Selling Your Domain. To Auction or Not to Auction?

Looking to capitalize your domain names fast? Putting your domain up for auction may be just the ticket for sales with a side benefit of promotion.

The first ticket to ride is Ebay auctions. I have seen no proof that these provide a lot of big sales but they will garner sales for low priced domains. One thing to remember, a listing on Ebay will get search engine placement for your terms. I have used this technique to place million dollar domains up for attention and search returns. The unexpected result was a huge up-tick in parking revenues that offset the Ebay auction costs and returned better than any Google Adsense advertising would.

Finding ways to match domains to sellers has become a big business and many big name companies are working hard to facilitate – for an ever-increasing price. Investor funded efforts like Sedo and Afternic have dominated the domain sales market for years but are costly and recently doubled their fees. Individual and personal efforts have always been the most lucrative for sellers and the best deal for buyers. The way the business works no doors are closed so there is nothing better than looking at new avenues to market your domains.

Recently these big name houses have started to add online and live auctions to the mix. These auctions have provided increasing sales and are bringing more attention to the domain name market. All positive business as far as that goes. But what does it take to make these auctions?

Some of the big multi-million dollar auctions recently provide lists of names for auction and the promotion and activity seem to revolve around specific owners and in house domains. As the big houses now provide “better” service for “larger” fees one can assume that business model works all the way down the line of services.

How can you level the field or at least put your foot in the pie as a buyer or seller of domains?

Take the jump and get on as many auction sites as you can. Pay particular attention to free auction sites. Why? Free auction sites are most likely run by other domain owners and built out to promote the domains as much as gather attention for sales. Here is an environment where open floor auction is there for every search engine, buyer and seller free. It is free advertising with a possibility of sales and that cannot be beat.

One such site is http://www.winyourdomain.com/ run by the Win Your Dot Com people. This site is completely free. Listings, purchase and sales go without any cost to the buyer or seller. Support for the site comes from additional highlighting, feature listings, or just pure support donations to help get more advertising for the site. Win Your Domain is geared to the individual domain name holders to allow direct sales between buyers and sellers without the need for high priced fees. Once the sale is agreed the people can choose anyone to do escrow or continue to just do business as normal.

Putting your name up for auction is a good idea and you should add these suggestions to your domain-marketing regime.

Story by: Randy Penn