I have been asked to sell my domain, need advice

I received this email today:

To whom it may concern,

We have just tried to register domain name
azshow.com and found out that you have already
registered it.

For our strategic marketing purposes, we would
like to know if your domain name is availabe
for sale or for lease.

Hi Dennis,

> I received this email today:

> To whom it may concern,

> We have just tried to register domain name
> azshow.com and found out that you have
> already registered it.

> For our strategic marketing purposes, we would
> like to know if your domain name is availabe
> for sale or for lease.

> If anyone has any advice for selling a
> domain it would be appreciated. I have never
> sold a domain name before. I actually never
> even put much thought into it, until now.

I've never sold a domain name, but for what it's worth, here's what I suggest....

I recommend that you first ask them to make you an offer. How much will they offer for it? To my understanding, it usually puts you in a stronger position if they make the first offer....

After that, then see where you want to take it....

This is a basic rule in negotiation, to my understanding. Firstly, it at least gives you an idea of how much they are willing to pay. And secondly, if you name a price, it might be way below what they are willing to pay -- but you would never know if you made the first offer....

Anyhow, that's what I would do. However, I've never sold a domain name (nor tried to), it is just some general negotiation advice I've picked up....

Hope that helps somewhat....

Good luck with the sale.... :)

Dien

Dien,

Thank you for the response and the advice. Your advice makes perfect sense, and advice I will use in the future as well.

I'll email them and see what transpires.

Thanks again,

Dennis

Looks like it turned out to be a ploy. At least I learned a negotiating lesson though (Dien).

I posted the same question on another board and received some responses. This response describes the contents of my email name for name:

Dennis...

This is a slick ploy by a spam harvester to build a list with verifiable email addresses... it's their way of checking which email addresses are live and has someone checking it and then adding the results to a database they can spam to...

I've gotten the same email asking about selling 20 of my domains... each one comes from the same person, uses the same email addy and tells the same story... in my case they were sent to me and signed by a "Mike Williams" with a return addy at MakeMeCeo.com... MakeMeCeo is owned by Cool Amazon and Jon Liu out of Stafford, TX and is hosted on Liu's servers (popularlink.com)...

Don't expect a response... do expect more spam mail... one other thing you might want to do is to keep an eye on your domain in the case it's just a precursor to hijacking your domain name... hopefully this is nothing more benign (if you can call it that) than being put on more spam lists (which, considering the amount of spam we all receive daily is not going to make a huge difference)...

Hope this helps...

Hi Dennis,

I'm sorry to hear that it was a ploy by an email address harvester and probable spammer....

However, thanks for sharing that response here....

> Looks like it turned out to be a ploy. At
> least I learned a negotiating lesson though
> (Dien).

Glad you enjoyed it. :)

Negotiation and "deal making" seems to play a HUGE part in the lives of many successful business people.... Some very wealthy business people have made their whole careers essentially out of deal-making, and nothing else....

I hope to write more about this fascinating topic in the future.... :)

- Dien