Advise me on domain parking

In My Humble Opinion
1

I own a handful (probably about 12) domains for businesses that I’ve been considering starting. At the moment they’re all sitting dormant and until I decide to activate or get rid of them, I thought I might as well try to get some money out of them.

So I’ve just begun researching the world of domain parking. Before I go much further though, I just thought I’d see if any of my fellow dopers have any recommendations, advice, or warnings about specific parking companies, general practices, or pitfalls to avoid.

Thanks.

2

No one has any advice?

3

I don’t really have specific advice at the moment, but am wondering what type of parking companies you’ve looked at, and what specifically you plan to do. Just a bunch of google ads or what? And how do you expect traffic to get to your site?

4

All good questions, to which I was hoping to find some answers here. I’ve only just become aware of the whole practice of domain parking, and since I have these domains sitting around doing nothing, I thought it would be nice to see if I could make even a little money from them.

This site, which I found from a Google search on “domain parking services,” and about which I know nothing, suggests that, with fewer than 50 domains, I should try “Sedo and/or Parked for almost instant results.” It goes on:

I’m a babe in the woods as far as all of this goes, so any advice would be welcome.

What do you suggest?

5

IMHO…the Internet doesn’t really need any more crap farms. Would this be a useful venture in any way other than for you to make money? I’m all for making money, I love money. But making money by directing search results to your page full of ads? That’s kind of weak. The Internet needs more valuable content, not more ads.

I’m really disappointed in Google for pushing this service, to be honest. But they do it so they can make money too.

6

No disrespect, ZipperJJ, but I’ve noted your opinions on this topic in other threads, and I’m not interested in them. I’m asking for practical advice from people with experience in this business, not complaints about it.

I will say, however, that I’m not a squatter of the type you seemed most incensed about elsewhere. My domains are mostly ones that I really intend to develop some day, just not now. And if I can make some money on them in the mean time, even just to cover the annual registration fees, why not. (That’s a rhetorical question, not an invitation to debate.)

7

[QUOTE=commasense]
All good questions, to which I was hoping to find some answers here. I’ve only just become aware of the whole practice of domain parking, and since I have these domains sitting around doing nothing, I thought it would be nice to see if I could make even a little money from them.

This site, which I found from a Google search on “domain parking services,” and about which I know nothing, suggests that, with fewer than 50 domains, I should try “Sedo and/or Parked for almost instant results.” It goes on:
I’m a babe in the woods as far as all of this goes, so any advice would be welcome.

What do you suggest?
[/QUOTE]

What I’m wondering is, how much do you pay a service like Sedo? Basically what they’re doing is making a skeleton web page for you that has nothing but paid links on it. Here is an example of a “parked domain” from the Sedo page: http://www.freefonetones.com/ If you look at those links, they’re just paid Google ads… You can put Google ads on your site for free, so why pay a service like Sedo to do it?

The question is, besides making a page and plugging in Google ads for you, what else do they do? How do they ensure that traffic gets to your page? Unless search engines know your page exists, traffic won’t get to it. And unless there is meaningful content on it, search engines won’t give it a good rank. Google crawlers can tell the difference between a real page with meaningful content and a fake page full of paid ads.

I just don’t know how any significant traffic will be directed to your site, and therefore how will you make money? I suppose if Sedo just takes a portion of whatever you earn from clicks on your Google ads, then you have nothing to lose. But then again I don’t know what their pricing structure is, so try to find that out.

If it were me, I would throw together a preliminary page with some content and put Google ads on there myself. Check out https://www.google.com/adsense/ to find out how.

8

Just FYI, I have a personal web page where I published a knitting pattern that I created. I tried out Google Adsense, which put a content-related ad on my page. So for example, it would be an ad for a yarn shop, or something like that - something that was actually useful and relevant for visitors to my page. However, even with a lot of traffic to my page, I was only earning a couple of dollars per month. So you really need a lot of traffic and a lot of clicks to earn any significant money.

A friend of mine, however, has her own site that gets a ton of traffic, and she gets a couple hundred dollars a month from Google ads. But her site is well-known and has been around for years, and has very good unique content.

Stuff to ponder…

p.s. Are you a web designer, and would you be able to put together a site to host Google ads on?

9

nyctea is obviously onto a good idea… the only real way to make a significant amount of cash online is to have a high-traffic site with good content and either charge people to see that content, or make money off advertisements.

The domain parking stuff may work if you’ve got, literally, thousands of domains to work with. With just 12, you’ll really not be making anything. I really find it hard to believe you’ll make even $10/year per domain with this technique.

Like anything else, if it were that easy to make money with it, everyone would be doing it.

10

I use NetFirms. The have a free web service with small ads, although the link is hard to find. I’ve had no problem with them but someone else pitted them.

11

The domain parking services I mentioned charge nothing, and have no obligations, so there’s no downside to trying them out. Both claim to have super duper SEO and keyword selection.

I could design pages for the sites, but that would add the cost of hosting and my time for the design.

12

[QUOTE=commasense]
The domain parking services I mentioned charge nothing, and have no obligations, so there’s no downside to trying them out. Both claim to have super duper SEO and keyword selection.

I could design pages for the sites, but that would add the cost of hosting and my time for the design.
[/QUOTE]

They don’t charge any percentage of the profit from ad clicks on your page?? They have to be charging something, otherwise why would they be doing this?

13

[QUOTE=commasense]
The domain parking services I mentioned charge nothing, and have no obligations, so there’s no downside to trying them out. Both claim to have super duper SEO and keyword selection.
[/QUOTE]
Then why are you asking us if there’s no risk and you’ve done all the research?

Give it a shot and report back.

14

[QUOTE=wasson]
Then why are you asking us if there’s no risk and you’ve done all the research?
[/QUOTE]
Because I wanted helpful advice like yours. :rolleyes:

nyctea: Presumably they are taking something from the advertisers before passing on the users’ share, but they don’t say how much. Another reason I was hoping people here might have some experience to relate.