Use a “Domain for Sale” Landing Page

One of the reasons I like to use Parked.com for almost all of my undeveloped domain names is that I can have a nice “domain for sale” message at the top of the page. On BoracayHotels.com alone, I’ve received 4 offers in the last 3 weeks, and for that reason alone, having the link is beneficial.

On some of my domain names that make very little revenue but receive traffic, I have been thinking about not parking them, and instead, I would put a domain for sale landing page. This would require hosting, but if you get an inexpensive VPS that costs under $50 a month, you can host all of your domain names you want to sell. Heck, you can probably get even cheaper hosting on a per domain basis at some hosting companies. Some registrars like Go Daddy offer a free hosting option, but you will have a hosting company banner on the site.

I was checking out ThemeForest yesterday, and I found a few landing page templates you may consider using (affiliate links affiliate links have been removed):

I believe the key elements on a good landing page are the domain name, a contact form or your phone number, perhaps some sales points, and possibly the price (I don’t like listing a price). People who don’t know about the Whois database (many end users) may search to see if a domain name is available simply by visiting it. Ā If you make it clear that your domain name is available, you may receive additional inquiries.

Using a landing page template may help you close more deals than you’re currently closing. It’s a bit of a process to set up, but once you get going it’s fairly easy. You may forego some revenue, but it’s a short term cost for hopefully a greater gain.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

36 COMMENTS

  1. Good article.

    Always a trade off to park or just have a sales page.

    You have to ask yourself:

    What is my business model, revenue from parking or from sales?

    If most of your revenue is from sales, point your domain to your domain for sale page at Afternic. This way if/when someone types in the domain, they land on the for sale page.

    You need A LOT of clicks on ads to equal the sale price.

  2. Parking is just an absolute waste of time and at best a short term solution. The templates you pointed out are good, but I think getting a designer to build a custom template is a better solution especially if you have a lot of domains.

    The licencing for the ThemeForest templates is average $5.00 a pop, if you multiply that times 50, you can get a designer to custom build one for you at that price. There is the initial expense, but after that it’s just cookie cutter stuff and you can customize it as you see fit.

    I think Mike Mann’s pages are a good model. The domain is very prominently displayed as is the company name, information, contact, etc,. And he has what appear to be Google ads on the bottom that do not detract from the name, yet offer the potential for a little revenue.

    Sample:http://www.mozzarellacheese.com/

  3. Why would you get VPS hosting for $50/month when you can get a cheap hosting package with unlimited add-on domains?

    I may be going about it the wrong way, but that’s what I do with my 3 or 4 domains.

  4. @AB – you are correct. I use 1and1 and host over 10 domains with them.

    All my mini sites, larger projects and domains for sale.

    Haven’t had any major issues.

  5. I have always believed that putting a little content, a few ads and a for sale message with an email address goes a very far way. It also increases the value of the domain overtime as it gets search engine traffic, revenue and it gets indexed. These are all things which you can consider when deciding on a sales price. You can check out http://www.ceremoniously.com for an example of what i’m talking about. I just added that one this week.

  6. You can create a simple for-sale graphic with email address, forward the domain to it with masking, then use an autoresponder (on the given email) that delivers an instant message/pitch.

    I used for sale landers with webforms for a while, then started experimenting with this “ultra low tech” method.

    Raw inquiries (read: pointless time wasters) were down significantly, but sales were up. More importantly, sale prices and initial offers were up big. The autoresponse prepared buyers for the price ranges involved. It seems to work very well.

    Something about the difference between inquiring via a webform and actually making the effort to type the address into an email weeds out a lot of the bullshit inquiries. Use different emails for whois and the lander, so you know where they’re coming from.

  7. I think the only question that lies unresolved between a parking page and a template, is if a particular domain is going to get trafficked as much without the content that a parked page has.

    I think any sales are going to come from direct navigation, someone looking for that particular domain and not just because they happened to stumble upon it. So considering most don’t make squat from parked pages, having a template seems to outweigh in favor of having a domain parked.

  8. Hi Elliot:

    Great post.

    Just curious, do you know for sure if the 4 offers you received were directly credited to the new landing page?

    Thanks.

  9. I sold a geo dot co with this method recently. Also, since I hate dealing with sales negotiations on some domains, I use a parked.com page and tell the visitor the domain is available at Godaddy where I have a premium listing.

  10. I’ve been making my own landing pages for a while, they translate to ten times more sales than other methods. Instead of waiting for someone to find your “Domain for sale”in the whois info, I make it the focus on the site.

    Something new I started trying is pricing the names and adding a “Secure This Domain” button with a short explanation of the value of the name.

    Not only does the domain get indexed, but it gets traffic and people buyers don’t have to wonder how much you want for it.

    I saw relative success with graphic only landing pages, great indexing results though!

  11. I saw relative success with graphic only landing pages, great indexing results though!

    WTF is up with that?
    I’m experiencing the *exact* same thing and for the life of me, cannot figure it out.

    Pages with a stupid masked redirect graphic only lander index decent, for whatever keyword is in the domain and in the title. Totally counter intuitive, since G reads them as being ZERO on page content.

  12. Well I’m adding a detailed META description, so there is some content on the page. It’s probably because the landers with content are somewhat duplicated So you’re getting penalized for having copied descriptions or something.

  13. Good articles but why pay for hosting.. DomainPower has a for sale framework you can use for free and it posts into the domaindirectory for management. We launched it once, took it down to revamp it but has both a strickly for sale page or a blended for sale/ppc. If interested, ping me up and we can get you set up for free on a solution that will help you position it better both in terms of seo and in terms of sale roi.. have a great weekend everyone..c

  14. That’s an interesting topic.

    But if to go further, how do you think, is this practice applicable to developed domains that the owner wishes to sell at the same time? E.g., does it have sense to add “domain and website are for sale” banner at the top of some developed sites with decent traffic that are making revenue through affiliate sales? Will it have the noticeable negative impact on common visitor’s trust and conversion as a result?

  15. “On BoracayHotels.com alone, Iā€™ve received 4 offers in the last 3 weeks, and for that reason alone, having the link is beneficial.”

    You might have had 8 offers if they doubled the size of the text…its tiny…maybe I need glasses šŸ˜‰

    DomCollect/sedo has a nice example of a landing page if your’e not worried about PPC

    sales.domcollect.com/?domain=go-israel.org

  16. Hey.

    You know, I think it has a lot to do with your structure. As a pure investor, you really do need a passive approach, which probably should not include parking or click income strategies.

    Obviously, there are ways to differentiate your business from your investments, but if the same intellectual assets are involved, the paperwork can be very involved as well.

    Not having the two clearly defined can lead to a situation where the capital gains on your investments turns into business taxes (at a substantially different rate).

  17. @Bulls If you’re using the same pictures, you could save a TON of space by making a single or double page HTML document instead of using WP.

    _________

    Truth is, I’ve made $300 from parking, ever. It’s simply not worth setting up the domains to display ads that barely pay anything. I rather focus my efforts on adding value to the buyer who might use the name.

  18. Interesting post, and I agree that a large for sale message would improve response. Is it necessary to setup a separate hosting service to enable this, or are there means to do so without paying $2-3 per month per domain name you own?!?

  19. @Observer – I use G@@gle Apps. It’s free if you set it up yourself. I actually point all my domain names to a single sub-domain (see http://WhoisManager.com), but you could setup a sub-domain up for each site instead. For for that matter, I suppose you could set up a GA network for each site if you’re planning to develop them individually or pursue a strategy that requires SEO.

  20. Parking has made me a grand total of about $14. It would probably be more profitable to build small mini sites or create some For Sale pages.

    Elliot thanks for sharing!

  21. I too don’t see any real worth in parking domains. If you build yourself a template, add your domain and keywords to the body, and add some links back to other websites, you can start to build up the domains in search engines, which will make them more valuable as they mature.

    Also, if you get a premium account with godaddy (I pay a little over $60 a year) you can create sub-directories and host as many domain names as you please. You can even drop in WordPress solutions, setup a site for the domain, and sell a full blown website.

    Here are a few of my one-page template domains:
    http://www.QwebD.com
    http://www.QmobileD.com

    -Steve

  22. Elliot

    How it would be to use GoDaddy’s instant page for “Domain for Sale” Landing Page? Because there some photo available of domain for sale.

    You can see one of my domain http://www.bfcbd.com where I am using GoDaddy’s instant page for “Domain for Sale” Landing Page.

  23. We have just on 100 domain names hosted on one account with herbiesdomains.com They have enterprize account with unlimited domains hosted for a pretty great dollar value to the buyer

    Cheers

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