I’ve been working with websites for a long time. Probably over 10 years, and currently sitting on 40 domains, and who knows how many I’ve walked away from, you could say I’ve had some experience since the days of $50 domains and NameZero got me started.
In March, I had obtained, finally, that golden goose of domain names, my name .com. MichaelSorg.com was the only one I hadn’t claimed, having collected the .net, .org, and the trilogy for MikeSorg.com/org/net as well. It was sitting on one of those parked pages asking you to make them an offer, and maybe offering email addresses for the domain. I waited. I wasn’t ready to pull $100 from my butt. So I marked the expiration days and waited…
Leading up to the domain expiration, I received scores of emails from no less than three different companies offering me a chance to bid and buy the domain. I had finally bit the bullet and setup through one of the groups for $99, the minimum “bid”. Authorized a Paypal, and thought I was good.
Again, I marked that expiration date. Woke up that day. Checked my debit card. My PayPal. And then, after seeing nothing, went to Godaddy and searched.
And there it was.
And using those trusty Revision3 discount codes (disclaimer: huge fan of Film Riot, Tekzilla, etc), grabbed my MichaelSorg.com for about $8.
I backtracked to find that my authorization was cancelled at some point by the receiver.
Hm.
Fastforward to this week. We had aquired CafeSolstice.net for our recent restaurant venture, again, since someone else snagged, but was not actively using, the .com. (and there are other similarly named cafes halfway across the world.) I started noticing the same pattern of emails leading up to the expiration of CafeSolstice.com. I considered contacting someone, again since I thought there was some competition, but when I noticed how many different emailers we got, I played the hunch…
Another $8 and Rev3 discount code later. We have it.
Now, I don’t recommend this tactic when you’re trying to get that .com for your About.Me sized venture, but for the personal blogger or small business with little cash flow, this tactic seems to work out pretty well.
Next task: retrieve a .com for a certain video game blogger...let you know how that goes in 2012…