Earlier this month, Frank Schilling was nice enough to let me join his platform Domain Name Sales and Internet Traffic. While my portfolio is relatively small, it’s growing every day and I usually give pretty good feedback and I am thankful that they agreed to let little ole’ me be a part. And they have certainly delivered.
The results I have may not be typical but they are real. I used to be parked on Sedo. I was parked there, not because of the great parking returns, but because I felt it was my best chance to reach potential buyers for my domains. I usually received a few inquiries per month at Sedo with half of them being lowball offers. But I did received some legit offers every once in a while. After talking with other Internet Traffic guys I felt that they may actually be getting more. Not just more because they had better names, but more because of the big “Click here to inquire” button across the top.
It’s nothing fancy but it seems to work because now I am getting inquiries every few days. No, I have not sold a domain yet and yes, many of them never respond to your request for an offer, but several of them have responded and I’ve had good dialog some decent offers. Not high enough to sell, but it’s encouraging to see people interested in my domains.
The back end to the sales platform is a work in progress but its pretty nice. The person that puts in their inquiry is IP tracked and it gives you an idea of what part of the world they are coming from. There are google buttons for their name and emails for us right on the user page if we want to do a little research on the inquirer.
The initial inquiry doesn’t require them to put in a price and is a big vague for the buyer, but it does start the process. Once received, you can then send them an email that is either custom or form letter asking for an offer. From there, the dialog is pretty much like any email dialog except that everything is tracked so you can go back and manage all your past offers and responses.
Tracking the offers is nice because it keeps you consistent and avoids the different prices for different people problem. We all know that people will come back using different email addresses. The IP check also helps because you can see if two different email addresses come from the same city.
Again, while I’ve not sold a domain, I am encouraged by the activity alone. I obviously have a MUCH better chance to sell a domain when I have people inquiring. I could have sold two of the domains for $3K but I am waiting for more. I was fortunate to sell $10K in domains this month both privately and through other platforms and have the luxury of being a little more patient.
And parking? My parking sucked, I mean really sucked. With IT its up 70%. I’ve heard the first month is always much better and then starts to drop a more average level but I guess I’ll let you know if that happens. For now, I am very happy with the activity and the returns since joining the platform. It further reiterates that Frank knows what he’s doing yet is always looking to improve. If you want to do well in this industry you need to surround yourself with people doing great things and by being part of IT I think I am headed in the right direction.
Were the domains you sold this month all inbound inquiries? Do you ever outbound?
You lucky dog, Shane! I’d love to move away from Sedo to DNS. Good luck with it bud.
who is this frank schilling you speak about… and what does he want from us?
I submitted 50 names to Internet Traffic but it was rejected on the ground that it was too small for their platform.How can i get in touch with frank to accept the names just like he accepted yours.
I think Sedo is better than many parking companies, but they still are weak.
That said, I think they are the only domain selling platform you can trust, besides InternetTraffic. The rest are shamsters!!
I think you will see your income rise at Internet Traffic and then maintain its higher earnings. That’s what happened with me and it has been almost a year now with Frank.
I get some astoundingly high clicks with IT and I believe ALL, and I do mean ALL, the other parking companies have been shaving the real “home run” clicks the last three or four years.
Now they have been shown to be what they are, thieves!!!
The parking industry was rife will collusion. Why? Because there were not that many serious domain investors and not that many parking platforms. It was easy for them to compare notes and keep a particular domainer down.
I had one parking company tell me they would not compete or take another parking company’s clients. Who does that in a capitalist economy? Only those that collude.
Like Schwartz noted in his posts, these companies were dogs and were called out on it. We should never forget this!!!
@mike
funny you should say that. During the last week or so in December of 2011 my clicks were coming through much higher than normal @ like $2+ on some. This went on for a week or so. Sedo must have then figured out the messed up their payout ratio. A week after that those clicks were dropped to like a couple of cents. Scummy thing to do and I bet they hoped nobody would notice. They still make a killing at our expense. And it was well after their provider streamed the real totals so it’s on them 100%.
Someone needs to do a h2h comparison between IT and DP now.
How many domains did you submit to IT?
For my own webpages and minisites, I’ve added an “inquire about this domain name” link at the top right of my page, and built my own offer submit form that everything links to. Since last year when I started it has increased the number of inquiries I get.
Some people won’t inquire if you don’t make it easy for them.
The first the you notice is the parking companies we’re ripping us off. You see this immediately when you park your domains with internet traffic.
It is infuriating to know these parking companies are lieing thieves.
They take an extra 35% easy from what I can tell.
My portfolio was recently accepted at http://domainnamesales.com/ and I have got few serious inquiries.
While I have yet to sell a domain based on these inquiries, I am pleased with the quality of potential buyers contacting me.
Dave,
Hopefully you’ll sell a name soon
Nice Article Shane,
Care to share what names you sold, or what type they were?
IP tracking is great!
Cheers