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Domaining 101 Contents:

• Introduction
• Extensions
• Researching Keywords
• Registration
• Parking

What is Domain Parking?

So now that you’ve registered the domain name you want, how do you turn that investment into revenue? One of the ways to start earning with your domain is to park it. Domain parking is simply pointing your domain to a page, typically containing advertisements, to either assess the amount of traffic the domain is receiving, earn revenue from the ads, or to allow potential buyers a means to contact you. For now, I’m going to concentrate on how domain parking can earn you revenue from advertisements.

First off, for a domain to earn you a good return through parking alone, you need to have a lot of traffic. Traffic for parked domains comes mostly from type-ins or search engines. Since your domain will not be pointing to a page with much relevant content for the user, there will be very little recurring visitors. Because of this parked domains rely entirely on organic traffic to produce income.

Parked domains typically use contextual advertisements to display text ads on your parked pages. Good parking services have ads relevant to the keywords in your domain name (which is another reason to research your domain keywords extensively), as well as allowing you to select keyword categories, and sometimes even one or two specific keywords. These ads are setup as the main focal point of the page. What you’re hoping is that organic traffic to your domain will get there, see there is no real content, and exit through an ad rather than closing the page. I know that doesn’t sound entirely reliable, but there are a ton of people making their living off of this method alone.

Domain Parking Services

There are a number of domain parking services available, all of which have their pros and cons. There isn’t a “number 1 parking service”, so you need to select where to park based on each individual domain. Out of all the parking services I’ve researched, I can only recommend two: Sedo and Parked.com.

Sedo
http://www.sedo.com

Sedo is the most popular domain parking service on the net right now. It is a very professional service with a lot of features available absolutely free. Although you do have to deal with some promotion by the staff pushing you to invest in their “premium” features such as domain appraisal and promotion, they don’t require you or trick you into paying for anything. The only complaint I have with Sedo is that they’re PPC for ad clicks seems to be very low. The best part about parking with Sedo is the exposure to potential buyers, but that will be covered in the next post on the second hand market.

Parked.com
http://www.parked.com

Parked.com is solely a parking service, which allows them to focus more on the earning aspect of parked domains. They claim to have the highest parked domain payout, which I haven’t heard argued against very much in the domaining community. They also advertise their domain optimization services. “While parked domain names do make some money, parked domains that are optimized often generate 10 times more revenue.” Even though their terrifically scientific numbers there make me giggle a bit, I’ve heard great things about them from a number of domainers. If you’re looking to optimize your parked domains solely for revenue then I suggest giving Parked.com a try.

Creating a Landing Page

Many domainers argue that parking services, on the whole, just don’t give the returns that they should. Therefore, many domainers now are creating their own landing pages (simple 1 page websites that promote ads much like parking pages do) hosted on their own servers. Landing pages are a bit more simple than niche minisites, but they follow the same basic guidelines. The main purpose of a landing page is to provide visitors with affiliate offers or contextual advertisements. Affiliate offers are commission or lead-based advertisements that require the user to click on an advertiser’s page and then buy a product (sales commission) or perform an action such as filling out a survey (pay per action). Contextual advertisements are links, typically text links but sometimes images, that display ads relevant to your domain’s topic. Both of these advertising options are viable, and you will simply have to test which one works best with your particular domain. It’s also possible to use both with a somewhat advanced landing page.

Now lets get into the nitty gritty of creating a landing page. First and foremost you want your landing page all to fit on the user’s screen. The best domain landing pages are those where the user does not have to scroll to see the offer or advertisements. In addition you do not want to overwhelm your visitor. It is commonly agreed by most webmasters that the best conversion rates for landing pages are on pages with as little as one or two ad blocks or affiliate offers. If a visitor lands on your site and is flooded with ads and popups, they are most likely going to quickly close the window. However, if you integrate your ads into the page subtly and classy then you are more likely to get leads and ad clicks. You should also make an attempt to give your landing page a somewhat professional appearance. Users today are becoming more and more used to scam sites and MFA (Made for Adsense) sites and are learning to steer clear from them.

Go the extra mile with your landing page. Hire a graphic designer to integrate some photos related to your domain niche into the landing page. You may even buy an article from an article peddler, get an article custom made by a freelance writer, or download one for free from one of the many article depositories on the internet. If you follow these basics you should have good success with landing pages. There is a lot more I could go into; however, this is a segment on domaining in general and not landing pages. I will be going more in-depth with creating landing pages at a later time.

So now you know how to setup your landing page, but where do you get the ads or affiliate offers? There are a ton of advertising and affiliate programs out there, but I’m going to do my best to whittle them down to the few best.

Google Adsense - Contextual Advertising
http://www.google.com/adsense

Google Adsense is the most popularly-used form of contextual advertising today. Advertisers sign up through Google Adwords, create ads, which then display through Google Adsense (what you put on your landing page). Adsense has a good targeting feature that gives your visitors ads that are extremely relevant to your domain. Since they’re backed by Google, you can rely on Adsense’s reputation and never have to worry about them not paying out at the end of the month.

Yahoo Publisher Network - Contextual Advertising
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Following in Google’s footsteps, Yahoo has established YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) which is almost exactly the same as Google in every conceivable way. The main difference is that YPN is currently in closed beta and is only open to U.S. citizens which means they have less advertisers and in turn less targeted ads. Many publishers, however, claim higher payouts with YPN but that is speculated to drop significantly as it moves out of beta. However, YPN is still one of the best contextual advertisers out there and cannot be overlooked.

Commission Junction - Affiliate Marketing
http://www.cj.com

Commission Junction specializes in offering products or lead offers to publishers rather than contextual ads. You have to sift through their link database and decide which offers are best for your landing pages rather than simply slapping some code on your site and letting the program do the rest. CJ has the largest selection of affiliate offers and a long-standing reputation. They are, in my opinion, the best affiliate marketing company hands down.

Other Affiliate Marketing Programs
Azoogle - http://www.azoogle.com
Maxbounty - http://www.maxbounty.com
CPAEmpire - http://www.cpaempire.com
Hydra Network - http://network.hydramedia.com

These are the networks I consider to be the cream of the crop. However, if you want a more complete and unbiased list, John Chow has written a very concise article on his blog listing a huge number of ad networks (contextual and affiliate marketing).

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