Several years ago I hand-registered a number of pronounceable and brandable href="http://www.dotsauce.com/2011/03/02/find-five-letter-domains/">5-letter domain names. Domains like these have already become a rarity in a fairly short time. I submitted one of my favorites, “Jabsy,” to  href="http://www.brandbucket.com/profile/dotsauce/">BrandBucket last year where I listed it for sale at $3,999. The domain received an offer yesterday for $2000 and I accepted it.

Just like my first href="http://www.dotsauce.com/2011/04/05/godaddys-recommended-pricing-for-premium-domain-listings-and-my-first-sale/">GoDaddy premium listing sale earlier this month, BrandBucket received a 30% commission on the sale and there was additionally a fee for logo design and marketing. My take-away this time was $1,300 or about 162 times my initial registration cost of $8.

Hard Lesson Learned

You may be curious why I accepted an offer of $2000 when my asking price was double that. Well, the sale of this domain also came with a hard lesson learned. I made one of the more common domaining blunders, having an old sale indexed in search engines.

I try to stay on top of deleting old sales post content, but it slipped my mind during a recent short-sale and it ended up hurting the bottom-line of the offer at BrandBucket.

I received word from a BrandBucket representative that a buyer was “very interested,” but had done his homework and believed I had purchased the domain from a forum sale for $500 some time ago. In actuality, it was me offering the domain for sale during 1 week of raising funds to launch the new  href="http://www.dotsauce.com/">DotSauce Domain Club.

You can imagine how viewing the $500 price tag on the same domain listed for sale for $3999 would affect an interested party’s offer.

Spring Cleaning

I am not going to dwell on what could have been, but I am definitely going to be wary about making this mistake again. When listing your domains for sale on blogs and forums, be sure to remove the post content after the sale has been finalized or it will remain indexed on search engines.

Savvy buyers will look up the name on Google to see its history. So, if you have old sales on domain forums, auctions, classifieds, Twitter, etc. I recommend you do some spring cleaning and delete anything that may be harmful to your current domain sales marketing efforts.

href="http://www.dotsauce.com/2011/04/22/domain-flip-hard-lesson-learned/">160x Domain Flip at BrandBucket and One Hard Lesson Learned href="http://www.dotsauce.com">DotSauce Magazine