The site utilizes WordPress for easy updating, and is upgraded to the latest release. I’ve written original articles for the website over the last several months, and I’ve done a good job of optimizing the articles for the search engines. And of course, “Venezuela Report” is an extremely common keyword combination, with governments, NGOs and corporate intelligence organizations all over the world constantly writing reports on Venezuela. As a result, the site is generating steady traffic on the order of between 20 and 100 visitors per day, without the need for paid advertising. The website has already attracted a small following and a fair number of inbound links. It’s a very good buy at this price, and an excellent long-term investment.

If you are interested, please contact me through this website’s Contact Form. Thank you.

Update 8-26-2011:  VenezuelaReport is ranking quite well on Google for a variety of relevant search terms. For example, do a Google search for “life in Venezuela” and see what comes up. Consequently traffic to VenezuelaReport has increased to more than 250 visitors per day, so my price is going up as well, to $4,500. I’m also going to be experimenting with ad placements to increase CTR, using some techniques that I’ve recently been experimenting with. I think the website will be turning a nice profit soon. The sale price on this one is only going to go up, so if you are interested then act now.

A few months ago I was browsing some of the domains coming up for auction at NameJet and I had the idea to see what sorts of common people’s names – I mean the names are common, not the people – might be dropping. I looked at several names and ran Google searches on them, studied the results, and considered their search popularity.

I ended up back ordering a handful of names, and won several at the minimum bid of $69 each. These included AprilWilliams.com, LauraVega.com, and MattGreene.com. I thought I might contact some of the people with those names and try to sell them the domains. As it turned out I got busy with other things, but only a few months later I received an offer for AprilWilliams.com through Sedo, and sold it for $500.

If you’ve been trying to acquire generic domains at auction and getting outbid, you might try some real “names”. If they’re common enough there’s sure to be a market and a steady trickle of traffic, and at the moment there’s not a lot of competition for these domains.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

- Thomas Edison

Having a hard time with this domain name business? Or for that matter, with any other challenge you’re facing in life? Have you been working at it for a long time and starting to feel like you’re not going to get there?

Don’t give up, evolve. Learn from your mistakes.

Here are five pieces of advice that will almost guarantee success. It took me two years to learn how crucial these points are, so pay attention:

1. Sell. As a domainer, focus more on the sell side and develop selling strategies that work.
2. Buy Revenue-Earning Domains. Only buy domains with the proceeds of your sales, not on credit or with your savings. Use the money from your sales to buy revenue-earning domain names. Ask the seller for proof of earnings and analyze the stats and the domain carefully. Is the traffic steady or declining? What is the source of the traffic? Is it easy to monetize? Is the domain easy to remember, pronounceable, and descriptive? Consider all these points and make sure the domain name will be profitable for you within a reasonable period of time before you agree to buy.
3. Buy Underpriced Domains. Look for deals where the seller is either desperate or is undervaluing the domain name out of ignorance. If the industry standard is to pay one year to ten years revenue depending on the quality of the domain, try to find someone who’s selling for 10 months to 2 years revenue. Make lowball offers and bargain hard; you’ve got nothing to lose.
4. Monetize Your Traffic. If a domain name is getting traffic but no clicks, look for alternative ways to monetize it, such as changing parking services, altering the keywords, developing a website, or redirecting the traffic to an existing website or affiliate link.
5. Dump or Sell the Losers. If a domain name is getting no traffic, dump it. Sell it for whatever you can get, unless you are convinced it has re-sale potential, in which case, return to point # 1.

Remember the coyote in the old road runner cartoons? In every cartoon he’d try some new ACME device or trap to catch the road runner, and each time he’d fail abysmally. Like maybe he’d try a rocket-powered harpoon, but he’d point it the wrong way and shoot himself instead of the road runner. Whereupon he would ditch that idea and try something else.

Even as a kid I remember being frustrated and thinking, “Why not just try the harpoon again, but this time point it the right way?” By the time I was ten I could not watch the road runner cartoon anymore because I was so annoyed at the coyote’s inability to learn from his mistakes.

Maybe I was a weirdo kid and missed the point of the cartoon, I don’t know.

Look, I know this is a cliche, but the night is darkest just before th dawn. The moment when something is the most difficult is often the moment before a breakthrough. Don’t abandon your dream, just refine your strategies, learn, adapt.

In my previous post I mentioned Sedo’s ongoing premium dot Mobi auction and suggested two of my own domain names, installer.mobi and updater.mobi, that were included in the auction. I’m not quite satisfied with the results of the auction, but I can live with it.

Updater.mobi went for $100, and installer.mobi for $320. Personally I thought installer.mobi should have brought more as it has many possible uses and the keywords around it are quite pricey.

But it’s entirely my fault as I did not get serious about promoting it until the last two days of the auction. In fact I only emailed one or two businesses who might have been interested. And the worst part is that I know better. I know that it’s best to list potential buyers before the auction even starts, then contact them in earnest once it gets underway. I was just busy with other things. The offline world intrudes.

I have 25 other good dot Mobis – some quite good, I think – and I’ll take the auction much more seriously next time. Overall it’s encouraging to see that the dot Mobi market is heating up. Perhaps my DigitalVideos.mobi, JobAds.mobi or OnlineBrokers.mobi will be worth some big bucks after all.

A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology analyzed the tactics people use when negotiating, and how well buyers and sellers feel that they negotiated once the deal is done. The study contains some interesting lessons for domain name professionals and anyone else who deals with products with negotiable prices. It turns out that most people don’t bargain very well, and don’t get the best possible price, whether they are buying or selling.

Many People Don’t Bargain Well

The study was carried out by professors Richard Larrick of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and George Wu of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. By talking to buyers and sellers – including professionals with MBAs – about how much they would have been willing to either pay or reduce a price, the professors found that the people in the study generally captured only about 50% of what was available. So buyers only captured 50% of the possible discount, and sellers only obtained 50% of the price increase that the buyer was prepared to accept.

The funny thing is that both buyers and sellers felt that they had done quite well, pushing the opposite party to the limit. Why does this happen?

Self-Fulfilling Estimates

Professor Larrick says:

“The problem is that we rarely learn the truth about how far we could have pushed the price in a negotiation. We talk about the fact that if you’re a buyer and are too optimistic about how low you can push a seller, you’ll figure out that your ‘ambitious’ estimate was wrong. But if you incorrectly believe you won’t be able to push the seller much at all, you begin the negotiation too modestly and give away too much, too easily. Your modest estimate becomes self-fulfilling through your modest actions. It’s this lack of feedback on the truth that really traps people into thinking that they have always pushed the price close to their opponent’s limit.”

To put it in domaining terms, suppose I want to sell UOLV.com, and suppose I am hoping to get $5,000, but would settle for $4,000. I might set a price of $8,000. The buyer comes at me with an offer of $4K, I counter with $6K, and we settle at $5K. I come out of it feeling good because I got my price target, and the buyer is happy because he got the domain for $3K below the asking price. Since we don’t talk to each other afterwards and say, “How much would you really have settled for?” we both believe that we bargained well, when in reality I would have sold for as little as $4K, and maybe the buyer would have paid as much as $7K if I had pushed.

So my $5K price target became a self-fulfilling reality, and I’ll never know that I could have gotten more.

Street Market Negotiating Skills

The professors say that people who come from countries where street markets are common and haggling is standard practice do better in these kinds of negotiations. They are able to recognize the following kinds of statements as bluffs or negotiating tactics:

Buyer: “I absolutely can’t go any higher.”

Seller: “This is barely above my wholesale cost.”

Buyer: “My boss won’t approve the deal if I go higher.”

Seller: “I’ll be losing money if I go any lower.”

Buyer: “Take it or leave it.”

Seller: “This price is firm, non-negotiable.”

Once when I was fifteen years old I was at a sprawling street bazaar in Saudi Arabia, looking for a watch. I had grown up in the United States and knew very little about negotiating. I found a Casio that I really liked. The seller, a wizened Yemeni fellow, gave me the price. I responded with an offer about 30% below his asking price. The seller suddenly became angry. “Are you trying to take food out of my children’s mouths?” he said loudly. “Are you trying to ruin me?” Shocked, I apologized and walked away.

Now, looking back, I recognize that his behavior was nothing but a particularly dramatic negotiating technique. Every culture bargains in their own way. I live in Panama now. People haggle here as well, but the style is more apologetic than accusatory. I’ve learned to ignore the bluffs that are commonly thrown up. Of course it also helps that I’ve been here long enough that I am familiar with the normal price range.

On the other hand, long negotiations have a downside: they take time, which for some people affects the opportunity cost of the deal. A big-time domainer with 100,000 domains earning millions of dollars a year may not want to spend three days bargaining over a $5K domain name. His time is worth more than that. A speedy deal and a little less aggravation may be worth another $500 to you on a given deal. That’s a choice you have to make.

Three Important Price-Setting and Negotiating Tactics When Selling a Domain Name

1. Pricing: The professors came up with a specific conclusion about the best way to price something for sale and get the best price possible. Professor Larrick says, “For us, the key is to get an accurate picture of the range of prices, target the favorable end of the range, and then be a little more aggressive than that in setting your opening offer. It’s only by doing this that one avoids the ‘self-fulfilling’ cycle…”

2. Countering Bluffs: I would add that you should learn to recognize and counter the most common bluffs that buyers use. If a buyer says, “I can’t go any higher,” don’t give in, and don’t call him a liar either. Instead counter with a reasoned argument like, “I understand what you’re saying, but this domain name will ultimately save you money by bringing you targeted leads. The extra money is worth it.”

3. Small Increments: To get the best possible deal, move away from your initial offer in small increments. So if I’m selling a domain for $5,000 and the buyer offers $2,000, rather than counter with $4,000 I might come down just $200, to $4,800. This causes the buyer to move upward towards my end of the price spectrum, rather than me moving downward to his end. Of course it also results in a longer negotiation.

Know the market, learn as much as you can about your buyer, and bargain hard.

I’ve never tried selling a domain name on eBay because I’ve heard from other domain professionals that you can’t get a good price there. Furthermore, listing fees can eat up your profits if the domain sells for a low price, or if you have to list it more than once. Most domainers advise sticking to traditional industry auction/aftermarket sales sites, like Sedo.com, Afternic.com and GreatDomains.com.

Recently, however, I’ve been following a few forum threads in which experienced domainers insist that they have made some very large and profitable domain sales on eBay.

They claim that a number of well-moneyed domain buyers shop on eBay, and furthermore it’s an excellent place to find end-users who are often willing to pay a premium for the right domain.

So I’ve decided to run an experiment of my own, by selling one of my domains on eBay. I plan to sell Touch-Up.com. This domain is parked at DomainSponsor.com and is a minor earner in my portfolio, earning slightly over its annual registration fee. However, I think Touch-Up.com has inherent appeal for five industries in particular:

1. Plastic surgery
2. Makeup
3. Skin treatment products
4. Photo editing software

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to reach end users in these industries and attract them to the eBay auction. My primary target is plastic surgeons, because there’s a lot of money there, it’s currently a red hot industry, and the domain just seems to fit.

I’ve come up with an action plan of points to be implemented before posting the eBay ad:

1. Surf the web and put together a list of end users who might be interested, including email and telephone contacts for each potential buyer. I want to create a list of at least 50 potential end users.
2. Compose my pitch to these companies, both in writing and verbally.
3. Survey current domain name auctions on eBay. Look for the ones that are attracting the most bids and the highest prices. Study their ad headings and ad format style in order to learn what sort of ad is most appealing to buyers.
4. Compose my own ad in HTML using an HTML editor (in my case, Adobe GoLive).
5. Create a logo for the domain, as I have heard that this can increase the domain’s appeal.
   

I hope to complete these steps in the next few days and begin the auction by Friday.

If you have experience successfully selling domains on eBay, I would love to hear about it. Do you have any advice for me? Any other preparatory steps I should take?