Money Maker # 3: How to Make Money with Parked Domain Names:
Another way to earn cash with your domains is by signing up with a paid parking service. What is paid parking? This is a program where you assign your domain with a paid parking company. The company then places pay per click ads with your domain. If someone clicks on an ad, you earn commission. As you can imagine, if the domain gets a large amount of traffic, you could earn a large commission. You could earn anywhere from a few cents to a few thousand depending on your domain quality & traffic. The best part is that this gives you a way to earn extra money while you are in the process of selling your domain.
Sometimes you can get your entire investment back on the price paid for registration. If you have a domain with great traffic, you could earn a very nice passive income. There are several companies on the web that offer a paid parking service. The list below lists a few of the most popular programs:
Paid Parking Services
www.Sedo.com
www.NameDrive.com
www.Parketeer.com
www.ParkingDots.com
www.Godaddy.com
Some of these companies are free to use (such as NameDrive.com), while others charge a small monthly fee. Usually the “free” companies offer lower commissions, while the companies that you pay a small fee offer higher commission percentages. Which company is best? Again, it depends on your preference. In my experience, I have tried several “paid parking” services. I like Sedo.com simply because I am often selling domains on the site & it helps me to keep everything organized. However, other programs have given a good return.
How Domain Name Parking Works
To start earning money with domain parking, sign up with a company that offers the service. Again, there are several to choose from. Then, most companies will require that you provide a list of all the domains you want to “park.” This may take time you have a bulk list of domains. In this case, many companies will allow you to upload a spreadsheet or file with the entire list of domains.
Next, you will have to forward the domain to the paid parking service so you can start earning money for clicks. There are a couple of ways to do this. Most companies will allow you to forward the nameserver, or forward via a URL link (or both). To change the name server, log into your domain registrar’s account (e.g. Godaddy.com). Then click on “Nameservers” as pictured below.
Godaddy
Next, you be taken to a page where you can view your Current Nameserver, and make modifications. Click the “Custom Nameserver” tab as pictured below. You can then enter the Nameservers of the company you are parking with.
Godaddy
In the Nameserver 1 & 2 location, you can enter the paid parking Nameserver. For instance, Sedo.com uses the following Nameservers:
NS1.SEDOPARKING.COM, NS2SEDOPARKING.COM
The domain can also be forwarded to the parking service. To do this, click on the “forward” tab on the “manage domains” home page. You can then add a redirect URL.
Make sure to click “enabled” as pictured above. Then enter the URL for the redirect . For Sedo.com, you would use the following: www.sedoparking.com/Domain.com. You would replace domain.com with your own domains. Then click “ok” to save (changes may take up to 48 hours). The domain will now be forwarded to a “parked page.”
After your domains are redirected to your parking page, you can optimize and customize your pages. You can do this by selecting relevant keywords, and choosing a page layout that best suits your domain. This simple step is often overlooked. If you will simply take the time to research & select high paying keywords, your earnings could be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or more! It is important to select keywords that match your domain. For instance, if your domain is Carparts.com, then you don’t want to have keywords for art, painting, etc. You would want to use keywords that are related to car parts. Next, you want to use a keyword tool with a pay-per-click company to see which keywords cost the most for advertisers. You can do this by going to Yahoo! Publisher Network, or Google Adwords. Do a quick search for keywords related to your domain. Then, compile a quick list by copying & pasting the highest paying words. Then, use these for your keyword optimization on your parked page. By using the highest paying keywords, you can maximize the revenue you receive from each click. I learned this lesson the hard way. By simply changing the keywords I was using, I was able to double my earnings almost instantly.
Also, you will have the option of selecting a page layout. This is less important, but you will want to look & see which design compliments your domain. Also, see which design has the best “click through” appeal. Pick the design that looks natural, with ppc links that blend in with the page. The more natural & blended the page looks, the more revenue you will likely earn.
The sites mentioned above are great if you have a small portfolio of domains & you want to earn revenue while you are either trying to sell them, building a website, or simply holding them as an investment. However, if you happen to have a large portfolio (or eventually build one), then you may want to look at other options. For example, Google has a special domain parking service that allows domainers with large domain portfolios (that generate large amounts of monthly traffic) to use their Google Adsense program in conjuction with the domains.
The program works similar to paid parking with other companies, however, you basically cut out the middle man. You simply use Google’s special code that analyzes domains & displays ads on your parked pages. Again, this is mostly for very large domain portfolios. The last time I checked I think the minimum required traffic from the domains had to be around 750,000 hits/month. So that means if each domain you own receives 100 hits per month, you would need 7,500 of them before you were accepted. However, Google may change the requirements at any time. For more information on this program or to apply for the service, you can visit http://www.google.com/domainpark/.
Money Maker # 4: Domain PPC Brokerage/Arbitrage
Another way to make money with domains is by taking advantage of pay-per-click (PPC) “brokerage.” What is PPC brokerage? This is similar to paid parking, but you can control every aspect of the pay per click program. This is a method where you set up a domain, make a simple 1-10 page site, place pay-per-click ads on the site, and then drive traffic to the site. When you “buy” traffic, the idea is to pay a minimal expense for the keywords, and then have higher paying keywords on your site. You might pay $0.05 for a keyword, and then you “sell” another keyword for $0.50 (making $0.45 cents in gross profit). This may not be much, but it doesn’t take a math whiz to figure out that if you are doing this in the thousands or hundreds of thousands successfully, it can be very profitable.
Starting a Pay-per-click Campaign
To get started, you must sign up for your own PPC publishing program. There are many companies online to choose from. The table below lists some of the most popular pay-per-click companies.
Pay-Per-Click Companies
Google Adsense
Yahoo! Publisher Network
MS Ad Center
Miva
Simply
Simply choose a company (or all companies) & sign up for a publisher’s account. This is usually free, and takes only a few minutes. Some of these programs may want to verify your site before accepting your application. That’s why it is a good idea to have a general layout for your website before you apply. Once you have been approved, you can quickly get the code to insert into your page so that the ads will display.
Build a Simple Site
Once you have the ad code, you can begin making a template for a simple website. Many hosting companies will have built-in templates that you can use. You can also use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) html generator such as FrontPage, Web Expression, or Dreamweaver. You will also need to have your site hosted online. There are several companies that will let you do this for free, but they display ads on the page also. Your best bet is to go with a cheap hosting plan for around $3.99-6.99.
This way, you don’t have to worry about the hosting company’s ads. The idea here is to build a simple web page or website (1-10 pages in length) and place links (or plain ads) on the page. The links will then lead the visitor to a page with almost nothing but ads on it. This leaves the visitor almost no choice but to click on an ad. Of course, you could always add pictures or content.
Of course, the better you make your site, the more clicks you will get. Try adding pictures, content, and more for a better look. The more blended & natural the ads look, the more clicks you will get. When you are ready to build pages, do a keyword search like I mentioned before on a popular site such as Yahoo! Publisher Network. You can then find top paying keywords. You will then use these keywords for your Meta Tag & any content you place on the page. This will usually cause the ads with high paying keywords to display on your site. Also, try adding content at the bottom. You can write a short keyword rich paragraph at the very bottom of the page. This way, the ads display at the top, and the visitor would have to scroll down the page to see the words (this technique is often used).
You can build one good site, and then forward all of your domains to that one site, or point each domain to a separate web page. This is good because it saves on hosting fees. Also, many hosting plans now allow for “multiple websites” on one plan. This means you can literally have as many mini-websites as you want, all on the same hosting account. So you simply use one hosting plan, and you can monetize your entire domain portfolio using all of the techniques mentioned in this guide.
This works the same way as before when I discussed forwarding your domain to a paid parking service. Instead, you can create one page, and forward all your domains to that one page with ads. Also, you can group domains (for example, all medical related domains), and then create a page with medical related ads & keywords. Then, forward each medical related domain using the forward button.
If you want each domain to have the appearance of it’s own web page without actually creating a separate page for each domain, you can do this easily as well. Create one generic page with no logos or typing. Then, when you forward all of your domains to this one page, select the “mask” or “alias” button. This makes it appear as if the “typed-in” domain has it’s own page, when in reality it is being forwarded to another page. This “masking” feature keeps the domain that the person typed in visible in the browser bar. For example, you have 50 medical related domains. So you create one generic web page with all medical related links on it.
We’ll pretend this page is created on “nurses.com.” Then, you forward all of your medical related domains to this one page. If you select “mask,” then it will keep each separate domain visible in the browser bar. So a person goes & types in one of your medical domains (doctor.com), & it forwards them to the generic medical page you have for nurses.com. They will never know it was really nurses.com, because you “masked” the real page’s domain. This can be a real time saver if you have a lot of domains & you wan to create a “mini-site.”
Driving Traffic
After you have set-up a simple 1-10 page site with ads, you can begin to drive traffic to the site. This is where you will start to realize that traffic=money. Of course there are 3 ways to do this. First, there is the free way. Next, you have the cheap way. Finally, you have the expensive way.
The free way to get traffic is by type-ins (if the domain is good), and by taking advantage of forums, social networking sites, email campaigns, search engine referrals, and any other free marketing methods you can develop. You can respond to forums & use your link as your signature. Go to social networking sites & tell your “friends” about your site. Put links in an eBook & offer it for a free download. Create a video with the domain advertised in a subscript, and circulate it online. The sky is the limit. As long as you aren’t spamming or breaking any rules or terms of service, then you have almost unlimited free resources to drive traffic. Also, this is where it can pay off if you purchase an expired domain with existing traffic (or bulk of expired domains), and then point them to your site.
If you don’t have a lot of “resources,” and you want to drive even more traffic, then you may want to take advantage of the second method of getting traffic (the cheap method). To get cheap traffic, you will actually use PPC campaign and banner advertising methods. Again, the key here is to pay a low price for traffic and then receive a higher price when they click on your ads. To do this, seek the absolute lowest bids on keywords, but build as many keywords as possible. You can create multiple campaigns, with up to 500 “cheap” keywords for each campaign. You will not get as many clicks per keyword, so it is important to get as many as possible.
Also, use cheap pay-per-click companies. GoClick.com will allow you to bid as low as $0.01 per click. If you use creative banner advertising with Adwords, it could be even lower. You can then drive large amounts of traffic to your site for dirt cheap prices. Then, you can reap the profits for the clicks you receive in return. Just make sure the traffic sources you are using are real “genuine” visits. Avoid companies that use automated robots, etc.
Obviously, you should stick to the first two methods to drive traffic to your sites. This is because the last method (the expensive way) could devastate your profits. If you pay too much, you could actually lose money. That is why it is extremely important to find the cheapest advertising methods as possible, and monitor your progress very carefully. Also, beware of “bad” sources of traffic. What are “bad” sources of traffic? Usually, it is involves these “get 1,000,000 hits for $10” schemes. This traffic is usually worthless because it involves automated robots or other ineffective ways to deliver “fake” or “undesired” traffic that usually results in no clicks. So you must be very careful when paying for traffic.
Track Progress and Collect Profits
Again, it is extremely important to measure your progress. Try to find out which method results in the best return. Be careful not to overspend. Using brokerage/arbitrage can be very profitable, but it can also make you lose money. Your success will depend on your own skills of finding cheap, clever ways to get traffic, while making sure you stay at a profit. If you get really talented at doing brokerage, you could literally almost double your investment (or more). If you are not careful & clever, you could actually lose money. The key is to start slow, and spend cautiously.
One Word of Caution: Read Also, be very careful to read all of the fine print in the terms & conditions (and program policies) of any PPC programs you decide to use for the purpose of generating revenue. The last thing you want is to get banned by the company you were using to generate click revenue. Some programs (such as Google Adsense) are not too fond of the type of sites I just described. They consider these M.F.A. sites (made for Adsense) and they have been banning publishers that have created these
types of sites. Does this mean you should forget about the whole idea? Not necessarily. It simply means to read & understand everything to know what is allowed & what is not allowed. Maybe you will have to make a slight alteration (such as add more content, etc.) if your site has nothing but ads. Things are not always “black and white” with these policies. However, they will ban you if they feel you are behaving in a way that is bad for their business. So be careful to read & follow the policies of the company you use, and be careful where you by your traffic.
Money Maker # 5: Use Affiliate Links
Another way to make money with domains is by using them with affiliate links. This idea is similar to PPC brokerage, only you are using your own affiliate links to earn commissions (instead of PPC ads). You simply sign up with an affiliate company, place your own special referral links on a page, and drive traffic to the domain’s page. When people click on your links, it is tracked by their cookies. You can then earn large commissions if they visitor makes a purchase.
To get started with this method, you need to sign up with an affiliate account. There are lots of different affiliate programs on the web, and each one deals with different kinds of products. The table below lists some of the best affiliate programs online.
Top Affiliate Programs
· Clickbank.com
· CJ.com (Commission Junction)
· LinkShare.com
· Shareasale.com
· Amazon.com
These programs allow you to earn commissions on anything from digital products to tangible products. These usually pay on a CPA (cost per action) basis. In other words, you only earn commission if the visitor clicks on your referral link, and then performs a certain action. This “action” can be anything from making a purchase, to signing up with an account. Also, some companies (such as CJ.com) will manage affiliate programs for other large companies (such as eBay.com). With eBay’s affiliate program, you can earn money (up to $20) for each new account that you refer (if they make a purchase/bid within a specified time period), or you can earn a percentage of the sales price. Here is how you can start cashing in on these affiliate programs.
First, you will have to go to the company of your choice & sign up for an account. Most companies have a quick approval & affiliate accounts are almost always free to join. You may even want to sign up for more than one affiliate program. This way you can diversify your links and product offerings. Next, you will want to create a simple 1 page site just like you would with the ppc brokerage. You can then place your affiliate links on the page. Some programs will give you access to text links, special links with product pictures, and more. You can then set up a page with your special affiliate links placed on the page.
After you have the links set up on your page, you can point all of your domains to the site. Again, this is where buying expired domains with traffic can pay off (especially if you have a bulk of domains). Simply forward the domains to the one site. Again, you can do this by logging into your domain account & following the steps mentioned earlier.
Once you have the site set up & your domains forwarded to the site (or set up as a sub domain) then you should start seeing traffic. To increase your traffic flow, you can use the techniques (free & cheap) that I mentioned before.
Money Maker # 6: Sell Your Links or Ad Space
If you have a website, then you probably know all about back links. As I already stated, search engines (such as Google.com) rely very heavily on back links as an indicator of a site’s value. This is because links used to occur over the natural course of a website’s development. They were slowly built up over months or years. A webmaster would link to another site if he or she felt like the site had good content or features.
After webmaster’s learned that back links could help get higher results in search engines, manipulations started to take place. Webmasters then started developing linking schemes designed to make their sites appear more popular than they actually were (to the search engines anyway). Entrepreneurs have now realized that links can be valuable as well. This opened up a market to “link selling” and people now sell back links on their websites.
Some links can go as much as $50-200 a piece or more. But how do domains relate to back links? Well there are a couple of ways you can make money with this. First, if you have a domain that is generating traffic, you can offer to forward the domain to a site for a yearly/monthly fee. Secondly, you could build a simple one page site (or full website), write articles, and sell the back link.
Sell a Forwarding/Redirect Service
The first step is simple, and it doesn’t require you to build a site. To do it, you just need a domain that has some traffic and a search engine presence. Again, this is where buying expired domains can prove profitable. If you can find a domain that was used with a website, then it will almost always have traffic. Use the tools on domain software, or check a domain expiration site that gives this information before attempting to purchase an expired domain.
Once you have a domain that gets a reasonable amount of traffic, you can then sell a “forwarding” or “redirect” service. This can be done in several ways. First, you can make a simple listing on an auction site or website offering the service for sale. Check your traffic logs to see how many hits the domain is receiving. You can show a screen shot in the auction/site to prove to the buyer the kind of traffic the domain receives. You can then offer to forward the domain’s traffic to the buyer’s site for a given length of time (months, years, etc.). You can do this with one domain, or you can do this with multiple domains. You will keep ownership, but the buyer will get the traffic.
To forward the domain, follow the steps shown earlier on forwarding the domain. Simply log in to the account, redirect the domain to the new URL, and forward the domain to the buyer’s site. How much should you charge for this service? Again, this depends on a few factors such as the amount of traffic the domain receives, Page Rank, etc. A typical back link can cost anywhere from $5-$1000 a year (or more). A good way to estimate your selling price is to calculate the cost of the traffic if a ppc campaign
was being used. For example, let’s assume you have an expired domain that receives 100 unique visitors per day. You are interested in selling the domain’s “redirect” service. So to come up with an estimate, you take 100 visitors and multiply by 0.01. The $0.01 represents traffic if purchased from a ppc company like Goclick.com. This works out to be $1/day. Now multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you come up with a value of $365. So roughly, the domain is worth at least $365 because it can generate this revenue in a year (or at least save on advertising costs).
If you are selling the service, however, you would probably want to offer a lower price to give the buyer an extra incentive to buy your redirect service. This is a quick & easy way to make money with domains, with almost no work involved. Remember those companies I mentioned earlier that offer “100,000 hits in one month for $xx.xx?” Well one way that these companies do this is by using automated robots that generate nearly worthless “hits” and usually no clicks. However, another way this is done is by investing large amounts of money into expired domains with good traffic figures. They are then able to direct 100’s or 1000’s of visitors to your site by forwarding (or redirecting) these hits to your domain or website. There are several companies that are now using this method with domains to generate revenue.
This works out well for the company. The revenue they generate from domain traffic covers registration fees & expenses. Meanwhile, they get to keep the domain as it goes up in value. Then, they can always flip the domain for even more money in the future. This is the same as investing in real estate. You buy a few extra rental properties. Then you rent the properties & make a small profit. Meanwhile, you retain ownership while the value keeps rising. You can then flip the house in a few years for substantial profits. This is all very similar to domains!
Money Maker # 7: Build a Real Website
Another method way to profit from domains is to use them with an actual website. This is different from the methods I mentioned earlier. In those situations, you are only creating simple 1-5 page sites containing very simple designs, and very low content. The idea was to place PPC ads or affiliate links on the site.
However, it can be just as profitable if you develop an actual website. This is true whether it is an old or new site. How can domains help make money in this method? First, let’s consider a brand new website. When starting a new website, traffic will be virtually non-existent. You will also have to do tedious things such as: Submit to search engines, build back links, develop marketing methods, etc. These things can all be very time consuming (or expensive), especially when you have to actually develop the website and build content. This is where domains can prove helpful. You can register an expired domain and use its existing internet presence to deliver traffic to the new site, or you can register a new domain and forward several other (expired) domains to the new site. Either way, thiscan put your new website on the fast track to gaining traffic & popularity.
How can you monetize the new website? There are literally dozens of ways you can make money with a website. I have already covered a few of them. Again, you can use PPC ads to generate revenue, affiliate links, and you can always sell back links. In addition you can sell your own product, subscriptions, etc. By using several “high traffic” domains to drive traffic to your site, you are not only saving money in advertising costs, but you are also maintaining an investment (the domain itself) which you can later flip for an even greater profit. Remember, you can roughly calculate the value of a domain’s traffic by comparing it to the expense of running a ppc campaign. Let’s assume you can buy an expired domain that shows average traffic values of about 100 visitors a day. Again, this would roughly cost at least $365 a year to get this traffic if you were running an inexpensive ppc campaign. You can often acquire expiring domains with these numbers for as little as $30-100.
Even if you have an established website, don’t underestimate the power of domains to beef up your existing visitors. By using the same techniques, you can deliver good quality traffic to your existing website & see results almost immediately. In fact, most top websites & webmasters have a large arsenal of domains delivering quality traffic over & over again. If you have a very large portfolio of domain names, you can long in to your domain account & select all of the domains & then forward all of them to the same site. Then, all of the traffic will flow to the one site you have the domain redirected towards.
Chapter 5: Domain Tips and Tricks
How to Make Money With Domain Names-Intro
What Is a Domain Name Exactly-Chapter 1
How to Find Profitable Domain Names-Chapter 2
How to Estimate and Appraise Domain Value-Chapter 3
How to Make Money and Profit from Domains-Chapter 4
How to Make Money and Profit from Domains-Continued
Domain Name Tips & Tricks-Chapter 5
Sponsored Links
Posted under Domain Names, eBooks
This post was written by Ben on May 31, 2009
