A couple of days ago, I read the story about the Alec Brownstein who found a job using AdWords. He basically identified the CEO's of the companies he wanted to work for and left them a message in the form of an ad. Ultimately, he landed a several interviews and a job for a grand total of $6. Now my point isn't just retelling this story which has been featured on several blogs and websites already. My point is how to take this idea and apply it to domain sales.
I'm definitely not an AdWords expert. But the system isn't so complex that I can't log in and give it a shot. So that's just what I did. I chose a domain for this experiment that I felt has an easily targeted audience and that someone with interest in their existing site might Google to see what results come back. I also picked something with a limited scope, in the event that it got a ton of hits there would be limited waste. The domain I chose is MillersBlog.com. I set my monthly budget at $30 and my maximum daily budget at $1 (come on, I'm not cheap, it's an experiment). I kept the key words to exact matches to further target my specific, limited audience.
It's only been about 2 days and the ad has had 540 impressions, mostly through the content network. But I couldn't get that kind of targeted exposure anywhere else. And I also decided to include the price right in the ad. That way, I would weed out anyone that was just curious as to the price of the domain and prevent curiosity clicking. So far, running the ad hasn't cost me anything because there have been no click throughs. I also haven't sold the domain yet either.
I plan to let the ad run for a month and possibly adjust along the way. If it turns out that it generates a sale, I'll let you know. I'd be interested to hear your stories if you have tried this before.