websitehosting.com – SOLD!

If you've been following my blog at all then you probably know I purchased websitehosting.com on 1/28/11 for $190,000. Then, shortly after I purchased the domain I wrote a detailed post about why I bought this particular domain and followed up with a series of posts about how to build an affiliate website.

About The Sale

Shortly after I purchased websitehosting.com I received an offer of $250,000 for the domain. It reassured me that my analysis for this domain was dead on, but since I'm not really in the business of flipping domain names I turned it down. Then, about 2 weeks ago I was contacted by another guy looking to pickup this domain name; his offer was for $300,000. I had done a significant amount of work since the $250,000 offer, so I turned this down too.

Since I now had two strong offers in hand, I felt like it was time to decide what I would sell the site for. I don't get possessive about projects I work on and I like to make sound business decisions. To that end, everything must have its price. So, I spent a couple hours figuring out what the right price would be; I came up with $415,000.

Once I came up with my price of $415,000 I communicated that to the guy who made the $300,000 offer. He responded with a counter offer of $401,000 within a couple hours, but I held my ground. For those of you who know me, you know how stubborn I can be. To be fair, I could have come back to this guy with a much higher number, or just said "you need to make a higher offer". I'm convinced that would have yielded me more money, but I also like being straightforward with people. I've been buying a lot of domain names lately and I get really frustrated with the process. People often won't be straight with me and it makes it very hard to negotiate. Since I don't like to do to others what I don't like done to myself, I decided to just be straight with this guy. It was $415,000 or I wasn't going to sell. Anyway, long story short, he accepted.

Escrow.com

We used escrow.com to close the transaction and I agreed to split the fees (pretty typical). For those of you who aren't familiar with escrow.com, they are the de-facto escrow service to trade domain names. It protects both parties and it's a service I've used numerous times over the past few months. The way the process works is the buyer sends the money to escrow.com, then the seller is notified the funds have arrived. Once that happens the seller transfers the domain name. Once they buyer accepts the transfer, the money is released by escrow.com and you're done. The closing statement for this transaction is below with the buyers name blocked out to protect his privacy.

WebsiteHosting.com Closing Statement

What's Next

Selling this website doesn't really change my plans much. I've been working hard on my WordPress theme sites and I have a really good idea about how to leverage that concept more. I'll be launching a new site in the WordPress theme space in late July / early August and I'm pretty sure it will be a game-changer. Of course I'll be talking about that project at length as it gets closer to launch time.

I also launched a new RV park directory site at www.rvparks.org a couple of weeks ago. I haven't posted about that here yet because the site isn't fully populated with data yet, but I will make a detailed post about that in the next few weeks.

Finally, I've been quietly purchasing other quality keyword domains. I'm really excited about a couple of them and intend to make a post about all of them on this blog over time. I've been holding back making posts about them because I'm trying to buy several domains in the same vertical and I don't want to expose myself to competition.

Since websitehosting.com is now gone, I'll need to start another series on How To Build An Affiliate Website. Two of the keyword domains I recently purchased are a good candidate for this. Over the next few weeks you'll see part one of this new series.

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