. There might be no need to buy a domain name from a reseller for an exorbitant price.
If you are really intent on selling a domain name, get an assessment of your domain’s value first. Case in point, travel.com might bring in enough money for you to travel the whole world and back. Mytravel.com might bring in less, maybe enough for a tour of Mexico. Mytravelnow.com is, well, questionable, in terms of how much it’s worth in the market.
There are third party sites that can help you assess the value of the domain name. Else, you can probably gauge value by noting how many responds to your “selling a domain name” ad. Other than this, you may have gotten unsolicited offers for your domain name. This is good as you have some sort of idea how much the domain is worth. Whatever the case, it is important to get a sense of your item’s value. If you’re best just getting $50 for your domain, then so be it.
If you intend on selling a domain name, make sure that your Whois information is up-to-date and public. There might be those who chance upon your domain name during a search and take interest.
Other than that, you can try to up the value and visibility of your domain too by developing and marketing its website. Think of it as “google-izing” your site. Google.com would be a worthless piece of domain name at face value because Google was not a real word – that is, until it was used to pertain to the best search engine on the web. Develop your website’s content and increase its audience. If you can, make it a household name. This will definitely increase your domain name’s value.
You can try to find a buyer yourself. You can post online ads, and hang the “for sale” sign on your homepage. Or, you can use a third party domain name broker. For domain name brokers’ you’ll have to pay a portion of your revenue from selling a domain name for their services.
