- Part 3: Domain Name Parking
Domain Name Parking
If you own dozens of domain names or are becoming a domain name entrepreneur on your free time, building a functioning website for all of your names may just not be feasible. Instead, why not try “parking” your name to make a little money?
Your domain name is a blank slate when you purchase it—like the side of a city bus. You don’t need to put advertising on the side of the bus for people to want to ride it—but why not? As the owner of the bus, it doesn’t cost you anything to sell the advertising, it takes little time because the advertiser will do the work setting up his logo on the bus, it attracts attention, and (on top of it all) it earns you a little extra money.
Great services like www.SEDO.com, www.NameDrive.com, and many others allow you to park for free. Here’s how it works: When you sign up for a parking site, they were fill your pages with a website, complete with advertisements in the form of banners, search boxes, and other clickable links. In most cases, these advertisements will be customized somewhat to fit the theme of your site if that is possible. With some parking services, you can even go as far as choosing certain options to determine the look of your site. As traffic flows to your site, viewers can click on any number of these links and when they do so, you will earn money. You can get as little as a few cents per click to as much as a few dollars.
Earning $20 or so many not seem like much, but it takes care of your registration costs, and if you site gets tons of traffic, you can make even more money. In any case, it is better than letting your domain name go dormant and not earning any money at all! Remember, every month you don’t sell your domain name, you’re not making any money with it and you have to pay for registration. Domain name parking takes care of that!
Domain name parking has the added benefit of making your domain more pleasant to potential buyers. Just like when you build a website at your domain name, having your domain name parked somewhere shows buyers that it is getting traffic and that you care about the site. It also makes it easier for a buyer to contact you to negotiate a selling price. If you don’t have time to build a website, this is definitely the way to go.
Parking sites come in all shapes and sizes. Until you learn how to drive traffic to your sites, I would recommend choosing a free service. There are also domain name parking services to which you must subscribe. The benefit to these paid parking sites is extra services. For example, with www.Afternic.com, you can do parking while listing the domain in their auctions at the same time. Other sites provide things like higher paying advertisements, customization, and search engine optimization. The key is finding a domain name parking site that will work well with you and your domain name. Like I said, start with a free site, and as you learn about parking, work up to paid sites.
A quick note about parking programs: DO NOT click on ads from your own site. Every computer has an IP address and when a person clicks on an ad, the website can tell what IP address clicked. In short, they’ll know if you’re clicking on your own ads just to make money and you’ll be removed from the program. Of course, they can also tell if you’re getting friends of family to click on the ad multiple times to raise your prices. If someone clicks on an ad, it has to be legitimate or you won’t get paid, and your IP address may even get banned from the site, so you won’t be able to use their services in the future.
