Monetizing Your Low-Cost Domain Parking

By: Rea Lea Osaka

So what is parking your domain? Domain Parking is an advertising practise used mostly by domain registrars and internet advertising publishers to create income from type-in traffic to an blank domain. The domain will typically resolve to a page consisting of nothing but advertisements or links to affiliate programs. There is often no useful information of any value to the web user who typically clicks on one of the links just to get away from the page. The domain owner is typically paid based on the number of clicks and the following benefit derived from those clicks.

Is it possible to make revenue from domain parking? Yes it is! Some domainers have portfolios of thousands of such sites that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Venture Capital firms. One Canadian internet mogul has managed to sign an agreement with the government of Cameroon. Cameroon URLs end with a ".cm". Many internet users mistakenly type in ".cm" instead of ".com" and all of the unregistered domain names resolve to a parked domain page consisting of ads. This person is reported to make millions of dollars each year, his share for helping the Cameroon government monetize this phenomenon!

My personal experience with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty pathetic. I had a handful domains with Sedo for two years and I made about 1 cent per month! Not even enough to cover the expense of the domain name registration fee each year. GoDaddy was worse. They wanted me to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your domain with them. I had just one site for several months but I was unable to make sufficient money to even cover the cost of this fee, even though it wasn't a lot to begin with. I guess that if you're a bulk domainer with thousands of domains, you will probably gain a lot more traction than I did. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Before you think that you'll go out and buy 5-6 domains and snowball your parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the party. It's now an intensely competitive playing field and there are several thousands of interent entrepreneurs struggling to make income from domain parking. All of the 3 letter domains are all gone and so are nearly all of the four letter domains too! Capturing type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Private Equity firms getting in on the action, there's more than enough money being thrown around to buy up all the possible dictionary words and their possible combinations.

But you don't need to totally dismiss the idea of domain parking. There are still a few tricks to make some money. Some of them involve creating MFA (made for adsense) domains that have a tiny bit of content which brings organic traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is significantly more involved than ordinary domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are methods to automate this procedure, but many of these methods require a certain amount of cash outlay for software tools that all generate indentical duplicate content for all users. Creating unique content is highly important for ranking high in the search engines and getting their traffic. There are ways to automate this process without spending any money but thats a new topic for another article.

The author is very lazy and has a site devoted to creating passive income streams and has also achieved some minor successes with domain name parking through domain embarking.

Article Source: http://www.marketingarticlelibrary.com

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