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In the past I’ve typically always been a hoarder of domains rather than a seller and I thought that it was about time that I went through my portfolio of brandable domains and prepared some of them for sale.
 The first thing that I wrestled with was the whole concept of what does it mean to “prepare a domain for sale”. I scratched my head and sat down to do some thinking about how does a domainer sell domains to both the domaining and end user markets?
What I first did was put together a site with all of my domains that I had for sale and placed them under the flagship domain bingonight.co.uk. Since I’m familiar with development I used Joomla and customised a database plugin called Sobi2 to hold all of the domains and allow potential buyers to place offers on the domains.
The first thing that I did was price the domains to sell. Bingo is a massive industry in the UK with literally hundreds of online Bingo businesses and many times that number offline. There are over 3-4 million Bingo players in the UK and in recent times there has been a demographic shift away from the traditional older generation to younger more affluent players. In 2008 the UK online Bingo industry has a gross revenue of just over $US1.38 billion and this was achieved in just over 5 years! This was all good news for me with my premium quality Bingo domains!
My plan was to allow potential buyers to immediately purchase a domain via a “Buy It Now” campaign which would run until the end of October followed by an online auction until the end of November where the highest bidder would be awarded the domain if it met a reserve. This is completely virgin territory for me and it may not succeed but there is one thing for sure I’ll be giving it my best shot.
So after building the site I began researching who all of the Bingo companies that would potentially purchase my domains. I then drafted an introductory email, sent it off and then waited for replies. I also planned to keep an eye on my Google Analytics data to see if any of the potential targets came to bingonight.co.uk.
The next stage was to call these companies and also seed all of the Bingo “news” outlets with information on the domain sale. I really think that it’s a case of I don’t know what will work but throw enough mud at a wall and hopefully some will stick.
In terms of the domainer community I think that the majority of domain owners are from the USA and on the whole they tend to invest in .com domains. I’m not really sure why but they tend to leave the very lucrative ccTLDs to domainers from the rest of the world. There is a thriving domain community in the UK and I’ve listed the sale on the various forums.
So what’s next? I think that I’ll be making phone calls, monitoring results, making more phone calls and then adjusting the pitch and in the meantime spreading the word across through the UK Bingo community. It’s a big experiment and one that I’ll be fascinated to see the results from. In the meantime feel free to make any offers on the domains at bingonight.co.uk!
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