Way to Find End Users to Buy Your Domain Names — An Easy
A dead simple way to find qualified end users to buy your domains.
End users, end users, end users. Everyone in the domain name industry wants to be focus on selling domains to the “end user”. This is essentially anyone other than a domain investor. But finding these elusive end users can be a challenge. Fortunately, the easiest way to find them is sitting right under your nose: people who have registered your .com domains in other TLDs.
I recently scanned my list of domains to find any .coms for which someone else registered a .net or .org following I registered the .com. To my surprise, a good number of domains I registered in just the past few years now have corresponding domains registered in other TLDs.
I decided to e-mail five of the registrants of .net domains for which I have a corresponding .com. I let them know that I registered the .com a number of years ago, which is probably why they settled for the .net. I offered to sell the domain to them for a reasonable amount. Of the five emails I sent, one has resulted in a sale and another one is under negotiation. The other three didn’t respond.
Be smart regarding who you try this with. If your domain sounds like a firm name, you might get a nasty letter back from the firm you approach (even though they have no legal standing). I’d do this only with clearly generic domains. In my case, most of the domains were geo-related.
To find out which of your domains are registered in other TLDs, use a bulk domain checker at your favorite registrar. First you’ll first have to strip the .com off all of your domains. There are plenty of tools out there to strip everything but domains out of a list, but this is a bit different. I pasted my portfolio into Excel and then did a search and replace, searching for “.com” and replacing with “”. This stripped all of the .com’s off. Then it was as simple as cutting and pasting the list into a bulk checker and checking for .net and .org domains that weren’t available.
