Things are really tough in Townsville at the moment. Our biggest employer was Queensland Nickel, and back in January, 237 employees were retrenched (no entitlements have been paid as yet). On Friday, the remaining 550 employees were dismissed by the Administrators. Unfortunately they had no option given the shenanigans of others.
I just sat through an interview of Clive Palmer by Barry Cassidy on “The Insiders” (ABC TV). Of course, nothing is Clive’s fault. 🙁 According to Clive, everything is down to the Administrators and the Queensland Government. I’m sure he believes his own “spin”. Unbelievable.
Hopefully there may be some joy for these employees and their families in the future.
Reflection 1
I was just having a look at some old records about the domain aftermarket in Australia, and came across this snippet I wrote back in 2009.
“As at 1/10/2009, there were over 35,000 domain names for sale on NetFleet alone.”
Looking at Netfleet’s platform this morning, I see that just over 6 years later, there are now almost 59,000 domains listed for sale. Bear in mind that these are all .au domains.
Reflection 2
I haven’t done any outbound marketing for a long time, but having just read another piece that I wrote in 2009, I’m going to get back into it.
Back then, I had come across this quote from someone (unfortunately I don’t remember who it was, so apologies for lack of attribution).
“If you want to achieve the best possible price for your domain or website, you need to be proactive and go and find the right end-user. If you do nothing to bring people to it, it’s like a city in the desert. Nobody’s going there unless you give them a reason.”
Whilst I don’t totally agree with the above (if you have a premium domain, you will get some inbound enquiries), it does make a lot of sense to contact as many potential endusers as you possibly can. It’s amazing what can happen when you have more than one party genuinely interested in a domain name. 😉
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Shame to hear about all those workers getting sacked. I think a lot of towns in Australia are finding it tough at the moment.
As for contacting potential customers who may be interested in buying domain names…
We’ve been doing that a lot lately.
We manually contacted 1000 businesses regarding a premium one-word domain name two weeks ago. (Domain name was like “doctors.com.au” – but wasn’t, but was similar… That’s manually emailing, one at a time, directly-targeted, 1000 associated businesses to the domain name.
Only one business wrote back, claiming we were spamming them. Obviously, they didn’t get it at all, how powerful the name was.
Only 4 businesses emailed back saying they would like more info. We rang those 4 back.
Only 1 of the 4 businesses made an offer, but it didn’t meet reserve.
Meanwhile, we manually targeted only 50 businesses for “scrapmetals.com.au” and one business emailed back and made a formal offer. Which was low-four-figures. We accepted and the guy got himself a great deal. We targeted roughly 10 businesses per state. In this case, a Perth scrap metal yard GOT IT and they are now winning! (well, they will be, once they develop the name.) Just think, if he’s smart, he can start Australia’s first Scrap Metal directory, get scrap metal yards all across the country to pay for leads or a monthly fee, and advertise his own scrap metal yard as the “premium” Perth scrap metal yard on the site.
All these companies that don’t get it yet…. That’s why all us domainers have to be patient with our awesome names. These businesses will wake up one day down the line. Unfortunately for them, the longer they wait, the higher the price will be. And if they wait too long, they’ll miss out altogether.
Still a lot of educating to do in this regard, I feel.