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Why Domain Parking works for me

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privatereg

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I was going to title this thread “How to Make a Million Dollars with Domain Parking” but I figured that would make a lot of people think it was click bait so I’m taking a different approach HAHA.

The reason I’m taking some time to write this (and more importantly taking up your valuable time reading it) is I get really tired of everyone saying Parking is Dead. Let’s see if you know one of these people:
  1. They never tried it – just like to troll the forums….
  2. They took 100 names they had lying around desperately trying to sell, and figured they’d try parking and it made $0.05 in two months.
  3. They have a domain portfolio from 5 years ago without ongoing reinvestment and watched the traffic, EPC, CTR and revenue die over time.
  4. They believe the registrars are faking the traffic stats at the auctions, the parking companies are keeping all the clicks, reporting falsified data, stealing your money and think it’s all a scam.
  5. They tried to game the system with fake traffic or 100 other methods (that I won’t get into) and got their accounts and domains banned (from DRID tracking), and now want to seek revenge.
  6. They have an inherent belief that domain parking is for “bottom feeders” of the domain industry and should be avoided at all costs.
So why am I posting this? I just want to put it out there that Domain Parking is a serious business and some are making substantial revenues with it even today. But one thing is for sure – it doesn’t work like it did in 2005 – you can’t just randomly pick a domain that looks good to you and expect to make money. And there is no lazy way to riches with domain parking anymore – those days are long gone. The big players know that it takes several hours a day of their time to research, buy, optimize and manage, and you have to do it every day of the year – no time off. But the good news is once you perfect a formula it actually works, and it’s a serious business for corporations and individual domainers alike, even in today’s competitive marketplace.

Before I go any further, I’m not going to tell you the tricks to find the right domain name that makes money and I’m not going to sell you anything nor offer consulting services for the simple selfish reason that it increases competition. This is not a business of “the more, the merrier” – that will clue you in on why you don’t see in the forums how to really do it (unless they want to sell you something). Instead I want to give you my experience with domain parking (since 2007 but more importantly in recent months) and why I think it’s still a viable business today for a select few.

So let’s take away the mystery and talk about it being a serious business. Like any true business start-up, you need capital, and with domain parking today you need lots of it. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of naysayers but one thing that has become extremely difficult is drop catching solely for parking domain monetization. It’s basically dried up – too many players and companies like DC dominating the market. Put another way, you’re basically out of luck finding that domain that’s going to make you hundreds or thousands of dollars through your own drop catching – maybe if you’re lucky you can cover renewal fees, but that’s about it (yes, I know there are exceptions…).

Buying someone else’s portfolio is out for most of us as well. With publishers demanding 30x or more of monthly revenue up front, and the requirement to purchase blocks of domains costing $xxx,xxx, isn’t worth it to me. And the traffic for many of these domains will die before you can break even (or worse, the traffic was faked and you’re screwed).

So that leaves you with the auctions which are far more competitive than years ago. And since domain owners have gotten smarter and registrars have made greater efforts to notify owners of upcoming expirations, what is leftover to go to auction pales in comparison to the traffic rich domains of the past. Those of us who battle in the daily auction houses fight against big conglomerates like HD for bread crumbs in most cases. Just try to find an expired government site anymore. And nothing pisses off a domain investor more than some lazy guy who does zero research and waits until they see a lot of people bidding on a domain so they can jump in at the last minute or someone who trolls the bids to drive up the price just for fun.

So that means the serious domain investor is going to pay more for these domains, and the price goes up every month it seems with longer time to recoup your investment. But in spite of these odds, one can still find domains that can recover your ROI in 12-24 months (or sooner if you’re lucky). That’s where the capital comes in. A serious investor knows that ROIs purchased at the auction house are not going appear for a year or two, if at all. Or to put it another way, if you think you’re going to get a domain at auction and start making a profit in a month, you’re probably wrong (or have a better system than I do!).

So after accepting the truth that your capital investment will be tied up for potentially years with a risk of losing some or all of it, there is the research aspect. If there are over 100,000 domains expiring every day (depending on TLD, gTLD, ccTLD), 7 days a week, 365 days a year, how would anyone know which ones to bid on. As I said before, I’m not going to tell you how but to say that investors in this space spend hours every day doing research in preparation for the next auction. To clue you in, that does not simply mean throwing some filters on expireddomains dot net and going after those (no disrespect to this great free service). If you don’t have access to resources to develop APIs to multiple link traffic source sites, develop some AI techniques, have a full understanding of keyword EPCs, prediction models to forecast the longevity of traffic through analytics, and a myriad of other considerations, your risk of losing capital rises exponentially.

Let’s say you have the capital and willing to risk it, and through trial and error have developed good algorithms to narrow your search and go after the types of domains that have historically yielded results – you’re done right? No, the hard work really begins now! You have to optimize your domains and manage your portfolio. I sometimes spend more time optimizing than all the other tasks. What do I mean by optimization? Some parking companies have contractual relationships to allow the parking provider to request related search terms that G will use. And yes, even that is shifting as G will now take your keywords as a “suggestion” and may use some or all of them depending on the historical traffic that has gone to that site before you bought it (using their massive data warehouses). Why go through all this trouble and just let G auto-optimize? Because in many cases it can take a lot of traffic before they get the terms right, IF they get it right, and your best opportunity to mitigate ROI loss is in first 60 days you park it before traffic drop (unless you have strong backlinks or are lucky enough to have a type-in or typo domain).

I don’t write all of this to turn you off to parking, but to say that gone are the days when anyone with $100 can buy some domains from their drop catching program, change the name servers and make money. But that isn’t to say parking today is not a viable business – just far more sophisticated.

One question often asked is “how much money can I make in parking?”. That’s a loaded question. I think the better question to ask is “what is my target annual profit I want to achieve in this business and when can I get there?”. Profit in parking would be your gross parking revenues less any chargebacks (I rarely have any, but it’s still lowers your revenue), less the cost of the domain, less costs to run the business (your time, subscription costs, IT charges, renewal fees and so on), less the predictive loss ratio of declining traffic, taxes, UDRPs (depends on your risk tolerance), and probably a few other things I can’t think of right now.

I’m not going to give you my annual profit target; I don’t want this to go on my permanent internet record HAHA.

I already know what you’re thinking right now…. “Yeah, talk is cheap – show me the proof”. I hear you. Just to let you know, there are many in this forum that are serious in this business and have no incentive to show any type of stats, myself included. It raises too many suspicions and follow-up questions – how many domains, what kind of domains, what kind of keywords, how long did it take, the numbers are fake, you name it. Who wants to be raked over the coals with all this grief? So contrary to my gut reaction not to show anything like most of the other guys, I would rather put myself out there to show that Parking is real, at least for my situation it is. So I attached a screenshot of stats for the past several months, and no they’re not photoshopped, whether you want to believe it or not – doesn’t matter to me.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/3965/PK0lIe.png

You’ll notice my traffic and revenues rising every month. So obviously I’m in a growth mode. To answer your next question on how long did it take to get where I am right now, let me give you a little personal history… In the late 2000’s I was making serious revenues with parking, but I got involved in other ventures and didn’t have the time to devote in keeping up with it. So I just let my domain traffic die a slow death for years. Eventually I was tired of running businesses and working 90 hours a week so I went back to the rat race, being respectable and making a salary in a normal job. What I quickly discovered was I had a lot of free time to think about other sources of revenue, and of course parking like the old days seemed like a good place to start. But I kept asking myself, “would it still work today?”.

So April of last year with the pandemic driving more people online and my employer telling us all to work from home, it became an opportune time for me to see if my old methods still worked. For the first couple of months I wasn’t buying many domains, but I quickly saw that with some tweaking and serious commitment of time the process still worked – worked back then and works now. Crazy. They were saying parking was dead back in 2010, maybe earlier and here it is in 2021 and it still works. Weird.

Let me be perfectly frank. I’m not bragging about this – far from it. In fact, depending on which side of the revenue fence you’re on, you might say what I’m achieving is peanuts to what you’re making, but I’m happy with my results so far. Long ways to go to meet my net profit target, but I’m confident I’ll get there.

I’m sure I’ll hear from a lot of people telling me “you’ll never make any real money with parking – selling or leasing is the only way, or developing your website with affiliates or adsense, or zero click direct traffic advertisers, or smart traffic switching”, you name it. And I say to all of that is if it works for you – great! I’m not talking about that – I’m just making a point about domain parking in today’s world, pure and simple. I enjoy it and you’ll never convince me it’s dead.

So let the haters weigh in but at least I got this off my chest…Domain Parking is real folks!

P.S. Please don’t IM/DM/PM me trying to sell your traffic domain, join a JV, try a new monetization service, ask for my methods, more details on my portfolio, etc., etc. I will not respond – no offense.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
If we cant force related terms on domains, a financial domain regardless of traffic has to contain financial keywords or Google with display what it thinks is correct?

I think my portfolio is affected by this, I just notice a lot of unrelated keyword on my landers.

@privatereg did you get affected by this?
Its hit and miss with the related keywords. I think if G likes them it uses them; if not, it doesn't. My CTR% has actually gone up a little over the past month or so but I think that's more related to the new default Bodis landers ;)
 
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The reason I’m taking some time to write this (and more importantly taking up your valuable time reading it) is I get really tired of everyone saying Parking is Dead. Let’s see if you know one of these people:
  1. They never tried it – just like to troll the forums….
  2. They took 100 names they had lying around desperately trying to sell, and figured they’d try parking and it made $0.05 in two months.
  3. They have a domain portfolio from 5 years ago without ongoing reinvestment and watched the traffic, EPC, CTR and revenue die over time.
  4. They believe the registrars are faking the traffic stats at the auctions, the parking companies are keeping all the clicks, reporting falsified data, stealing your money and think it’s all a scam.
  5. They tried to game the system with fake traffic or 100 other methods (that I won’t get into) and got their accounts and domains banned (from DRID tracking), and now want to seek revenge.
  6. They have an inherent belief that domain parking is for “bottom feeders” of the domain industry and should be avoided at all costs.

I think many of the experienced people that are negative towards parking fit into a different description which would be:

7. Previously parked domains and spent hundreds of hours optimizing 1000s of domains, but revenue went from $1,500 per month to about $250 per month almost overnight during the 2009-2010 crash.

I never believed there was this much of a real decrease in parking revenue. I ran an online business at the time and I was still paying just as much for buying ad space with Google Adwords. It just seemed like a good excuse for Google to pay less revenue at the time.

Many people didn't want to bother with the parking maintenance after it reduced by 5x, literally within a month. Maybe things have slowly increased since then and it is back up to 2008 levels? That would definitely make sense, since the economy is doing much better than it was back then.
 
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Great post! I just started this domain investing couple of weeks. Currently am selling and parking at Dan.com with Bodis hybrid. If i have some of the domain with higher traffic shown on Dan.com and Bodis, Should i just make it pure Bodis? Does the hybrid affect the clicks? I have not seen bodis pure parking page as i straight started out with hybrid. For Hybrid it will show the domain name is for sale with a sidebar for you to put your offer.

Thanks!
 
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Great post! I just started this domain investing couple of weeks. Currently am selling and parking at Dan.com with Bodis hybrid. If i have some of the domain with higher traffic shown on Dan.com and Bodis, Should i just make it pure Bodis? Does the hybrid affect the clicks? I have not seen bodis pure parking page as i straight started out with hybrid. For Hybrid it will show the domain name is for sale with a sidebar for you to put your offer.

Thanks!
For me it negatively affected my revenues quite a bit by using DAN; however, I don't have any for sale banners even on Bodis. So if you are wanting to sell as well as park not sure if would be as bad using Bodis for sale pages vs. Dan pages...
 
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For me it negatively affected my revenues quite a bit by using DAN; however, I don't have any for sale banners even on Bodis. So if you are wanting to sell as well as park not sure if would be as bad using Bodis for sale pages vs. Dan pages...

So you are recommending for those domain names with better traffic to convert to pure bodis parking servers?
The Dan/Bodis Hybrid has very distinct side bar that says the site is for sale and the Links are on the right with up to 8 related terms. if turning to Pure Bodis i will put on hold for sale and see how the parking revenue goes.
 
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So you are recommending for those domain names with better traffic to convert to pure bodis parking servers?
The Dan/Bodis Hybrid has very distinct side bar that says the site is for sale and the Links are on the right with up to 8 related terms
Theres no harm in testing it over a week at Bodis without a sales banner and compare revenues IMO - you can always switch it back or test with using a Bodis for sale banner afterwards...
 
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Theres no harm in testing it over a week at Bodis without a sales banner and compare revenues IMO - you can always switch it back or test with using a Bodis for sale banner afterwards...

I see. Let me seat my domains in Dan/Bodis Hybrid for a while as its only been a week but average of about 10 visits a day with the highest at 35. but no revenue so far. thats why am wondering if the people who when in and saw its a for sale page they exit immediately.
How does Bodis parking page looks like? is it like only with the links displayed?
 
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For me it negatively affected my revenues quite a bit by using DAN; however, I don't have any for sale banners even on Bodis. So if you are wanting to sell as well as park not sure if would be as bad using Bodis for sale pages vs. Dan pages...

Hi

Thanks for pointing that out.

wondering if they had different ads on dan, than bodis which affected revenue....
or if the "for sale" banner was distraction from clicking
or if it was the structure of the page itself,
or if the change from bodis originally to dan affected repeat or new visitors?

the "for sale" banner, could indicate to visitor, who is not looking to buy the name... that the website may not exist for long -
therefore, they may not click on any ads.

hmmmm...
definitely something to ponder

imo...
 
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Hi

Thanks for pointing that out.

wondering if they had different ads on dan, than bodis which affected revenue....
or if the "for sale" banner was distraction from clicking
or if it was the structure of the page itself,
or if the change from bodis originally to dan affected repeat or new visitors?

the "for sale" banner, could indicate to visitor, who is not looking to buy the name... that the website may not exist for long -
therefore, they may not click on any ads.

hmmmm...
definitely something to ponder

imo...
Hey Biggie, as an experienced domain parking person like yourself you know that domain parking pages are counterintuitive - the less on the landing page the better the result. In fact lately Bodis has been only serving 3 related terms on desktop and mobile pages instead of the usual 7 (or 5 for mobile). I know they are constantly looking for ways to increase revenues so I have no complaints....Parking pages are ugly but I want the visitor to get through a link as fast as possible without anything around it - parking companies know that all too well. The way I look at it is say you have an expired domain that was a Chinese Restaurant. If the visitor sees a for sale link they think the restaurant is out of business and they get out. if all they see is "Chinese Menu" as the first link they're going to click through. Having said all that I still sell several domains a month. They find me if they want it bad enough so I don't see the value of a for sale banner - not interested in resellers, don't have generics and a visitor would never want to buy it IMO....
 
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btw i still prefer 7 ads than just 3 on most of my domains as I get better performances.

from my research Bodis has better parking results than the same domain on DAN as the for sale part distract the visit from the ads.

from my experience the inquiry link doesn't affect the CTR a lot but when i can i'll remove it.
i'm talking about a small inquiry link, not a for sale banner.
 
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@pablohc86 I see. I am not sure how Pure Bodis parking page look like as i said before. I am also guess why i have visits but no clicks maybe they exit immediately after seeing its for sale domain.
I guess i monitor 2 weeks and change those high traffic ones to pure Bodis parking page.
The current Dan/Bodis hybrid has 8 links though but after that there is another link to click if one click on the first link.
Oh yes that brings me to another question:
Does the earning comes after both links are click?
What if i disable Tier2? Does that mean i get money after someone click the first time?
Sorry for this question am just 2 weeks in this domaining business..

TIA!
 
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the less on the landing page the better the result.

Hi

thanks for your post.

the excerpt reminded me of DomainSponsor, who, in their "hey-days" had the worst looking pages, but produced some of the highest epc's

imo...
 
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@domainingnoob21 Based on 9 months of research on domain parking:

1. Hybrid (Bodi + DAN) model will not give you the desired result (click and parking revenue)

2. Brandable domains perform worst exception are if it is short and very popular typo name

3. First 1-2 weeks traffics are mostly bots/crawlers, so continue testing for at least 15 days before concluding anything

4. Do not impose optimization feature immediately allow auto-optimization to get natural traffic at least for a month and then based on the search, location and backlinks put keywords only after one month. Otherwise, you will break natural traffic/backlinks benefits.

5. Parking companies are here to make a profit and not to share with you. Therefore for them, the best situation is to get traffics without clicks or very low CTR.

6. So do not ask the PPC formula or why you are getting less or why the calculation formula is incorrect. Like ideally
Revenue= EPC x number of clicks. However here

Revenue is fixed and accordingly, they make EPC variable.

7. Now you can not question why also because EPC depends on more than 20 parameters including keywords, locations, type of advertisement and ad rate, etc. They can easily justify any amount your parking domain received.

8. So technically your upper ceiling to make a profit is already fixed and if you are crossing that limit you are not profitable to them.

I am not generalizing or criticizing anyone here, nether demoting colleagues like you. These are based on my experiment and accordingly, I changed my expectation and strategy.

Thank you!
 
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@GreatBrand.in
Thank you for the guides and tips!
So If i understand right, I should not use hybrid if i am to expect some income. I have disabled the top 5 domains that are getting traffic to be pure bodis.

You are saying that to let the auto-optimise to run for a month before putting in keywords? but most of them i have already input the keywords. Should i delete them away?
My domains have been running about 10 to 14 days now for most. about 30 of them.

From Bodis report 95% of my traffic are type-in or unrecognized traffic. Could it be because of Dan landing page?

TIA!
 
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@GreatBrand.in
Thank you for the guides and tips!
So If i understand right, I should not use hybrid if i am to expect some income. I have disabled the top 5 domains that are getting traffic to be pure bodis.

You are saying that to let the auto-optimise to run for a month before putting in keywords? but most of them i have already input the keywords. Should i delete them away?
My domains have been running about 10 to 14 days now for most. about 30 of them.

From Bodis report 95% of my traffic are type-in or unrecognized traffic. Could it be because of Dan landing page?

TIA!

Well I think you should wait for few weeks & then make changes. Frequently changing key words is not a good idea. Thanks
 
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I am exploring tailor-made advertisement providers. Appreciate it if anyone here can share their own experiences and how it works?
Thanks
 
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@pablohc86 I see. I am not sure how Pure Bodis parking page look like as i said before. I am also guess why i have visits but no clicks maybe they exit immediately after seeing its for sale domain.
I guess i monitor 2 weeks and change those high traffic ones to pure Bodis parking page.
The current Dan/Bodis hybrid has 8 links though but after that there is another link to click if one click on the first link.
Oh yes that brings me to another question:
Does the earning comes after both links are click?
What if i disable Tier2? Does that mean i get money after someone click the first time?
Sorry for this question am just 2 weeks in this domaining business..

TIA!


if the traffic your domains are receiving is not qualitative, or not targetized for the displayed ads it's very normal to have 0% CTR or really low.

Yes the earnings come after a visit click on the related search (first ad) AND on the ad link (second ad).
These ads generally are provided by 2 sources: Tier1 and Tier2.
Tier1 is tipically Google and Tier2 Bing, Yahoo or other advertisers.
Tipically all the traffic is sent to Tier1 but if some traffic is faillisted to be redirected to Tier1 it gets redirected to Tier2.
There should be a lot more to say about this but you should talk with Bodis support team to let you know more about your account configuration.

As you are kinda new and if you are not interested to focus your time on getting revenues from expired traffic I would advise you to keep for a period your highest traffic names on pure bodis and see what happens, then you can try to optimize your landing page to see if you can improve your revenues.
 
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Hey, guys, my account has been approved by Parking Crew. Which would you say is the best sales option, one that looks good both on PC and Mobile? I tried the orange banner, but its kind of invincible on mobile :(
 
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Hey, guys, my account has been approved by Parking Crew. Which would you say is the best sales option, one that looks good both on PC and Mobile? I tried the orange banner, but its kind of invincible on mobile :(
if you are looking for a good for sale lander.. PC is not good. Go with afternic for that purpose
 
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You inspired me to park my top domains. Can't promise I'll make as much but might as well make something with the names I'm not planning on developing while I practice patience.
 
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I have been using Bodis for 1.5 month.

150 domains / 4000 uniques / 7 clicks / 2.74 dollars profit.

I'm trying PC now.

Well, if a domain earns enough money annually to cover its renewal, it's a success I think. But does it? 🤔
 
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