Parking is not hopeless (My Experiences)

[Michael Purse]

Hey everyone,

[EDIT: And a big thanks to those that have hit the reputation button too ]

I'd like to basically take a moment to explain what processes we've gone through lately in terms of parking to maximise our revenue and ensure top dollar for our domains when they are in our portfolio waiting to be sold.

I've heard a lot of people saying lately that parking is hopeless and that revenue is 5 cents a click on a lot of their domains etc. Here's what you should do to maximise your revenue (well, it worked for us).

Keep good inventory and records
Set up a spreadsheet and keep a record of Domain, Reg Date, Exp Date, Registrar, Where Parked Now, and then a column for each parking company where you will put the average RPC for that domain. This will help you work out where you should be parking each domain.

Sign up everywhere
Sign up everywhere you can. Get yourself a membership with Fabulous, Parked, WhyPark, Bodis, SedoPro, DomainSponsor, TrafficZ, NameDrive, SmartName, BigJumbo/Skenzo. Then, get yourself an Above.com account to easily manage and view your statistics and link all your accounts to it.

Don't set and forget
Don't just add all your domains to one parking company, set the nameservers, and hope to do well. Cycle your domains through different parking companies every 30 days.

My recommendations to try first, in order; Fabulous, Parked, SedoPro, Bodis, then any others. Record all the figures in your spreadsheet, then go back through and set each domain to where it performed best. You can have this done automatically through Above.com, but I prefer to have manual control over this process and a full suite of information available to me.

Contact your account managers
Email your Fabulous, Parked, SedoPro etc account managers and ask what they can do to help you. Fabulous will optimise your domains if they're performing poorly free of charge, Parked can make recommendations, SedoPro can also do these type of things. Also ask about your revenue share - most will match the revenue share you get elsewhere or even give you a better deal.

Be fair to your parking companies
Do not engage in arbitrage, click fraud, or dodgy practices to inflate your figures. It's not worth your account, earnings, and reputation. Parking revenue is impacted by these activities on everyone, and I for one wish it did not exist as I would personally prefer my legitimate traffic be paid fairer and higher. Everyone can do their bit simply by being fair to the people helping you get paid!

Likewise, if you notice a problem with one of your own domains (weird traffic, strange CTR's) contact your account manager and mention it. Better to get it fixed and resolved than lose your entire account and earnings.

Refer people
Referral links and programs with a lot of parking companies entitle you to 5-10% of your referred customers revenue for at least 12 months. Even if they earn $50 a month, that's still $60 a year bonus in your pocket for no work at all.

Monitor and review
If your domain is still performing very poorly on an RPC basis but getting traffic, it's time to develop. If revenues drop off, go back to your spreadsheet and find out who paid 2nd best and move the domain to them for 30 days and re-evaluate then.

It's worth the effort!
We're quickly moving to a spot where all of our domain renewal costs and expenses related to our inventory will be totally covered by parking revenue, so it's basically becoming free to hold our portfolio. From what I can see so far, our parking revenue will be up around 450% by using these tactics.

Optimise your domains
Ask for help from your account manager for general guidance on how to do this on each platform. You can usually at the very least set keyworks. For Parked and Fabulous, you have massive customisation options to help yourself out. You usually only have to do this once or twice.

Register with Fabulous.com, try there first
You get free parking, DNS and EMail Management, Privacy and E-Lock for your High Value domains. The revenue for most domains is incredibly fair and overall the largest share of our domains will be remaining with Fabulous. Reporting is second to none and you get access to features to help sell your domains, we sell more domains through Fabulous' tools than any other method other than end user contact. Contact your account manager, ask how they can help.

Your parking company will not mind
On an 80% revenue share, if you're getting 2 cents a click on a subset of domains your parking company isn't going to mind you moving all the domain in this category elsewhere - they'll understand you need to maximise revenue and they probably will not care about their 0.3 cents a click they'll no longer earn

Your time is money
Yes, this will take more time. Set aside a day or two to work on your parking. Go through and optimise all your domains on every registrar account and work at it all in one hit. For something you only have to do once in most cases, the ongoing rewards are well worth it.

-

Hope this helped a little. Some of you will learn nothing, but some of you will find it useful

 

[SpareDomains]

Good points, the only thing I would add is for quite a few reading this their domains could be rotated through 10 parking companies and still won't produce as parking is generally good for domains that have natural search volume traffic as parked pages generally don't rank well in search engines so parking a dead domain doesn't really work, for those dead domains that don't produce anywhere with standard parking either get rid of them or look to noomle, smartname ecomm or content solutions etc... as personally I have taken about 80+ dead ones in the last few months and now more than half are on the front page of google and now pay their own way or better which makes holding them for the right sales price even easier as you can turn profitless liabilities into profitable assets by stepping beyond traditional parking on some of them.

 

[Michael Purse]

I have taken about 80+ dead ones in the last few months and now more than half are on the front page of google and now pay their own way or better which makes holding them for the right sales price even easier as you can turn profitless liabilities into profitable assets by stepping beyond traditional parking on some of them.

Very good tips. I was primarily focusing on the actual parking though I fully agree with development on non-performing names, and sometimes I find developing sometimes sends parked domains backwards if they're already paying well (I have a domain earning $60 a year parked, but only pulls like 30 cents a week developed!)

[Also just decided to replicate this post at my blog: http://f5domains.com/2010/05/12/parking-is-not-hopeless/ -- also, some of the sites are easier to get into with referral links, and we can help people out with SedoPro Invitations if they send us an email through the contact form, so there's links on the side. No obligation though of course - just trying to help people out.]

 

[matt_bodis]

Good post!

It's no longer the days of set and forget. Parking needs a bit of an effort now. But in my biased opinion , it still is a lot easier to make money parking than it is developing - as long as you know the basics of parking.

 

[SpareDomains]

But in my biased opinion , it still is a lot easier to make money parking than it is developing - as long as you know the basics of parking.

A year ago I would have agreed but solutions keep coming out now rootorange, smartname, epik, octane360, devhub, whypark, noomle etc... that really don't take too much work as they appear scalable. Personally I have made over 40x the income of 215 domains parked on only 77 domains lightly developed with smartname so far this month. These are not the only domains I own but the first batch of 292 I decided to sort through and determine which ones are better parked and which deserve some form of development even if mostly automated as development provides a better user experience and a better google listing. Front page google listings can help domain sales as well as end user advertisers do type in the terms they are bidding on to see how they rank compared to competitors and when your sitting in the organic listings for free next to their paid ads some will take notice and inquire when an inquire link is positioned on the developed property. Over the next few months I will do the same and grab another few hundred and sort some more into my develop pile as the first batch of 77 out of 292 are getting ranked and holding for about 3 months now. Click values are lower than traditional parking but the better google ranking is increasing traffic and making up for it. I think Michael's article should be phase #1 to determine what works with traditional parking, my advice is to step to phase #2 on the dead ones with either domain sales or development so you can move a very high percentage of your whole portfolio into profitable status.

 

[Michael Purse]

But in my biased opinion

How is that biased? You're one of the best people to be talking about this kind of thing I'm sure you wouldn't be running Bodis without absolute support for the product/service you're actually providing, or you wouldn't make any money yourself!

 

[matt_bodis]

The thing is, Octane360, Devhub, and the rest are still parking solutions. For the most part, they just add duplicate articles to your site.

Google and Bing doesn't want them in their index equally as much as they don't want traditional parked domains. That's a fact that I have confirmed and they don't look at content when they de-index, they look at where the domains are hosted.

Bodis, Sedo, Fabulous, WhyPark, Devhub - all are penalized no matter what articles you throw at them. But there are some domains that fall through the cracks. The Bing/Google penalization system is not perfected based on where the domains are resolving, but I guarantee you it will be one day.

Some services like Noomle and a few others don't have ENOUGH parked domains. That means Google and Bing hasn't done their regular review of them yet. Give them time, once they grow a little further, they will all fall into the same basket.

Whether it is traditional parking, automated development services, or some other form of mass monetization - it still falls in same basket for Google and Bing - a farm of spam sites.

They're going to get rid of it from their index 100% at one point and time. Both traditional and auto-developed.

Unless you have a full fledged site in the works, you're pretty much out of luck long term in terms of search traffic. And that's what powers the automated development. It's not bookmark traffic.

Just my thoughts..

That's why I still prefer traditional parking. But for you it is working, and sometimes it is all about jumping on the bandwagon while it lasts - kind of like arbitrage.

---------- Post added at 03:06 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:03 AM ----------

 

[StantheMan]

Very Dynamic Industry

Good stuff.

The biggest problem for me today is that there is no longer a set-it-and-forget-it place. I have watched many of my parked domains earn less revenue from parking as their results just don't pay what they used to. Most of them pay the rent - that is that they pay their own way by covering the registration fees. Just when one parking company starts to pay out better, the search engines drop the hammer on them and their results suffer. As Matt pointed out, many of these pages are seen as spam based on their neighborhood - I guess you could call that "Domain Profiling!"

The good thing is that when you have a good domain, the value is still there. You can still park it until you decide to develop it. The search engines love older domain names. I have some that I am just starting to develop and Google just loves them as they are older names - now that I have them hosted with fresh content.

 

[domainsusi]

Parking is not hopeles ??

I used to think that was a true statement.

Nowadays you need to look at the performance history of your parked domains. See if your domains, having strong keywords are still giving you the same dollar return.

I have several domains parked for years that suddenly went from $1+ down to $.001 per click just within the past several weeks.

Where is the answer to that ??

 

[DN BROKER]

parking through 3rd parties are a waste of time and loss of investment. Google direct Domain Pages pay you higher and index quicker.

 

[infosec3]

parking through 3rd parties are a waste of time and loss of investment. Google direct Domain Pages pay you higher and index quicker.

If you are refering to Adsense, you are totally right. I recently move many of my domains and I have seen an obvious difference. My only complain is that there it is not possible to present the visitor with attractive templates. As a result, the rate of clicks is lower than if you use some other parking services. But, still, you are right, the earning are higher.

 

[DN BROKER]

If you are refering to Adsense, you are totally right. I recently move many of my domains and I have seen an obvious difference. My only complain is that there it is not possible to present the visitor with attractive templates. As a result, the rate of clicks is lower than if you use some other parking services. But, still, you are right, the earning are higher.

Indeed its all about earning! Who cares about designs, the more creative it becomes the less clicks. Adsense pages are direct and simple, which will result in better earning in the long run.

 

[JB Lions]

Why not just make your own parked pages, cut out all the middleman, have more control on what ads are on the page, your own tracking, better chance of getting free se traffic etc. I understand most like parking because how quick and easy it is but once you make your own templates, it's really not that much more time. And whatever extra time it takes, will more than pay for itself.