A couple of comments on things that were not answered or may need a little more clarification:
- Yes, use the exact match using brackets "[]"to get a clear idea of the traffic. Quotes may work about the same, but stick to brackets with the Google estimator, use quotes for exact matches when you search at the Google search engine.
- Not all parking services are the same and a domain that does little or nothing at one service may do well at another.
- When choosing a name for parking, go for high bid price, high traffic numbers, or both.
- If your domain does not have hyphens, you can only expect it to match search requests for the same words in the same order. If there are hyphens it's like spaces, so it's possible to get a match on the other words in the phrase after the first one, but don't expect much. And the domains with hyphens have much lower resale value in general. multi-word domains with hyphens can, and do perform well in some cases. My third-best domain for income this month is a 3-word .us domain with two hyphens. It has earned $22.51 so far this month. I also have a 4-word .info with hyphens that has earned $5.53 this month. On the down side, I have about 1,200 domains about about 900 of them have not earned anything this month.
- If your domains get little or no type-in traffic, you are not going to make any money. You should either get some hosting and put sites on the domains, or park them with a parking service that allows you to optimize your domain and promote it like you would a site. Make sure your parking provider allows this, other wise you may violate their rules, which could get your account closed. If you are unsure, ask them.
- I think .asia does have a residency requirement, but most registrars will provide that for you.
- Learn as much as you can before you register a lot of domain names. Just because we all registered stupid, ugly, and worthless domains in the beginning doesn't mean everyone else also has to do that.
- The quality of a domain is really only important if you are parking or reselling. If you are going to develop a site you can get away with having somthing pretty bad if the site and the site's content is good. My first expired domain that I bought was Bizprolink-Internet.com. It had some traffic and links when I got it, but I knew it was bad. Now it has about 25 million deleted domain names and is my top site for income.
- Oh, about how much traffic does a domain need to get to be worth registering? It's hard to say, but I try to go for domains that have high bid prices. That way even if the traffic and clicks are low, I don't need to much to have the domain pay for itself. I have about 12 months to mess around with optimization, keywords, and promotion to get a domain to earn it's keep. If it doesn't do that I either sell it or drop it.