How to Sell Domain Names With BuzzStream

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Over the last 1.5 months, I’ve sold 3 domain names with (nearly) zero effort. How? BuzzStream. Here’s how I use BuzzStream to aggregate sale prospects & manage my domain sales pipeline.

I stumbled across BuzzStream close to two months ago while researching a RavenTools replacement. While I eventually settled on SERPS.com for my rank tracking, I was fortunate enough to discover BuzzStream as a linkbuilding tool.

Immediately after signing up, I received an invitation from Matt Gratt (@MattGratt), BuzzStream’s head of marketing, to take a tour of the platform. First — talk about phenomenal customer service. I’ve never received an invitation right off the bat like that. Cool.

Next, as he’s walking me through the system and its capabilities, I realized: ‘Holy crap. This is the best tool I could ever use to sell and market my domains on.’ 2 months later, I’ve closed 3 small sales through BuzzStream and have marketed about a dozen domains to hundreds of end users.

Here’s how.

If you’d like to skip right to their site, you can check out BuzzStream by clicking here. And yes, that’s an affiliate link. You don’t have to use it, but if my review helps you and you want to buy it, it’d be super cool if you went through it.

Table of Contents

• Video Tutorial (walks you through everything I explain but in a video format. Yay for video!)
• How to Begin Selling a Domain Name With BuzzStream
• How to Find Sale Prospects
• Selling Your Domain Name Through BuzzStream
• Final Thoughts
• Video Unboxing of BuzzStream
• Just go Buy It!

If you’re more of a video learner, I’ve prepared this video walking you through everything I detail below. Here’s the video (the domaining stuff starts at 2:30):


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How to Begin Selling a Domain Name With BuzzStream

I’m going to walk you through how I built a list of sale prospects through BuzzStream, reached out to them, negotiated a deal and closed a sale.

Out of protection to my buyers, the sale price will be left out. However, you will see everything else. Including the domain name. Which is…

***Drumroll***

WashingtonPatents.com

I acquired WashingtonPatents off the drop in late 2011. I used FreshDrop to scan the list and cherry picked that domain name out thanks to their awesome ability of filtering down to US State domain names.

BuzzStream provides you with the ability to create folders and projects. A folder holds all your projects. It’s essential to stay well organized in their system. I’ve created Folders for specific websites and each marketing campaign is a unique project in that folder.

For the purposes of domaining, I’ve created a Domain Marketing folder. Then, for each domain I’m marketing, I’ve created a specific project. You can see that in the image below:

My Domain Folder in BuzzStream

And here’s a more general overview of what I have going on:

My Folders & Projects in Buzzstream

As you create more and more projects, navigating gets to be a pain. So thankfully, there’s this awesome search feature. Yay for search!

BuzzStream has a great search feature

Once you create your project, you can specify who on your team gets to share it with you (you don’t need a team though).

Since BuzzStream is technically a link building tool, it asks you to specify what URL you are building backlinks to. That’s because BuzzStream wants to track the links you build. But since it’s not relevant for domaining, I just leave this blank or enter the domain I’m selling.

Next comes the fun part. Researching end users.

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How to Find End Users Using BuzzStream

The goal of every domainer is to sell their domain to an end user. Previously, in order to accomplish this, I’d have my Virtual Assistant enter a number of keywords into Google, scrape the results and find the contact info for all the prospects. This takes a longgg time. It’s tedious work. And, frankly, it sucks (it’s very similar to this article on getting awesome backlinks).

Enter BuzzStream.

With BuzzStream, you just click the prospecting tool and it goes out and scrapes the top 40 results for every search phrase you enter. It also scrapes their email address, phone number, twitter url and more. Kickass, right?

Here’s a list of keywords I used for one prospecting profile:

BuzzStream’s Prospecting Tool

What BuzzStream then did is scraped the top 40 results for every keyword in there and scraped their emails, phone numbers etc. But it will ignore duplications so you’ll never have double leads.

For example, it scraped the top 40 results for Seattle IP Lawyer. Say it pulled in SeattleLawyer.com. When it scrapes Google’s results for Seattle IP Attorney, it will ignore SeattleLawyer.com since it already scraped that data.

Pretty sweet, right?

Naturally, not every result will be relevant. So you then need to go in and manually approve, disapprove or block the results. I didn’t want to market my domain to any newspapers, so I had to remove them from my prospecting list.

Approving & Disapproving Scraped Results

In the end, you arrive to a refined, awesome marketing list. In total, I had 194 prospects to reach out to.

You’ll need to manually approve every email address. Again, that’s work my VA does. But it takes him far less time to mouse over an email icon and approve an email address than it would have taken for him to search the site for an email.

But what happens if there’s no email for Buzzy to scrape? Well, use its bot to go scrape WhoIS data:

Using BuzzStream to Scrape WhoIS Data

Next, see that big red DO NOT CONTACT in the above image? That is used so you can ensure you don’t contact them. So if you’ve really angered someone, you can make it account wide so you will never market to them again. Or if you know they won’t be into what you’re selling, just delete them or mark them as DO NOT CONTACT.

Easy enough.

Finally, if you land on a website and want BuzzStream to add it to a project, you can install a plugin to your browser called ‘Link Buzzmarker’. It’s produced by BuzzStream and it will add that website to your project, scrape the data etc. It’s really sweet.

Now, sales.

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Using BuzzStream to Sell Your Domain Name

When you set BuzzStream up, you can integrate it to any email account, including Google Apps. I had BuzzStream integrate to my domain selling email address and use it to mail merge appropriately.

Here’s what ya gotta do:

Outreaching to Sale Prospects via BuzzStream

And what happens if you go to someone you’re not supposed to contact? THE RED BAR OF DEATH!

RED BAR OF DEATH!!

If you have other fields, such as Name, Organization etc., you can use BuzzStream to mailmerge those in. I use that for linkbuilding more than domain sales, but figured you’d like to know about it.

One of the best features about BuzzStream is that it manages your contact history. If you receive an email back from someone, you can email them through a standalone client and BCC your BuzzStream email account (you get a personal one when you sign up). Then it tracks all your correspondance.

You can also use BuzzStream’s server side email, but that is a little aggravating as you need to login, filter for the email/person and reply in their platform. I personally prefer just using Thunderbird.

Here’s an example of my correspondance with my buyer:

Correspondance With My Buyer in BuzzStream

It’s really that easy to sell domain names with BuzzStream (of course, you need to have a good domain to sell!). I’d really encourage you to try it out yourself.

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My Final Thoughts on Selling Domain Names With BuzzStream

Here are the things I love:

• I know exactly who I’ve marketed a domain to
• My Virtual Assistant can handle every detail (I still review his work and reach out myself, but he could handle everything)
• If I had a team of sales people, everyone would know who reached out to whom and when
• Prospects are importable
• You can split test email templates

Here’s what I don’t like:

• Since it’s hosted on the cloud, the service runs slowly sometimes
• If you send an email through Thunderbird/Outlook and BCC your BuzzStream account, it can take upwards of 20-30 minutes for that conversation to be posted in your correspondance
• If you hit back, you don’t go back to your previous page, but instead you’re sent to Buzzstream’s login page. A major PITA.

Overall, it’s not flawless–but it gets the job done very effectively. BuzzStream has significantly reduced the amount of time my VA spends creating marketing lists. This has reduced my overall costs and allowed me to create processes to effectively streamline domain sales.

While I’m still the last person to review everything and click the SEND button on every email, there’s no reason my VA can’t do that.

If you’re interested in checking out BuzzStream for yourself, you can get a 14 day free trial by following my affiliate link. You still get the trial without my link, too.

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Finally, I created this little video when I first signed up for BuzzStream. It’s an electronic ‘opening the box’ video so you get to see exactly what it looks like when you first sign up for BuzzStream.

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Have any questions? Thoughts? I’d love to hear them!

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Yup! That's me. Perry Rosenbloom. And I'm smiling because I know you're going to succeed online, too... especially if you sign up for my newsletter right below...