So what exactly is domain parking? Domain Parking is an advertising practise used predominantly by domain registrars and internet advertising publishers to create income from type-in traffic to an blank domain. The url will normally resolve to a page consisting of nothing but advertisements or links to affiliate programs. There is typically no useful information of any value to the web user who usually clicks on one of the links just to get away from the page. The domain owner is normally paid based on the number of clicks and the following benefit derived from such clicks.



Is it possible to earn money from domain parking? Yes it is! Some domainers have portfolios of thousands of such sites that produce hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Venture Capital companies. One Canadian internet mogul has managed to sign an agreement with the government of Cameroon. Cameroon URLs end with a ".cm". Many internet users mistakenly type in ".cm" instead of ".com" and all of the unregistered domain names resolve to a parked domain page consisting of advertisements. This individual is reported to make millions of dollars each month, his share for assisting the Cameroon government monetize this situation!

My personal experiments with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty miserable. I had several websites with Sedo for a 2 year period and I made approximately 1 cent per month! Not even enough to bare the expense of the domain name registration fee each year. GoDaddy was even worse. I had to to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your page there. I had just one site for several months but I was unable to make sufficient money to even cover the cost of this fee, even though it wasn't a lot to begin with. I think that if you're a bulk domainer with thousands of sites, you might achieve substantionally more traction than I did. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Before you think that you can go out and buy some domains and snowball your parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the game. It's now a highly cut-throat playing field and there are several thousands of experienced domainers struggling to earn income from domain parking. All of the 2 & 3 letter domains are all gone and so are most of the four letter domains too! Getting type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Private Equity companies getting in on the action, there's more than enough money being thrown around to buy up all the possible dictionary words and their possible permutations.

But you don't need to completely give up on the idea of . There are still many tricks to make some money. Some of them involve creating MFA (made for adsense) sites that have a little bit of content which draws search engine traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is substantially more involved than regular domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are ways to automate this procedure, but many of these methods require significant cash outlay for software tools that all create the same duplicate content for all users. Creating unique content is incredibly important for ranking high in the search engines and getting organic traffic. There are ways to automate this process without spending any money but thats a new topic for another article.