Live off of Domain Parking???

[PapaStiz]

I will kinda step in here and give you my experience. It is only my experience and those who would like to agree or disagree is fine..but this is how I got my start.

It is very possible to still get in the game. You need to realize some things first.

Either you have money to begin with and can use that for your seed money, or you got alot of time and patience along with enough of an education to be able to find the "finds" and reject those names that don't make any money.

If you are a money person, you don't need to live off parking as you have come into the $ by some other means and most likely looking to invest some in a market that is very liquid and very little hastle. (As opposed to buy, selling, renting houses -- investing in high risk funds, etc). In that case this does not apply to you anyways.

If you are a time person you come into the game with almost nothing and can walk away with an empire but you got to know how to do it and how to play your cards right.

Right before I joined DNForum I invested 100 bucks into a series of a few names. I sold those names and made a little profit, then bought more, then sold for a little profit. After time I had a bunch of names and 1000 bucks. But, it is always about timing and scouring drop lists.

Domaining is a 3rd job for me (I got 2 already). And it really is a job. There is work involved. I have to look over lists, reg, and then find a way to sell.

After a while I decided that it was to much work and I wanted other people to do the work for me so I got into traffic names. I liquidated all of my non traffic stuff and got all traffic names.

Each parking payment always goes into traffic names, always. Also, I keep a little money on the side for deals that are too good to pass up. All of this money is paid for by previous parking payments.

It is possible to make good money now, still. But, you need to make sure that you are diligent about taking that money and reinvesting it.

You can eat the seed or you can plant it. I would rather eat my crops then eat my seeds.

But to get going you are going to have to work pretty hard if you are starting from scratch and expect to spend a good bit of time.

 

[bdss]

I During the last three months, I registered domains now making 2000$ a month parked. Luck and focus can be helpful.

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Just out of curiosity....are there any TM's or typos of TM's in there....or is it pure generic domains making that kind of money

 

[DOTCA]

A very intresting thread and keep it going. GoPC and PapaStiz have spoken thier heart out. Thanks guys!!!

Thanks for all the nice info... after all that's why we come to DNF.

 

[Domainmaster]

While it may no longer be possible to reg names like Cellphone.com that earn a thousand bucks a day parked, it is still possible to make a living in Cyberspace. As Internet Commerce continues to increase there will be even more ways to profit. As we all know it's all about the traffic.

The internet will continue to evolve and present opportunities to those with the skills, knowledge, and foresight necessary to profit from them. There is also new technology coming out daily that no one has heard of. Some day these names will be household words.

In my opinion a combination of being a domainer, developer, ppc income, affiliate marketer, and webmaster offers one the best chance at earning a good living online. It's all about multiple streams of revenue.

I'm not there yet, but without dreams and goals what's the point.

Let's not forget the famous quote of an early IBM CEO. It went something along the lines of "I cannot see a market for more than a half dozen computers in this country"

 

[SDX]

GREAT INFO!!!
...
Any more input guys?! :smilewinkgrin:

 

[typist]

Just out of curiosity....are there any TM's or typos of TM's in there....or is it pure generic domains making that kind of money

That figure probably includes quite a few typos. I don't care about esthetics as long as a domain gets traffic. As for trademarks, I do not actively hunt for trademarks, but if you look through worldwide trademark registries, you'll notice it's hard to avoid trademarks if you use common language. There are simply too many generic trademarks (like apple, or shell), and even some plain descriptive trademarks. Add unregistered marks enjoying some other form of protection, and you'll be unable to register any domain these days if you're paranoid.

What's important to me, is that I've never lost any tm disputes. It all boils down to usage. So if I by chance should get apple.tld, I sure would use it to promote apples rather than computers.

 

[Tom K.]

I think it is important to diversify until you get some experience. Don't burn all your resources in one area, such as domain parking. Spend a little time, observe, and adjust. As you learn you can gradually increase resources into building a solid portfolio.

Domains are integral to Web navigating. You will always be able to make more money developing as opposed to parking. But as parking evolves, parking providers get better at getting the visitors to click a link. I think you can learn much from studying the parking pages.

 

[SDX]

Ditto! I AGREE!
...
Don't be "afraid" to register anything! :smilewinkgrin:
...
The line between developing and parking is becoming more and more "blurry" now as parking sites are slowly "developing" into mini-sites! :lol:

 

[bdss]

That figure probably includes quite a few typos. I don't care about esthetics as long as a domain gets traffic. As for trademarks, I do not actively hunt for trademarks, but if you look through worldwide trademark registries, you'll notice it's hard to avoid trademarks if you use common language. There are simply too many generic trademarks (like apple, or shell), and even some plain descriptive trademarks. Add unregistered marks enjoying some other form of protection, and you'll be unable to register any domain these days if you're paranoid.

What's important to me, is that I've never lost any tm disputes. It all boils down to usage. So if I by chance should get apple.tld, I sure would use it to promote apples rather than computers.

Thanks Typist, just what I was thinking ...

cheers

 

[Ronaks]

hehe typist

since m very new to this domain parking business can u suggest me some steps for making proper revenue as per the domain as such n make the best out of it

c can u just tell me how can i promote my site in various ways n do the best i have say around 50 domains in all is it fine to park all the domain in 1 parking system as such help neeeded badly..... (

 

[Tom K.]

During the last three months, I registered domains now making 2000$ a month parked..

Just out of curiousity, how many domains did you register in order to make that amount??

 

[namestrands]

If anyone is living off parked earnings then you can be sure that they got some serious typos in there, and good luck to them, only wished I regged them first.

However if not, then they are selling themselves short. Parking domains is the lazy mans solution, all you are doing is living off the bread scraps of the more learned profiteers, who actually sponsor the ads your visitors are clicking.

The sponsor on most occassions are not the company advertising, they are actually affiliates. They pay you 5c a click and they earn $10 a sale, most people landing on your domain are looking for something specific and a higher percentage are looking to buy something, why settle for the milk when you could have the whole cow?

Your domain does not need to have a large amount of traffic, one of my sites got around 10 visits a day, it was earning 2c a day parked, I decided to develop it into an Affiliate site using a product feed from the advertiser. The domain now earns $600 a month with little more than 100 visitors a day.

I now have about 5 websites that are pure affiliate sites all using advertiser product feeds. The combined revenue of these sites annually is the equivalent of the basic wage in my country. (actually more than my girlfriend earns as a teacher, so I keep reminding her... lol)

I have THOUSANDS of domains parked still and that revenue is not even 10% of the revenue of the affiliate sites.

Of course the affiliate sites are country specific, however it would be simple enough to geo-target advertiser feeds to most western world countries and then you could redirect to a parking page for those countries that your advertiser does not serve.

If you had the time and the investment, you could build hundreds of affiliate sites and then live off those earnings. Online commerce is on the increase, yet the PPC revenue is on the decrease in comparison to 2 years ago.

Content based sites will 99% of the time earn more than parked websites. When you park you truly devalue your domain with the search engines, parking a site longer than a year (unless generic term) you can bet you will get delisted on most search engines.

When registering domains, consider only 2 things. Is it targeted? Will someone buy it?

Just because the name sounds good to you, it really is worthless unless it has a visible target market.

Join up to programs like TradeDoubler and buy.at, look at the feeds they offer and concentrate your domain purchases around that.

Typos you can park, the same goes with trademark domains all the rest build it and they will come, if not then join up with google and yahoo and sponsor some keywords, give the domain parkers your 2 cents and you sit back and enjoy the new more comfortable life you have just built for yourselves.

With the exception of a very few, most parking programs have no interest in you as a customer, they want your domains so you can earn for them while they pay you 30% of what they earn.. they dont care if your domain loses out on the search rankings as they can be sure a hundred more like you will come again.

I do not believe that in light of parked websites from parking programs and domain registrars saturating the market it cant be sustainable for much longer at the current growth rate.

Advertisers will start to opt out of these eventually, which will be the catalyst for parking programs having a zero tollerance policy on typos and trademarks.

Dont be suprised if in the next 18 months companies like google will add the option to opt out of parked page results as it does now with search results and content based results.

This market is driven by the advertisers and not the parking programs.

 

[typist]

impressive contribution.

 

[smile]

yeah impressive article u wrote there namestrands . thanks

 

[katherine]

This market is driven by the advertisers and not the parking programs.

That really is the bottom line and that's why we need to pay attention to the advertising trends. Parking companies are just like us... fed by the advertisers.

 

[namestrands]

I will be true to my word and be happy to assist a select few in realising the potential of Affiliate sites.. I am at the moment coding a uk based ligerie site, that has zero maintenance as I have managed to create a cron job to automatically update the feed to a MySQL database on a daily basis, this will increase the speed over pulling the remote XML each time the page loads.

If I have the time over the holidays I will try to include an auto install script with the site and template for you all to try out and hopefully it will give you enough to start your own sites using this generic format, I will avoid the whole template structure and use the simple include methods to allow you to build your own designs with simple html.

Hopefully this will help you all earn more in 2007.

 

[DOTCA]

PM sent Namestrands. Thanks for your willingness to help. Appreciate it. Great writing and well spelt out.

 

[namestrands]

I have the next generation Affiliate Site to add to my collection.

Parties interested in seeing this new site pop me a pm as I am not sure as to the rules on posting Lingerie links

Site took 18 hours to code and design which is a vast improvement on the others.

 

[Tom K.]

I PM'd namestrands for the url. Thanks for a quick reply.

Your affliate sites sports some nice integration. Looks professional and seemless. Couldn't see the checkout integration, though. Can you add items to a cart and then proceed to La Senza's checkout? Or is it buy one item at a time? Couldn't see that part because the affiliate isn't yet approved.

As far as affiliate sites go I like it.

It looks like you're using Buy.at which looks like an affiliate management service like CJ. There seems to be a number of services like this one. Are they all the same or do some break away from the pack?

Anyways, wishing you all the best in your development.

Cheers.

 

[domainah]

Although I could live of domain parking I still work, mainly because I think its a fragile business,
...I actually see overly-eager newbies causing trouble in this sector, many reg worthless names, get frustrated, wonder how they could increase traffic and the next thing you know they are trying some fake traffic scam..seen it a thousand times..this is lowering CPC rates and will cause more and more advertisers to totally opt out of the parking-ads,.... I mean what we have seen with the decrease in CPC rates over the last year is not because advertisers are less, its because traffic (worthless fake traffic) has increased, so traffic in general is cheaper, I think there needs to be a better job done by the parking companies and google etc. to control this BS, even in this thread there are people asking how to get more traffic to their parked pages with promotional things to their high paying keyword domains in order to get lots of $$$ quickly, all my high paying keywords CPCs have dropped because of exactly that, if you reg names today that make $$$$ monthly they are either typos or the traffic is fake, I dont care about the typo traffic because its good traffic, but I think companies need to invest to filter out the garbage otherwise the only people making money are yahoo and google, because they are getting paid either way...