So, what does a 'parking company' ...

[HeavyDuty]

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you?

1) They have free use of your domain name
2) They have free rein with your hard earned traffic
3) They collect PPC monies generated by the above

In return, they provide what?
1) A few templates
2) Bare bones hosting

I find it quite odd and quite curious that the dn owner can't include any type of tracking. Which would be a very simple piece of script. A simple 1x1 pixel image would easily do the trick.

Hosted mini-sites rule IMHO. It requires some work, much more than just reging a dn for $8 bucks and parking it.

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you? That you can't do better for yourself?

So you list your name for sale with one of the 'big dogs', and park it there. Is that where end users look for domain names? Do they make any attempt to market the names?

Do a search on,
"the best <your choice> domains"
"where can I find <your choice> domain names?"
"<your choice> domain names"
"I want to buy an <your choice> domain name"

You'll see how aggressive their marketing is. Cherry pickers, nothing but cherry pickers. Fabulous will turn up on occasion, SEDO even less, all the rest are 5-10-50 pages deep in SERP's.

Just curious, what's the attraction? , inquiring minds want to know.

Regards,

 

[robertjr]

I'm still at a loss though, what can a parking company do for me that I can't do for myself?

Actually, I think it has been addressed, just it's been with the answers the members wanted to give and not the answers you apparently wanted to hear.
:imho:

Fast and easy:imho:

I dont have time... It is fast and easy.

Boils down to opportunity cost to me.

To sum it up for that "simple" answer, time & money or it that time is money?



Larry- Be honest, are you more interested in the "counter" issue?

 

[spinoza]

I knew what you were trying to do, I had that figured out after the second post. I don't even know how many 1 click to two click pages we have. But I would say it's probably the opposite of what you have. We just don't track what's a 1 click vs 2 click, it's not really worth it to us. I won't go into a debate about 1 click or 2 click because my head would explode since so many people would argue against what I had to say.

Donny

Donny,
I am learning so much from this discussion... I would love to hear more about this issue.
I mean,do u need to go into a debate? I would think the numbers should talk for themselfs...maybe I am wrong, but why its not worth it to you to know if 2 click pages doing better than 1click?

 

[HeavyDuty]

I guess you didn't understand the part where I stated that creating parking pages, maintaining there content, and hosting costs, mean nothing to me.

If you don't have the skills or facilities to do those things then you would obviously need a parking company. It's not something I require which I thought was clear in my initial post. Maybe not, maybe I didn't make that clear enough. Those three elements have zero value to me.

So, if I understand what you just posted correctly, I don't see that I stand anything to gain.

 

[robertjr]

I guess you didn't understand the part where I stated that creating parking pages, maintaining there content, and hosting costs, mean nothing to me.

Wow, that must be nice.

If you don't have the skills or facilities to do those things then you would obviously need a parking company.

:lol:

I have enough domains to start my own small parking company, but I'm quite sure it would be a waste of time time to "develop" them all. I suppose it comes down to ROI.

Although, with your unlimited resources if your want to work something out on developing them I would consider dropping parking all together.

 

[Badger]

Ive been watching this thread with interest...

Especially some of Donny's quotes Nice to see the old AFD vs YDC rivalry remaining as warm as its always been .. :/

Anyway, on topic. And reference transparent reporting :: Parking companies have a real problem displaying real stats. i.e. a record of a visitor to your site. This is because the disparencies that exist between what the server records and what feed provider records are always completely detached from one another. Oddly enough, and allegedly (i might add), google reported clicks are consistently ~50% of the server records.. Why this might be...?? Thats a whole new topic.

 

[HeavyDuty]

Wow, that must be nice.

It is nice.

I have enough domains to start my own small parking company, but ...

Maybe you should.

... with your unlimited resources ...

I didn't say I had unlimited resources. The resources I do have are not at capacity though.

So let me rephrase the question. What, other than templates, a nifty little online user interface, and hosting, can a parking company offer?

 

[Badger]

What, other than templates, a nifty little online user interface, and hosting, can a parking company offer?

Sanitation... And dont forget the roads...

tee hee. Do i sense a Monty Python moment coming on??

 

[Aggro]

So, what does a 'parking company' actually do for you? That you can't do better for yourself?

The answer in a nutshell.

Most of the value in parking companies is as 'business aggregators' (or more appropiately traffic aggregator).
Most domainers individually do not meet the traffic criteria to go with G/Y directly. If they did like some of the big guys, they would.
Hence the existence of parking providers.

If domainers think they can get better income from other methods eg minisites, they are free to go with it.
It's called capitalism.

 

[mskdhero]

It is nice.

Maybe you should.

I didn't say I had unlimited resources. The resources I do have are not at capacity though.

So let me rephrase the question. What, other than templates, a nifty little online user interface, and hosting, can a parking company offer?

So maybe parking isn't for you? I hope to be a that point one day. As of right now most if not all parking companies help us monetize organic traffic to our domains. Sure, nicer templates would be better, being able to put our own ads in would be better, etc, etc. For me, I can buy domains, park them, and make some money while I am at my day job. Not all of us have the skills, resources, or time to develop mini sites in order to grow se traffic. I COULD throw up a crappy looking mfa site, but I'd rather park than develop a site that I'm not happy with.

Come to think of it, I would probably pay for a hosting/parking service that had templates geared towards info sites. Sort of like 1plus but with better templates and 100% our ads. Company makes some money, but it's on the domain owner to optimize and develop his site with their own content and seo.

just my 2 cents

 

[harkster]

The answer in a nutshell.

Most of the value in parking companies is as 'business aggregators' (or more appropiately traffic aggregator).

BINGO!!

It's called capitalism.

Double BINGO!!

An update on my moving from mini to parking. As I said before the mini click rate was becoming crap. Parked at Namedrive getting a 25% click rate. They have a MP3 Ringtone etc page which seems to work well for this Rap artist .cc name. I was going to let it drop but may decide to keep.

For those of us trying to get the best ROI I think there is no 1 solution. I like doing mini-sites. I have a reseller account with unlimited names, nice server space and enough bandwidth. Work I do for a few clients makes the server space basically free but I currently have full blown sites, mini-sites, names parked at Sedo and Namedrive. Giving 1Plus a try and looking for other options. But I have other things which put food on the table and this a retirement avocation for me.

I wish I understood where parking traffic came from cause I have parked names which I know for sure aren't typein names but receive traffic. Where does that traffic come from?

My 2.5 cents (again)

 

[Donny]

In a nutshell, parking domains is not for everybody. For example as I mentioned before we own cameras.com which is a parked domain. It's doing quite well. It makes more money as a 2 click domain than a 1 click domain. And I am sure I could probably double or triple our revenue if we built out the site. I would never mini portal it, because I think that's crap. But if we built it out and sold cameras, it would generate double or triple what it does now. If I had the resources to do it, that would be great. If I had somebody who would dropship cameras for me that would be great. But I don't, so until I decide to build out the domain which will cost me about a month of work, it will continue to be parked and make us a nice amount of cash each day.

Donny

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

BINGO!!Double BINGO!!

An update on my moving from mini to parking. As I said before the mini click rate was becoming crap. Parked at Namedrive getting a 25% click rate. They have a MP3 Ringtone etc page which seems to work well for this Rap artist .cc name. I was going to let it drop but may decide to keep.

For those of us trying to get the best ROI I think there is no 1 solution. I like doing mini-sites. I have a reseller account with unlimited names, nice server space and enough bandwidth. Work I do for a few clients makes the server space basically free but I currently have full blown sites, mini-sites, names parked at Sedo and Namedrive. Giving 1Plus a try and looking for other options. But I have other things which put food on the table and this a retirement avocation for me.

I wish I understood where parking traffic came from cause I have parked names which I know for sure aren't typein names but receive traffic. Where does that traffic come from?

My 2.5 cents (again)

Hark,

I am in the same situation you are - a retiree from over 40 years working with computers and trying to supplement my income.

I have had some success with 1Plus.net (I have attached my step-by-step guide to this post for your reference). With 1Plus you put your own Google AdSense code on your domains, which they render as pseudo mini-sites. You can also put your own Title, keywords and Google Analytics code as well.

Based on my recent experience with the true mini-sites from PPC-Sites.com ( ShopsInLasVegas.com and GolfAndBeer.com ), it looks like it is going to blow the doors off anything else I have tried so far. I have gotten more traffic and revenue from those two sites in a few days than I have from any of the over 100 sites I have had parked for almost 5 months at: iMonetize, NameDrive, 1Plus and TrafficClub. Plus each site is unique and looks fantastic (IMHO).

Your first statement confuses me. I thought you were going in the other direction (parking to mini-site) with your new adventure using Drupal on you www.DodgeTurbo.us site, which, I will say again looks great! Is it getting any traffic/clicks?

What hosting are you using? Are you saying they allow you to host unlimited domains for a single fee, like HostGator.com? I may need to move to something like that, as I am currently doing my own hosting on an Apache server, and I not sure how many more sites I can support (I currently have 11).

BTW, you can a good idea where your traffic is coming from (both geographically and referrer) using Google Analytics, which is free.

 

[advaita]

Artful - I have had a look at your 2 sites above and they look really good, but how did you get them looking like that, they don't look anything like mine, on eof which is openinggambits.com - do you have a special account with 1stplus or is it just the regular account? If so how did you manage to customize it so much?

 

[mskdhero]

Artful - I have had a look at your 2 sites above and they look really good, but how did you get them looking like that, they don't look anything like mine, on eof which is openinggambits.com - do you have a special account with 1stplus or is it just the regular account? If so how did you manage to customize it so much?

his arn't with 1plus, he used ppc-sites.com

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

Artful - I have had a look at your 2 sites above and they look really good, but how did you get them looking like that, they don't look anything like mine, on eof which is openinggambits.com - do you have a special account with 1stplus or is it just the regular account? If so how did you manage to customize it so much?

I DO have 59 sites at 1Plus, but the 2 I mention specifically above: ShopsInLasVegas.com and GolfAndBeer.com , were built for me by PPC-Sites.com and I host them on my own web server.

 

[harkster]

Hark,

I have had some success with 1Plus.net (I have attached my step-by-step guide to this post for your reference). With 1Plus you put your own Google AdSense code on your domains, which they render as pseudo mini-sites. You can also put your own Title, keywords and Google Analytics code as well.

I used your guide when moving some to 1plus -- great assist in getting started.

Your first statement confuses me. I thought you were going in the other direction (parking to mini-site) with your new adventure using Drupal on you www.DodgeTurbo.us site, which, I will say again looks great! Is it getting any traffic/clicks?

I am open to doing whatever works with each name. 50cent-cc had been a (bad q&d mini) getting enough clicks to be worth keeping until a few months ago. Closed the site & parked just for kicks and...
BTW I also have DodgeTurbo-com pointed to the us. May do something else with it. Getting traffic is the hard part.

What hosting are you using? Are you saying they allow you to host unlimited domains for a single fee, like HostGator.com? I may need to move to something like that, as I am currently doing my own hosting on an Apache server, and I not sure how many more sites I can support (I currently have 11).

The hosting provider I use isn't the cheapest but I think great value for my bucks ($35/month). I have 2 gig disk space, 40 gig bandwidth and unlimited domains etc. The server my account is on -- 99.889% uptime since coming online Aug 2004 -- they are proactive in managing server loads etc. etc. Check at www.httpme.com - I been there since Sep 2003 and have no desire to leave. I currently have 46 active names there.

BTW, you can a good idea where your traffic is coming from (both geographically and referrer) using Google Analytics, which is free.

That is not what I am asking.
Lets say I have a name yytiop.com parked at Herbs cool parking joint. yytiop gets an average of 500 uniques/month. Now I am quite sure that 500 people did not type yytiop.com in their address bar so how did those 500 unique 'people' end up at yytiop.com especially since, for the most part parked names are not listed in the SE's.

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

Answers

Hark,

Thanks for your comprehensive response. I'm glad you found my 1Plus guide useful. I will check out that hosting and the other sites of yours.

As for where your "uniques" come from, Google Analytics does show the referrers broken down in a pie chart by origin ("Google", "Yahoo", "NamePros". "DNF", "Direct", "Other", etc.). So, I would assume "Directs" are type-in.

P.S.: I forgot to attach the file to my previous post. I have since done that. It may be a more updated version of the guide than the one you originally used.

 

[phexchanger]

This is quite an interesting topic. I also have some undeveloped domains but I wonder if I had placed some efforts to place contents and somehow, promote each even just for a day. I think I might have earned more using the domains than parking them at Sedo.

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

My Results So Far with PPC-Sites

Here is a summary of my results so far with PPC-Sites.com mini-sites.

As of today, I have had my 2 PPC-Sites: ShopsInLasVegas.com and GolfAndBeer.com up live for 6 days.

I have had a total of about 165 domains parked at: iMonetize, NameDrive and 1Plus for about 5 months.

The 2 PPC-Sites in just 6 days have achieved 63% of the views, 14% of the clicks, and 41% of the revenue that were accumulated by the 165 domains in 5 MONTHS.

I'd say that's HUGELY impressive!! :D

BTW, they are both already listed in Google.

 

[iMODO Man]

Yeah, cool...

you are providing visitors with articles taken from a large DB of old articles currently available in its 300,000 entirety at $6 and which is served on lots and lots of identical websites.

Enjoy your short term listing with G and cross your fingers (and anything else youve got to hand) that these domains dont get banned.

Take a peek, copy and paste a sentence of one of your articles into google and you'll see other fellow "article" driven domains standing in the google departure zone.

Edit** You want a real black hat technique rather than making these dupe cont article fed MFA sites, create your own layout, take a recent article, translate it into French then back into English and youve your own questionable unique article rather than a carbon copy of many others.

 

[dongan]

Larry,

But if people are really interested in adding some additional code to their page, I'll add something next week.

Donny

that means, can we add our own google adsense code? can we add rss script to load contents?

 

[advaita]

Sounds impressive Artful, but does Chuck have a point? I'm asking because I don't know, and also because it seems to me that many people use info. and news they gain from elsewhere in their websites and blogs from elsewhere - I have often clicked on an article or a link only to find that I have already read it somewhere else. Does Google boot out all sites that copy stuff? It seems improbable to me as that would be half of the sites on the web. At the same time nobody can write original articles all the time as they would soon descend into the realm of fiction and in any case most stuff exists on Wikipedia already.

 

[LuckYou]

without our domainerz, parking companies would not be so many ...
some companies does good, some does bad.
some pays 80% and some pays 50%
it is your choice weather u like to take this one or another one.
:D

luckyou

In a nutshell, parking domains is not for everybody. For example as I mentioned before we own cameras.com which is a parked domain. It's doing quite well. It makes more money as a 2 click domain than a 1 click domain. And I am sure I could probably double or triple our revenue if we built out the site. I would never mini portal it, because I think that's crap. But if we built it out and sold cameras, it would generate double or triple what it does now. If I had the resources to do it, that would be great. If I had somebody who would dropship cameras for me that would be great. But I don't, so until I decide to build out the domain which will cost me about a month of work, it will continue to be parked and make us a nice amount of cash each day.

Donny

hi donny,

does parked accept new users?
i have applied once or twice but it was denied i think.
let me know if parked accept new users.
i plan to try some domains at parked.com parking service.

thanx n see ya

 

[Donny]

hi donny,

does parked accept new users?
i have applied once or twice but it was denied i think.
let me know if parked accept new users.
i plan to try some domains at parked.com parking service.

thanx n see ya

Yes we are accepting new users. We are just pretty strict on who we let in, because of an issue we had a few months ago. If you get rejected for whatever reason, just contact me and I can look at it.

Donny

that means, can we add our own google adsense code? can we add rss script to load contents?

Sorry, that's not the way it works. This is another reason why we initially decided to turn it off. I was talking about an external counter only.

Donny

 

[ArtfulWebSites]

Time Will Tell

Sounds impressive Artful, but does Chuck have a point? I'm asking because I don't know, and also because it seems to me that many people use info. and news they gain from elsewhere in their websites and blogs from elsewhere - I have often clicked on an article or a link only to find that I have already read it somewhere else. Does Google boot out all sites that copy stuff? It seems improbable to me as that would be half of the sites on the web. At the same time nobody can write original articles all the time as they would soon descend into the realm of fiction and in any case most stuff exists on Wikipedia already.

advaita,

I have to say I am also a bit skeptical about these nay sayers. I think your observations are accurate. I, as well, have come across much duplicate content through Google. I have also seen many, many parked paged in Google results as well.

Also, think about it. If we all followed his "Black Hat" process, we would also wind up with duplicate content.

So, I will take my chances and enjoy my current wave of success. time will tell how this will all play out.