Cash Partking Payday?

Welcome to What is Domain Parking? and Does it pay to use it?,  I can almost bet that if you are into buying and selling domains that this blog post is going to be of great interest to you. Or if you own a domain name that is just sitting around waiting for you to create a site around but now you have no intention of using the domain, this might help you recoup the cost of the purchase.

I am going to give you a new spin on this old concept but first...

 

 

What is Domain Parking? 

The domain parking method is a little different than simply parking your domain name that has a php theme or portal page running native advertising. We will discuss these methods in a moment. Just like the picture above. You can use GoDaddy, Sedo or Parking Crew, to name a few for native ad type parking.

 Domain parking has been a long time practice by domain investors to monetize a domain without building a website. The premise, is that domain investors who purchase one or more word domains would have a natural typed in traffic.

 Let's say that you were to own "money .com" for instance, there would be a lot of  people who would naturally type that word into the navigation bar and you would get traffic. There are two types of domain parking they are monetized and non-monetized parking pages. Of course in this post we will look at the monetization of a parked domain.

How do you Monetize a Domain name with no website?

  When you purchase a domain name from a registrar such as NameCheap or GoDaddy, the name is automatically added to their name servers and most will place a a one page (php) portal template with advertising that link to PPC ads relevant to the name or a coming soon, under construction page.

In order to monetize a parked page you will need to find a provider, hopefully a provider that you purchased your domain through or a separate reseller such as Parking Crew. If you registered your domain through GoDaddy,  you can add your domain name to their cash parking directory for about $5 a month. Sedo, will do this for free if you purchase or move your domains to them.

  History of Domain Parking

Trying to figure out who or what company started parked domain portals is just as much of a mystery and one that I will keep my ear to the ground and update you when I find out. I ask this question on namepros and received a couple of response. One domain investor told me ADEGRO an Italian based web provider. According to the article they have been the first company to park domains without redirecting out of network advertising in 2008.

Another investor, told me that he thought it was advertising .com (AOL,) was the first using zeroclick. I did a lookup on archive dot org and advertising .com was first captured in early of 2005.

The history of Domain Parking is vague at best. I believe that the person or company that put the first domain parking page online got their idea from web portals which are as old as the internet themselves and are still being used today.

My first domain name was a portal site that sold discount telecom services back in 2002.

Basically, portal sites are just informative link sites and generally, they have no advertising on them due to the fact that most links lead to a purchase of a product or service.

Does Cash Parking Pay Today?

It does and always will, you will need to send a lot of traffic to it on your own. That is the key to making any kind of money through advertising. Of course you should know that you will probably have a high bounce rate.

In 2011, Google.com added an identifier that removed parked pages from the search engine results due to the fact that parked domains did not add value to what people were searching for. This also included any kind of placeholder such as "under construction" type of page.

Before 2011 and Googles update, parked pages that were keyword rich such as "BuyAndroid. com" would rank in search results where people searching for Android phones and cases would naturally click on a result due to the fact, that the domain name had the word Android in it, thinking that the website specialized in Android phones and paraphernalia. Instead was an ad infested dictionary style portal page. 

Google and most search engines want relevant content not advertisements which should be secondary anyway.

My Own Tests Of Parking Pages

 

 

I  got interested in how parking pages work for a few years now. I came into the game late after Googles 2011 update. I also tested a couple of different parking pages.The one above was a domain/under construction theme that was responsive.

When someone landed on one of my domains they were introduced with the name of the site a very brief description with a link to either the sales letter or to Godaddy auctions. In the footer were four columns. On each column I places other domains that I was selling and link them to my parking page, sales letter or GoDaddy auctions.

I ran that theme for about 3 months. My traffic was around 300 or so per month just using social media and forums. My bounce rate was around 98% for all three months.

With the same amount of traffic per month, this time I added blogging to the mix and sent prospect through a call to action to a page that I created in html. This was not a responsive site but old school. The text links sent prospects to a $7.00 clickbank product. 

Even using a call to action from a blog post and explaining what to do at the portal site my bounce rate was still over 90%. These parking page type sites were not working the way I had hoped.  I abandon the parking page for a simple link style page like this...

I actually began selling a few domains names with a lot less traffic and my bounce rate drop to about 39%. I also use this link style approach on the domains for sale page here on this blog.

I check my traffic stats that were on the page before moving over to blogspot and here is what I found...

As you can see from the image above that I had 101 visits and I sold 5 domain names in total during that period. Not bad at all.

Parking Page Payday Conclusion 

So far you have discovered what a parking page is and where to find good vendors for your own parking page if after reading this information you choose to do so. You also found out what works better than an average parking page from my personal experiments over the last two years.

Go ahead do your own testing and see what works for you. Having a good domain name that could drive natural clicks may pan out, or even driving traffic to your parking page may give you even better results.

 I know a lot of domain investors still use this method. Remember Google won't index a parking page in the search results and you may not get your domain link to by other sites,  due to the fact that it is only a link based page with no credible content.

With all of this in mind Good luck with your Cash Parking Payday.