"So once you make the preliminary list of prospects, then you need to qualify the list. If you use automated software, you're going to pull up a lot of Wikipedia and news articles that are related to the keywords and the domain, but obviously there's not a buyer there. So then you want to qualify the prospects."
Rob Sequin has been a domain buyer, seller, and broker for many years. He is an active domain buyer/broker and has acquired dozens of domains for entrepreneurs, investors, and publicly traded corporations. Rob proactively markets domains to qualified end users with his effective Selling to End User System. He owns a portfolio of generic technology, financial, and domains in 16 other categories and his extensive Cuba domain portfolio consists of over 2,000 Cuba related domains and 30 Cuba websites in preparation for a post-embargo, post-Castro Cuba. You can read his Havana journal and learn more about his Cuba domains at Havana.biz. His site, RobSequin.com, offers a number of useful resources to domain investors like a list of non-brand domains used by international brands in advertising campaigns, a domain valuation process, and a long list of reasons to own domains along with other interesting and helpful information. Here is Part 1 of Jeff Zbar's two part interview with Rob Sequin that originally aired live on DomainSuccess.com.
Jeff: So Rob, how about we open the floor to you and let you talk a little bit about what you're up to, your portfolio, and your approach to the marketplace.
Rob: Okay. Yeah, I can't say I'm a big player in the parking industry. A lot of my business is selling my own domains or selling domains for clients as a domain buyer/broker. So I guess from where I sit it was a pretty quiet summer. I think it usually is that way and maybe more so this year plus I was off flying more this summer. But the first six months of the year were very active for me. I had several good domain sales on my own. I was able to broker a deal with H&R Block for a client. We sold them a small portfolio of tax related domains, so that was a good sale to a corporate end user, and everybody was happy with that. So if you want me to talk about selling to end users, I can go more into that because that's something I do very regularly.
Jeff: I think that's part of what we're looking at because we're looking at, for example, what's your take on one of the questions that we're exploring here is selling domains for the most money and the least amount of time, what's hot and what's not. So Rob, maybe talk a little more about how do you sell the most for the most money, or as best you can without sounding grandiose about it, and do it in short order?
Rob: Well, I guess I'll just talk about my Selling to End Users process, and I see you have my site up there. In the top left corner of RobSequin.com, there's a link that says "Selling to End Users." And there I've outlined my process for, first of all, finding qualified end users. There are some tools that I use that are proprietary that help me harvest prospects from the search engines, but it could certainly be done manually by typing in certain keywords into the three search engines and making a list of say the top 30 or 40 search engine results. And then when you're looking for websites that show up in the search engine results for say, two, three, four keywords for the target domain that you want to sell, then also of course you look at the advertisers who pay to be on those keywords. I usually make a separate list of those because they're actually putting their money to advertise on that keyword, so they would maybe be a more qualified prospect for purchasing a domain.
So once you make the preliminary list of prospects, then you need to qualify the list. If you use automated software, you're going to pull up a lot of Wikipedia and news articles that are related to the keywords and the domain, but obviously there's not a buyer there. So then you want to qualify the prospects. Then once you qualify the prospects, then it's a pretty manual task of literally visiting each website and making sure that the website appears to be a good candidate as a buyer for the domain that you want to sell, and then you look through the website, look for some contact information. If it's a medium sized corporation to a larger corporation, you want to look into the management area. If they're large enough and they have press releases, you'll want to read the press releases and come up to speed on that business a little bit. Spend , 10, 15 minutes on the site and get to know the management and maybe the technology they're working on or the products that they're selling. Make sure that it's relevant to the domain you're trying to sell.
Then take down some of the e-mail addresses and phone numbers. You can guess the e-mail naming protocol. It sounds a little spammy, but one thing I'll do is if I'm looking through a press release of a large corporation and the press release writer or media person is firstname.lastname@company.com, well you can try if you get the CEO's name or the VP of Marketing or VP Sales, Business Development, those are the types of contacts you'd want to put this opportunity in front of, you might be able to try them at firstname.lastname@company.com. One thing I always do is send one e-mail at a time. You never want to blast it out. I do have a template, a draft of the text of the e-mail that I'll put out to each person, but you always want to customize it as much as possible. Put the person's name on it, send them just one e-mail. And you might write a different e-mail, at least in the introduction first sentence or two, the media contact might be one you might say, "I have this domain for sale. Do you have a contact in the company that might be interested in talking with me about it?" The CEO would be a different pitch, and so on. And so then you just repeat that process, and it's up to you if you put the price in the e-mail or not. You can make an argument either way whether you should put the price in or not.
Generally speaking I find that to be a pretty productive way to get the name out there. If you don't want to just sell the name, you can use the same process to put this out that you're looking for advertisers if you have a website that's developed or even if it's a mini-site with DevHub has a directory listing and they even give you the opportunity to offer premium placement at the top of the domain. Then you can go through the same process and then put the opportunity out more into the advertising department of the corporation rather than going to the CEO and offering them an advertising placement opportunity on your website or even on your mini-site, and you might be able to get some direct advertisers through this same process. And then of course that could lead to a sale somewhere down the road if they're happy with the results, and this way you build a relationship with them. That's something that I've been pretty successful at with my own domains and with a number of client domains.
It's easier to sell domains, I would say, that are priced $5,000 and less, $2,000 and less to small and medium sized businesses. It's easier to get to the senior level decision makers. A mom-and-pop business is just that. You have one or two decision makers, and there's also less of a screen there so it's easier to contact people in small and medium sized businesses. If you have a category filler domain that's $50,000 or $100,000 and you're going to try drilling into publicly traded corporations, that's a lot more work. That's when you really have to get into guessing the e-mail naming protocols of senior level decision makers and also work the phone. You really have to call your way in and try and get through the gate keepers. But even after that, you're going to be leaving messages for people who pretty much never call you back. So I've been pretty successful proactively marketing $5,000 and under domains for sale, which I would think would be the majority of a domain owner's portfolio price range.
Jeff: Well, let's tap your stream of expertise there and ask this. I have a portfolio. The sale of expensive names seems to be going through the roof, and I may have a portfolio that has a variety of different names in there. How do I assess the value? Earlier it was mentioned, for example, that mom-and-pops may want to buy a $2,000 to $5,000 name or name that we would attach that value to versus a name that may be $50,000 or $100,000 or more. How do I assess and attach a value, whether it's a name or an entire portfolio?
Rob: Well, that's always a question someone would like to have answered. I don't think there's any silver bullet that really would be able to answer it, because for me, and Mike would have a different answer, because people can pay X times annual revenue and people can agree on what annual revenue is. So maybe he can address that. But as far as my purchases and sales, it's more just on keywords I guess.
As far as valuation, I was going to say that EstiBot I think has gotten better at giving people a rough idea of what domains are worth. I use them pretty regularly, and I either acquire a domain or look at some hand registrations and I put them in there and the return of value is the reg fee. I was hoping it would be more than that, but I think that they're pretty right on within say 10%, 20%. On most of the searches I find that they're right on. If I'm looking at a domain that's worth $5,000, whether I'm buying it or selling it, they might come back at $3,000 or $7,000. So I think EstiBot has a good automated system. But really when you're coming down to selling domains, the emotion and the motivation of each party really matters. People call me all the time and they say, "I have this domain and I want to sell it. What do you think it's worth?" And it's always tough to answer that because it's like, "How big is the industry that this domain is representing? How valuable is that industry? Is it bird houses or cosmetic surgery?" That comes into play. The number of times the keywords in the domain are searched, so I use the Google AdWords tool to make a pass through that, see how popular the keywords are. And then the pay-per-click rates on certain keywords.
So I don't think I have any scientific way to evaluate domains. It's just a little of everything -- some experience, some EstiBot, and some of the things I just said, and then you have to figure the emotion of the buyer, the seller. As you mentioned in my introduction, I have a lot of Cuba domains. Well, the current value of most Cuba domains is very low. There's very low traffic for most Cuba domains. There's hardly any advertisers from America anyway because Americans can't travel to Cuba. We can't buy Cuban cigars or anything like that. So the current value of Cuba domains is very low. So as a buyer, I don't want to overpay for the current value. However, I think the future value of a Cuba domain and even hand registered domains, if someone's going to hand register a domain today, it's not going to be worth $5,000 tomorrow. It might be worth $5,000 in five years if they're on the cutting edge of a technology and they realize the trends early on and they hand register it while the current value is low but the future value may be high. That certainly doesn't apply to all hand registrations. There's plenty of crap out there, and some people would probably say that about Cuba too. But my thinking on that is that when the embargo is gone and when Castro is dead, then I think the future value of Cuba domains is very high. So that's another thing to consider when you evaluate Cuba domains. It's some of the pay-per-click, it's some of the popularity of the keywords, it's the size of the industry, the type of the industry, and then whether it has enormous upside future value. I think that's the long answer. I don't think I can give you a short answer to valuation.
No comments:
Post a Comment