Domain Social Forums

I have taken it upon myself to write a guide to domain parking for those who may be interested in using it as a method of making money through their domains.



The Idea Behind Parking:

Domain Parking is a method of capitalising on domains with traffic, but with no content. For instance, if you have purchased a domain name with traffic, but no website came with the domain, you can park it in order to capitalise on the traffic without having to develop the domain. Simply put, its another method of Traffic Monitization.



What is it:

Parking Partners (such as Sedo) host a pre-made website filled with advertisements on your domain. These advertisements are usually targeted to the specific keywords of the domain. For instance, if your domain is earlypoker.com, then advertisements will be targeted towards poker or gambling. Likewise, a parked page at parishiltonphotos.us would show advertisements related to Paris Hilton or celebrities. Some parking partners simply display advertisements from large external networks, such as Google Adsense, and some maintain their own network, such as the Roar.com network which Fabulous uses.



How it works:

Although parking partners differ, they usually adopt the same monitization model. The large majority of parking partners operate on Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Each time that a visitor to a parked site clicks on an advertisement, the owner of the parked domain receives a share of revenue. Some of that revenue goes to your parking partner (the company hosting your site), and the rest goes to the owner.

A small minority of parking sites use alternative monitization models. Some adopt affiliate programs, where in part of the revenue of a sale is shared with the domain owner. Depending on the revenue gathered per sale, the traffic to the parked domain and the rate of conversion of that traffic (how many visitors actually click on an advertisement and, in the case of affiliate programs, proceed to buy a product), this might bring in more revenue than the traditional PPC model. Yet, because this is rarely the case, and because of further disadvantages (e.g. it is very impractical for the domain owner and parking partner to track sales on the advertisers website; And the 'good faith' of advertisers to share their revenue is reduced when sales are both large in revenue but infrequent), PPC is more widely used.




Parking Partners:

• Fabulous:
  This is one of the highest paying partners for some categories of names; for instance, mortgage names get around $9 - $12 per click on Fabulous. They run their own advertisement network (roar.com) which allows them to run some ads which other larger networks deny (adult, gambling etc.). A handy little tool for checking individual advertisement revenue can be found on www.roar.com (click on"Check bid prices").
  
  It is not easy to get names accepted into fabulous. They are looking for high traffic names, and have asked many domain portfolio owners to test-drive their traffic first. You should usually present them with many domains at once, not just 20 or 30.

• Domain Sponsor:
  This sponsor also gives high payouts (some being comparable to the high categories of fabulous). It is the choice of many domainers here. They allow auto-customizability, where the landing pages 'evolve' with each visitor to show the most targeted ads.

• SEDO:
  Sedo runs a large domain selling website, and offers sellers (and other domain owners) the option of parking their domains with them. The benefit is that, if you are seeking to sell your domain at the same time, then you can centralise all of your domain activity on a single network.
  
  Sedo has recently started a 'professional' parking service which returns greater revenue, but is only for high traffic domains.

• GoDaddy:
  This domain registration company has started offering parking. You actually have to PAY THEM in order to show ads on your website. This dosen't make sense to most of us here at Domain Social, except that they are clearly trying to capitalise on new users who are not aware that most (if not all other) parking services are free.

This list is certainly not complete, but I just wanted to give a brief overview of some of the major players. If you have any other information which would be useful to this guide, then feel free to add to it by posting replies in the thread.

Hope this helps!

Zach

Wow!!! That is great!! Thank you very much for writing that article. I really learned a lot from it.

great guide Zach,

i'm wondering abt the mechanics of this.
1) when you sign up for domain parking, do you still have access to the account? (ftp mainly)
2) if i parked it, would i be able to host a blog on it, possibly in a /wordpress/ directory?
( i guess it might be difficult to have access to a mySQL database)

in this way, the domain could earn 2 sources of income.

Good information. The only one I have used so far is Sedo and really have not had any results encouraging me to do more. That being said I don't really specialize in typo domains and such.

andreww38 Wrote:great guide Zach,

i'm wondering abt the mechanics of this.
1) when you sign up for domain parking, do you still have access to the account? (ftp mainly)
2) if i parked it, would i be able to host a blog on it, possibly in a /wordpress/ directory?
( i guess it might be difficult to have access to a mySQL database)

in this way, the domain could earn 2 sources of income.

Thanks

Generally when you park a domain, you do not have access to FTP, or any upload interface. You just point your domain nameservers to the parking partner, and they display ads that are relevant to the domain keywords, using their templates.

If you want to build a site and have the benifits of parking, you should just host it at a normal host and integrate PPC in it like adsense or YPN (I know that this is what you are already doing on your sites, and it's the best thing you could do if you want to develop your domains).

Zach

Zach,
tks for the clarification.

guess i just can't park a domain and autoblog away.
heh.

what's the revenues like from domain parking?
i've not done it before.

i've set up my content sites for a few weeks and am getting abt 200 impressions a day from 100pgs of content and my blog.
now the challenge is to do some adsense optimization.

i'm just hoping for the day i can make it to intellitext!

zach Wrote:Thanks

Generally when you park a domain, you do not have access to FTP, or any upload interface. You just point your domain nameservers to the parking partner, and they display ads that are relevant to the domain keywords, using their templates.

If you want to build a site and have the benifits of parking, you should just host it at a normal host and integrate PPC in it like adsense or YPN (I know that this is what you are already doing on your sites, and it's the best thing you could do if you want to develop your domains).

Zach

Nice information.
I tried to park a domain on sedo for sometimes. But it didnt gave me any good benefit.
I get very little bucks from there so i left that. Its better to put some YPN ads and host the domain in a little space.

spanking article. question for you:

a parked domain at Sedo for instance, has the partner putting up targetted keyword advts basd on the domain name right? how do these indexed or popularized to actually generate traffic given that there really arent content pages at all ?

hi Zach that is a good project u have did.Good whishes from me.U tell me how to get access to that so i can enjoy the parking so i can earn some i havent tried like this till now.

hi all,
Domain parking programmes lets you to earn money without developing your own site. I think, Sedo's domain parking programmes are good. Are you ever tried this? Their parking programmes are free of cost. You can receive money from paypal and if you have no paypal account they can send you electronic wire transfer.