Here’s a proven formula, and when I say “proven”, I mean I related this exact concept to a friend back in 2001, and that person, a good friend of mine for many years, followed through. Millions later, to say that he is a highly successful domainer/investor today would be a complete understatement. I also have done this myself as at times certain domains I inquired about were priced too high. Why “skip” if you can turn these inquiries to real dollars, hundreds of thousands of them?
Before we continue, a little background about who we are targeting here: domain investors. Investors have one main problem they can never solve. That problem is time. They can never have enough time on their hand to find all the best deals out there. In addition, the second part to remember is all active investors, especially the good investors, have preferences. they understand there’s money in anything and everything but the more they know about an industry or a segment within an industry, the more comfortable they feel making deals. Focus means the world to them.
So taking these two ingredients, time and expertise, what a beginner investor could do is identify potential investors, relate to them he is looking to help them out finding deals, discuss their preferences, negotiate a commission, and go hunt for deals for them.
How does it all come together?
1. Identify potential investors - Quite easy. Log on to DNJournal.com weekly sales report data and see who are the active buyers. It is easy to find those who spend, either through the WHOIS or through the “Contact Us” on a given domain.
2. Relate your intentions - Introduce yourself, get to know each other, create comfort, relate your intentions (finding deals for them)
3. Preferences - During discussion, find out their preferences, simply by asking what kind of domains or deals they are looking for.
4. Negotiate commission - The investor has nothing to lose as you are not getting paid until you found a deal he likes. Basically, no risk and negotiating an agreed commission of 10%-20% should not be a problem.
5. Go hunting - The beauty of this is as you find deals and relate to your investor, and he/they decline them, ask “why”. This is most important as you want to understand how they think, what makes a deal a good deal. This is the most important part as it is knowledge that creates wealth, not money.
(One of the quotes that irritates me more then anything is “It takes money to make money”. It really isn’t true and it is one of the most limited beliefs in the world which I believe holds hundreds of millions of people back from making their dream life come true.)
As you save few dollars from commissions you will be able to pick and choose what to pass to investors and what to keep. You will be able to create momentum.
Important point to remember - You can either work for one exclusive investor or have a group of potential investors. I personally like the idea of a group better but It can work either way.
Side bonus: This formula isn’t just for domains but is about making it in the world without funding. You can go to a shoe store and offer the store owner to buy inventory for him, and it will work exactly the same.
Looking forward to hearing your success stories!
Cheers
Sahar
damn, this is a great idea. i wish i had a guy looking for deals for me.
This post is really funy, because this is one of the main reasons we launched our premium domain certification and domain valuation service:
Locate the finest premium domains that can potentially be for sale.
It’s a hard and expensive task because the usual behavior of dmain owners is sell the worst and keep the best.
What we do is the better ones are directly proposed to big domain investors and offers are imediately done to sellers.
For premium of lowest quality for investors we simply have a marketplace where they can be listed for sale
Now to respond to the thread question, an idea:
Buy an available domain name into a niche where people are advertising, create content, exhange links, … do a good SEO work. After a pair of years when your site is acheiving top SE ranks for these keywords advertisers are bidding, contact them. You are sure to sell your name fast and make a very good plus value.
The first site we sold like this was a very ugly, long and hyphaneted domain that we sold 100K simply because the name was top ranked for the main keyword of the buyer in Yahoo.
CONDITION: SEO knowledge, work and patience.
A different path:
Monitor the news and as soon you notice something new that may have a high impact grab the name, it should be available if you are fast.
For example, recently Bush said that loans will be insured by FHA.
(it’s crazy all the new names that were registered just after the anouncement, mixing the keywords: insured, secured, securde, loan, fha, mortgage, …)
Minutes after grab a few ones I already got purchase offers…
…
—-ANSWER—-
Fully agree on trend monitoring. The first idea though is not my cup of team, although I’m sure it will work for some.
Sir,
It really sound so nice being in the domain business with no fund but am getting it difficult bcos I dont have any domain for now and I wish to get the potential investor who needs of my service
Regards
S.Oladayo
I am starting in this area and haven’t a clue how SEO works. What are the best ideas for SEO for my boating industry?