The year was 2005 and I had been domaining "professionally" for close to one year and accumulated a domain portfolio with thousands of domain names mostly focused on Music/Movies/Games, basically domains within the entertainment niche as well as a lot of Adult/Porn related domain names. I had a lot of traffic too coming in to all of this domains which were all of generic nature as well as ones that were expired or "foreclosed" sites which I picked up once they expired... I never really liked domains that just sounded cool but didn't have the potential to generate traffic, I did buy some of those, for example 3 letter .net and .org and single word names in com/net/org but flipped them as fast as I could. Most of the domains I kept were consistent traffic generating domains which I picked up for anywhere from $10 to $20 over at GoDaddy or eNom Club Drop or $60 at most over at Pool / SnapNames. I was never a big spender on any one particular domain name but went after many domains each and every day... Consistently. This was my one and only strategy... To acquire a lot of domains that receive traffic.
But all this traffic from domain names wasn't converting so well when it was parked. The click through rates were really low, barely at 10 percent across my portfolio, peaking at 20% sometimes at certain parking companies, but the payouts were even more depressing... Not even 20 cents per click... Some names did manage to get a bit more but that was the exception. So I had a domain portfolio that was generating a few hundred bucks per day from thousands of domain names that I paid six figures for... Great? No.. Not really, I wasn't happy with it. You are probably thinking to yourself... With a ROI of about anywhere from as low as 12 month's and maximum 24 month's --- it is pretty good... But I wasn't thinking like that. I knew there was more money to be made. I wanted to make the most of what I got one way or another and I was determined to find a way to do so.
At that time, there was at least 20 domain parking companies that were offering their domain monetization services. I had opened accounts at all of them of course. I tried out at least a few hundred of my domain names at each and every service for at least a week or two. I managed my domains and optimized them as best as I could but the results were pretty much all the same everywhere I went. I spent more than six month's going from parking company to parking company hoping to find that perfect partner that will pay a little more, at least double up the payouts and convert the traffic better by maybe 10% and I'd be happy... Nope, it didn't happen. The results were all the same across the board. I came to the conclusion that either the traffic wasn't as good as I thought or the domain parking companies were really underpaying me.
I decided that enough is enough... Something just isn't working out with domain parking and it was time for change. I was not happy with approximately 90% of the visitors leaving my domains without even clicking on any of the links, 90% of the traffic going to waste and the payouts fluctuating as well... Not good. There was no consistency with parking whatsoever. Also the traffic declined slowly month after month. So, I went ahead and setup my own parking page. I first visited some of the websites that were showing up on my parked pages as sponsored ads, signed up for their affiliate program if they had one, grabbed the url with my affiliate code in it and plugged it in my own custom parked page. It was nothing fancy... Nothing too sophisticated or out of the ordinary. Just a regular web page with big blue textlinks and a good call to action. I setup 5 custom parked pages total which were self hosted and managed for each category and manually redirected all of the thousands of my domains to them accordingly. I had setup custom parked pages for music, games, movies, dating and porn originally. Later on I setup custom pages with relevant ads on even more.
My top performing category was Porn and second best was Dating... The other three didn't do as great but they still earned more money as compared to when they were parked. Overall, once I switched up all of my domain names to point to my own custom parked pages, which only took about a few hours to make the DNS change, the next day my revenue had increased more than 5x from direct affiliate sales. The following day it increased 7x. The third day was even better... The week after it was close to 12x. After about one month, I compared my monthly statistics and I had earned more than 1000% more. I made more in one month that I would of made in one year with domain parking. But how is this possible? What the hell... Was I just lucky? No! Going direct is where the money is... Duh!
You see, the sponsored advertisements on parked domains are mostly from search engine marketers. They buy up a lot of advertisements on Google and Yahoo... Why? Because they are promoting affiliate programs. They are "resellers" of whatever product or service. Lets take Hotels.com for example. A search engine marketer signs up for the Hotels.com affiliate program, buys up PPC ads over at Google/Yahoo which are displayed on parked domain names...and if there is indeed a sale / lead generated through one of the links that the search engine marketer placed, he will get a 5% commission from Hotels.com --- if it was for a $1000 reservation, he gets $50. Search engine marketers or "affiliates" generally bid up based on quantity and not quality, so they try to acquire as much traffic as possible... This increases their chances of getting more sales.... Lottery style.
A lot of times the ads they setup to be displayed for many keywords aren't relevant. I remember many times having half if not more of the ads displayed on my parked pages which weren't even on-topic or even remotely close. For example I would have a games domain that would display dating, gambling or finance links on it... What the hell? How is that relevant! That surely isn't going to interest a "gamer" visiting my game site... So you get what I am saying. This is partially the reason why maybe my traffic wasn't converting as well --- the sponsored advertisements weren't on-topic... Not the best user experience if you know what I mean.
As for the payouts, obviously the profits were being split five ways. The affiliate is always offering either a revenue share or a fixed payout for a sale/lead. So the affiliate was paying the search engine marketer to promote the product/service or whatever who was paying Google/Yahoo in order to display his advertisements to potential users who may be interested in the product/services, Google/Yahoo are syndicating the advertising inventory to it's "partners" and paying the parking company who pays out the domain owners who parks the domain. By the time you get paid, it is only a fraction of what the actual traffic / value of the click was bidded up and actually may be worth.
So, I eliminated all this middlemen and went direct to the affiliate and top of the chain. The results were mind blowing. Over 1000% increase in less than a month!! Traffic continued to grow as well instead of decline like it used to for all the month's that I had my domains parked... If it wasn't for those 20 parking companies, I don't think I would of ever figured out that going direct is where the real money is... I was stubborn enough though and knew deep down inside that the traffic is worth more and obviously it is. If it wasn't for trying out all those parking companies I would of never clearly understood that they are paying pennies compared to what each and every visitor may be worth. Sure, they provided a simple and efficient way to make money off the traffic without doing much but come on... It is only a tiny fraction. A little optimization paid off big time.
By not going direct you are missing out on too many opportunities and leaving so much money on the table. My problem wasn't me being lazy, my problem was that I trusted and believed in all the hot shots saying that domain parking is where the money is... It is true, there is money to be made parking domains but there is even more money to be made by going direct to the source. A lot more money. Try it for yourself... Visit one of your highly trafficked parked domains, sign up with all of the websites that show up as sponsored ads on your parked domain, setup a simple web page with your affiliate links embedded in them... The results should be quiet interesting to say the least. This is nothing new obviously, and many have tried this and doing this already, but if you haven't experimented with this as of late --- you need to. There is tons of good affiliate programs out there offering revenue shares as much as 80% and fixed payouts on even free sign ups... The money is there --- go get it!
