Most people selling their domains don’t really have an idea of what their domains are worth, which means they often end up overpriced and unsold. I’m not the biggest domainer in the world, but I have sold several domains / websites and negotiated some domain purchases for pennies on the dollar by proving that they were overpriced.
So how you you know if your domain is worth money?
- It has revenue attached to it. I don’t know the percentage of websites sold versus just domains, but all of the sites I have sold had content on them, so technically they were websites. Not all had revenue, however. If your website or domain has revenue, a good benchmark for pricing it is the monthly revenue multiplied by a certain amount of months (12-24 is common.)
- Other TLD’s are not available. In a LinkedIn thread, Paul Whibley recently pointed out that if the .net, .org, and other extensions of your domain are not available, then that might be a sign that it has value.
- It has lots of direct match search volume. If you have a domain like BestWaytoQuitSmoking.co where it is a direct match for the search term “best way to quit smoking” you should be able to have your domain rank well for the term. It’s not always an easy win, and of course Matt Cutts (Google’s senior engineer) just announced that all of the new TLD’s that are scheduled to come out will not help rankings. Here is the formula to help you calculate your domains value if it has direct match search volume.
- It’s a dictionary word. These are rare, but if you happen to be sitting on one of these, I’d love to chat with you. I can help you get lots of money for your domain. And of course, by dictionary word, I mean like cars.com, paper.com, oil.com… you get the point.
I hope this is helpful. If you have questions about the value of your domain name, feel free to reach out.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on other factors that can bring domains value.
