You can always contact the owner of a domain to see if they are interested in selling. Most domains that are taken today are available for sale and the owners of them would be delighted to hear from you. The place to find the owner of a domain is www.networksolutions.com/whois.  Simply enter the domain you are interested in and the owners name, address, e-mail and phone number will be listed.

        Before you even contact an owner, you should check out the sites listed in the other chapters of this book to see if you can find that name listed.  You may find that the listing price is near what you are wanting to pay.  If that is the case, then you should contact them through the agency that they are listed with and make an offer.   If you have a price in mind that you are willing to pay for it, you can offer them as much as 25-50% of that price just to see whether they bite.  You can always go up on your price.

        If they are asking far less than you were expecting, then pay them their money quickly and be done with the whole process.  Always use an Escrow Service.  Escrow guarantees that neither of you get burned on the deal.

        Then again you may find that they are asking 10 or 100 times what you are wanting to pay.  If that is the case, then you may want to look for another.

        When you first contact the owner, be cautious.  First send them an e-mail stating that you found them through the whois registry and that you are interested in their domain. 

        They will sweat for hours and maybe a couple of days over how to respond to you.  Rest easy if they are slow to respond.  If the domain is not in use yet, then they are almost certainly wanting to sell.  Remember that you are the buyer, you have the money and this is a buyers market today.  You control the negotiations.

        Some owners of domains have invested so deeply that they need to make a sale to recoup some of the money that they have spent.