My largest content site is niche-specific. This morning I was surfing through some of the other sites in the same niche and clicked on a "vote for this site" link to a fairly well-known niche directory that I hadn't visited for awhile. Was surprised to land on, not the directory, but a "this domain for sale" page by Sedo. It's listed for sale as just the domain name without content, shows one offer having been made (but doesn't show the amount of the offer), and doesn't have a target price - just "make an offer".

Since domain names haven't been one of my areas of interest, I was reading through the Library threads from this forum for some basic info and when I got back to 2004 ran across this paragraph in a post by Webwork:

There's other ways to never sell a domain, besides pegging a screwy price. Another way to kill the process or to scare people off is to say "make me an offer". Why is that? Because it indicates you don't know value and therefore are afraid to set a price. It may also lead the inquirier to believe that you are shooting for the moon. It can also be assumed to be a tactic whereby the seller, who has no idea of value, takes the offer as money in the bank and will now - after you make an offer - wait for a better offer, saying "Well, I've already received an offer for $#*$!X, so make me a better offer."

This exactly describes what this "inquirer" is thinking at the moment. I wouldn't be planning to sell the name, so in that way knowing the value of it isn't an issue. But the "shooting for the moon" and "money in the bank" possibilities are very much in my mind.

This isn't a "big bucks" type of domain and would be of no interest to anyone outside the niche. OTOH, this particular niche runs very much on word-of-mouth, site recommendations, and directories (there's not much traffic from search engines). I'd be very happy to be able to set up a good, solid directory site using this domain name - especially since a number of sites still seem to be linking to it, not realizing it's gone. But I'm not willing to spend a lot of money for the name.

The "make an offer" is what has me stymied, because I don't know how the system works. If I started with a very low offer, would I get a message saying "Sorry, but we already have an offer for $[---]." If so, would I have an opportunity to submit another offer? Is there a better way to approach it?