 We're talking about how to price and sell domain names here on The Journey. Today on The Journey we have a special guest, Joe from GoDaddy. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience. Hi, everybody. As you said, I'm Joe. I work in the aftermarket, which in my opinion is one of the most exciting places to work at GoDaddy. I've been there for more than 10 years, done all different things. It's great. You get to meet all different people from all over the world, and you get to find out if you're sitting on a gold mine. Right on. So Joe is obviously the domain expert, which makes perfect sense for today's topic of how to price and sell your domain names. Let's just jump right into it. Let's talk about why it's important to know how much a domain name might be worth. You know, one of my favorite shows is Antiques Roadshow. I love to watch it. I love that, right? All the hidden gems that you find. And the best part is the end when they reveal what is it worth, right? What do they think it's worth? It's important to know they say for insurance reasons or other things for your antiques, but for your domain it's even more important. Because either you own one and you want to know how to value that, or maybe you're interested in starting a new business and you want to go purchase a new name, and you want to make sure that you're paying a fair price. I know, like, most people, we have those, like, late night just ideas, and you go out and buy a bunch of domain names. I've spent far too much money on those late night domains. My catalog is getting out of control. How do we find out how much our domain name might be worth? Oh, there's a couple of really good tools that are out there for you to use. There's a site called NameBio.com, and that tries to keep all the historical sales of names. So you can go look for comparable names to yours and find out what did they sell for, what did they actually go for in the open market. There's other sites like Estabot.com or GoDaddy has a domain valuation tool that you can use, and that will give you an estimate of what they think the market value of that name is. Yeah, so I saw that when I was registering my last domain name. I did my search. I saw it was available, and it said, cool, it's estimated this price because of this reason. Is that something new we've kind of been implementing? It's something we've been working on over the years, and we look at a lot of different things. It uses AI and machine learning, and it tries to figure out comparable sales. It also looks at things like how short is the name, how memorable is the name, how brandable is it, and then it looks at what people are looking for in a name so that they can have businesses that people can easily find and then they can use that to make money. Right on. So if I use that tool, whether it's Estabot named by a GoDaddy's valuation tool, is that the NLBL price? If I get that price, am I going to be able to actually sell it for that price, or what does that process look like? It's just an idea. It's a tool. It gives you another idea of what your name could be worth, but I think one of the best ways to find out what your name is worth is to get a name that you're familiar with, something in your industry, that you know that market really well. So for instance, if you were selling lights and you knew that the average lighting customer that came into your store was going to spend $1,500, then what would that name do that you're going to purchase for your advertising budget? How many people could you bring in and how many more sales do you think you would expect if people could remember your name easier, find you, use word of mouth with their friends to be able to bring more business in? Those things all add value to the name. That makes perfect sense. It's kind of like just real estate in itself, right? Like the better property you have near the city, near amenities, the more expensive that property is going to be, the better the domain name, brandable, the right market, the more profitable it's going to be. And also, you brought a brand that brings up a really good point, brand credibility. So if I had lighting.com, that's a great name, and it says to the market, hey, this person is serious. They own lighting.com. They must know a lot about lights. If I own Bob's lights down the road.org, it might not be as brand authoritative. Right. So the brand authority also adds value. So talk us a little bit more through the brand authority. You gave us a little bit of an example. What really makes a brand a domain authoritative versus one that may not be? I think one that resonates with people. So one that you can easily remember and one that looks legitimate. There's a lot of concern about online fraud or things that happen shopping online. If you have a name that resonates with people and that really is a great credible name, that's going to bring in more business freedom. Absolutely. Domain names can be priced at almost anything. I know if I can go online and say, my awful domain name is worth a million dollars and no one's going to buy it, how do we actually figure out the best practice of valuing it and determining that value? Some of the best practices are really just concrete things that you can look at, like the length of the name. Usually the longer the name is, the less value it has. The shorter the name, the more valuable because it's easier to remember and also it's usually easier to spell. Is there like a certain limit we should try to keep under? Most of the sales that we see historically happening are 15 characters or less. I would imagine dashes and numbers devalue the domain name. Yeah, it just makes it harder to pass the radio test we call it. So if you were to say, go to lightsonline.com but that's lights-online.com. People don't remember that as easily. Yeah, a couple of years ago, there was just a plethora of new GTLDs, those extensions in the end of the domain name that were released to the public and they were still adding more and more and more. So now there's not only the dot-com, norignet, there's dot-blue, dot-ninja, dot literally almost anything, right? Do those play into anything with SEO or the value of the domain name? Is it better to do that or what does that have to do? With the value of a name, it's really what the business is going to benefit from that owns that name, right? So using a new TLD or a new GTLD, some of those make perfect sense for people and Google said that they're going to show up with SEO results the same as a comm or any other TLD would. So from a branding standpoint, if you think that it's something that people can easily remember and use, then it's going to have value. Joe, do you have a fun extension that would actually be relevant to the aftermarket? Sure. I think one of the fun ones is Dot Games. I know that Free Dot Games and Math Dot Games, that's done really well, gotten a lot of traffic. There's Home Dot Loans which sold for a lot of money. So there's opportunities as long as the front of the dot and the right of the dot match up the SLD and TLD and make sense like Free Dot Games or Home Dot Loans, then you can potentially make a good profit on those names. Yeah, there's a site that I used to use when I used to just randomly buy domains, expireddomains.net, you heard of that? Yes, I have. It's a great resource. Use it all the time, but basically it shows you all the domains that just dropped off registration or they let them lapse. You can go and pick them up and it shows a ton of information like when it was first registered and a bunch of other stats and you could possibly use that if you're a domain investor and you want to look for another resource to buy some awesome domains. Yeah, one of the great things about expireddomains.net is it shows that a lot of other TLDs are taken. And usually if there's a lot of other TLDs that are taken and that same, so if it was Home Dot Loans and Home Dot Com and Home Dot Net and Oregon, they're all taken, it means a lot of people are thinking that that name is a good name because it's registered so widely. And the more people that think it's a good name, the more valuable it's likely to be. Joe, what if we're just completely lost? Like I know I have a bunch of domains, but I might be a little lost of how to, whether it's selling my domain or if I'm looking to buy domain names, I get help and the audience, mostly me though. I think if you want to sell your names, the best place to go is to try and talk to a broker. You can look at those automated appraisal tools we talked about earlier, but to really get somebody who's in the industry and knows the industry well, they can give you up-to-date advice and give you personal advice based on your names. If you're going to sell a name, that's the best place to go and also if you want to buy a name, we offer a domain broker service at Goody. There's other buyer brokers and what they'll do is they'll give you an idea of what the name that you're trying to purchase is worth, what the fair market value is. They do it day in, day out. They're really in touch with the market and they can help assist you in getting a fair price when you make the purchase. That is a ton of great information, but before we wrap things up, do you have any last-minute words of wisdom for our audience and myself? Sure. I think if I were to start trying to buy and sell names, I would do two things. I would start really slow. I think one mistake that people make is they buy a lot of names before they really understand what's valuable and what's not and that can cost you a lot of money up front. The other thing is to buy names that you know of the industry. If you sell guitars, then you should stick with names that are related to music or guitars. You know the audience and you know potential buyers. You might know what this would benefit, another business, a competitor or yourself and then you can gauge the value a lot better than if you're just buying random names that you think might be valuable. Awesome last-minute words of wisdom. Thanks so much, Joe, for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. And if you liked this video, got some value out of it, go ahead and smash that like button. Add a comment below if you ever bought a domain name or sold one. 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