Instead of letting your domain names waste away unused, you should consider “parking” them.
It takes less than five minutes, and once your domain is parked, you can start making money every time that a visitor clicks an ad on your page.
If you decide one day that you do want to develop the domain, it is just as painless to un-park it.
In order to park a domain, all you need is a parking service. There are thousands of options out there, and everyone has their own set of pros and cons.
Out of all the available services, Sedo and Moniker stand above the rest.
Both web sites allow you to park and list your domain names for free. Even if you list a domain name for sale, you are under no obligation to actually sell it. However, listing it on one of these web sites can be an easy way to make a couple hundred dollars off a domain name that you had almost forgot about.
If you prefer to do things yourself, you can always place AdSense or YPN on an unused domain name. However, keep in mind that you will need to create some type of content for your landing page if you choose to place either of these advertisements on it. Putting these contextual advertising programs on a page with no content is a violation of the program's terms of service.
You're probably thinking, this all sounds great, but how do I get traffic to an undeveloped domain? There are three ways to go about this:
1) Registering domain names with keywords in them: The idea is that people will find the site by typing keywords directly into the URL box.
You'll be surprised how effective this technique is. One of our clients with a domain of freeSOMETHINGvideos.com is raking $10,000 a month from type-in traffic alone.
2) Domain names based on typos: When someone mistypes a URL, they will land on your site and click an ad in an attempt to get to their desired destination.
3) Article submissions: If you park a domain name that you registered because you may want to develop it at a later time, chances are it does not fall into the first two categories.
In this situation, a couple of article submissions can work wonders. Not only will you draw traffic from the articles, but the proper use of anchor text could lead to search engine traffic for your parked domain.
In summary - Domain parking is truly one of those things that you just need to experiment with on your own. Since it is absolutely free, take your newly acquired knowledge and give domain parking a shot!
