Domain Name Whitepaper - Making Money with Domains by Leonard Holmes - HTML preview

Making Money with Domains

The traditional model for making money from Internet domains involves

buying and selling. Like traditional real estate, or any investment, the goal is

to buy low and sell high. Other models for making money with domains have

developed in recent years.

• Pay-per-click domain parking has been a very lucrative way to earn

money from domain names. This report will emphasize this approach.

The parking services described here provide free hosting and pay you

every time someone clicks on a link. Who should you park your

domains with? These services differ in important ways, and one may

work better than another for you. Whether you are a domain

professional or someone holding a single valuable name, parking with

one of these services will turn your traffic into income.

• Affiliate programs allow you to sell a product on your domain and keep

a percentage of the profit. You can do this from a site your build, or

you can redirect a domain to an affiliate page created for you by the

merchant who is hosting the offer.

• Developing your domain into a full-fledged website can sometimes

make the most money. It is also the most time-intensive.

Domain Parking Services

The remainder of this eBook will focus on making money through domain

parking. This is usually the easiest and most fool-proof way to make money

•

Some services require that you own a minimum number of domains, others

do not. Changes that you make appear immediately with some services,

while others require prior approval. (All provide free hosting.) In some cases

you can be paid when someone simply views your site (pay per impression) ,

or when they click (pay per click). Some of these services will automatically

optimize your domains based on what people search for. RPM (revenue per

thousand impressions) is not the whole story. Some companies include live

newsfeeds to keep people coming back to your site. Some services make it

easy for you to use one-click landing pages, while others do not.

•

Ac

tive Audience and Gold Key, try to keep your domain listed in search

engines. Results have been mixed. Many other services result in domains

dropping from search engines. Traffic from Asia does not monetize well on

most of these sites. Sedo, Traffic Valet, and TrafficZ seem to do better than

others with international traffic, especially European traffic and even some

Asian Traffic.

•

Stats are updated in near real-time on some services, while others update

once a day.

•

Se

do , NameDrive and Fabulous offer additional services, not just domain

parking income.

Up Front Strategy

In the following sections I will discuss the major PPC parking services. To

begin, these are recommendations that you might want to use if you are just

getting started. These recommendations are updated regularly and can

always be found at ParkQuick.com.

If you have at least 50 - 100 domains:

Apply at Parked for some of the best payouts. Apply for accounts at Sedo

and Active Audience if you expect your domains to make over $50 a week.

Both services have great looking landing pages. Sedo & SedoPro are highly

recommended for international domains. (Contact us to get an endorsement

code for SedoPro - include your first and last name.) Active Audience may

improve search engine performance of your domains if you use their

nameservers, but income there is down a bit lately.

Consider Traffic Z for nice looking and flexible parking pages. Check out

other pages of this site for more on the strengths and weaknesses of these

services.

If you have less than 50 domains:

Park your domains at Sedo and/or Parked for almost instant results. Apply

for a Gold Key account and try some domains there too. Some domains do

dramatically better at Gold Key. As mentioned above. Sedo is best for

International traffic. Sedo and NameDrive use Google/AdWords ads, while

Gold Key uses Yahoo/Overture. Gold Key can provide search engine traffic,

and their parking pages look better. Their site takes a while to learn.

Yahoo and Google Push for Conversions

Ad we go to press there are signs all around that Yahoo and Google are

pressuring parking services to delete the accounts of poorly performing

domain owners. Parked took the lead deleting suspected click-fraud accounts

some time back, and their numbers seem to be improving for accounts

remaining there (so much so that we are now recommending them highly).

The general trend in PPC income seems lower for most services. The long

term implications of these trends are unclear. Culling some of the "bad

apples" certainly may be a good thing. Yahoo and Google make a lot of

money off domain parking page ads, and it is in their best interests for the

current PPC system to continue. Advertisers want to sell their ads to people

who will not only visit their site but will also buy their product or service.

Conversion tracking software is more widely available than ever before, and

some advertisers are quick to equate traffic that doesn't convert with click

fraud.

Some newsletter readers have asked whether they can send paid traffic to

their pages. Most services forbid paid or incentivised traffic because it

generally does not convert well. Some sites (Parked is one example) do

allow you to buy AdWords or Overture ads and send that traffic to your site.

This is rarely cost-effective, however. Unless you are very careful you will

end up paying more for the ads than you will make off the parking. Second

and third tier paid traffic is more likely to include automated bots or other

clicks that will not convert, and you are likely to be banned from any of these

services if you buy that lower quality traffic.

An Alphabetical Overview of the Domain Services

ActiveAudience is a second generation domain parking service from the creators

of Gold Key. This newer service appears to target owners of larger portfolios and

domain professionals with higher-traffic domains. Gold Key and BuyDomains

merged some time back to become Name Media. ActiveAudience appears to be

built upon the experience of professionals who were involved in both projects.

Beginning in March 2007 they now offer a choice between one-click and two-click

pages on all sites. Their switch to a Google feed allows this to happen, and they

are hoping that it also allows higher payouts. New features include:

•

The ability to set domain names to 1-click or 2-click landers

•

The ability to place your own custom logo on the top of your sites

•

The ability to upload your own main photo image for custom pages

•

Improved ability to test keywords in rotation for auto-optimization

•

The ability to customize sites with up to 21 of your own hand-selected keywords.

ActiveAudience offers the option of rotating parking pages which auto-optimize your

revenue (similar in this respect to Domain Sponsor). The standard landing pages are

very professional, with targeted graphics and links. One-click landers appear when

Yahoo/Overture determines that your domain deserves them. These pages are more

stark, so that extra elements don't detract from someone clicking on links.

Don't bother with domains that violate someone's trademark. They are pretty strict

about not accepting these domains.

We've been testing ActiveAudience and we see some things we really like. The

graphics are crisper and many of the pages look more professional than Gold Key

pages. Gold Key style pages actually rotate along with these newer pages and

more generic (but still attractive) text pages. You have complete control over color

schemes and graphic layouts (and whether layouts rotate to maximize cash). Initial

income appears to be at least on par with Gold key, and the service is really

designed to improve your income over time. We now recommend this service for

people who own more than 50-100 domains. Others can receive many of the

benefits by signing-up with Gold Key.

An example of an ActiveAudience domain is GrandParentPlace.com.

Click for Active Audience

Domain Hop is a parking program from Kanoodle.

Because Kanoodle sells their own targeted ads (in direct competition with Google

and Overture) they don't split the profits with anyone. They pay well for sites in

categories where they have ad inventory.

Domain Hop initially pays the highest of a $4 rpm (4 cents for every 10

visitors who view your site) or their pay-per-click rate when a person clicks

on a link. They will quit paying the $4 rpm if your site falls under $2 rpm

over two weeks on its own.

Domain Hop was started with a model where they included newsfeeds on

your site. This seems to have gond by the wayside, tne their current landing

pages resemble Sedo's "lite" pages or other companies' pages.

There is no minimum number of domains required to park a name at Domain

Hop. Give them a try - you may find better income with them than with other

services. An example of a Domain Hop destination site is HealthMinds.com.

Click for Domain Hop

Domain Sponsor has been highly praised by most domain professionals.

Their system "automatically optimizes" your domains. Domain Sponsor sends

out checks more quickly and reliably than some other services. PayPal

payments are now available too. They have recently improved their Online

instructions, and their site is becoming easier to use.

Domain Sponsor was one of the first PPC parking services that moved to a

hybrid pay-per-click / pay-for-performance model. They no longer pay the

same amount per click on a keyword - rather they attempt to analyze the

"quality" of your traffic. This appears to mean that they want to know if

visitors really buy stuff from the sites that they click through to.

As of 2007 Domain Sponsor has a new system that allows you to create a

site with custom graphics. You can also set whether the domain rotates

between different landing pages or gives peope the same page every time.

These features were not working perfectly as of 1/20/07.

Domain Sponsor's "auto optimization" process starts with semantically

constructed generic search page that keeps track of what people search for

and click on. These links eventually migrate to the main page. The process

works quickest for high-traffic domains. You also have the ability to add or

remove keywords. The have upgraded their processes several times. It is

now possible to get graphic-rich pages that will rotate with the more generic

pages for the system to see which pages earn more revenue.

The stats that I get from Domain Sponsor always show fewer visitors than

other services show for the same domain. Payouts are competitive, and often

better than these other services. Digital-Daycare.com is an example of a

Domain Sponsor domain.

Click for Domain Sponsor

Dotzup is a fairly selective PPC parking service that creates custom landers

for domains that are expected to generate high traffic. They also have

automated systems to handle other high quality domains, but they do not

work with adult domains, trademark or typo-trademark domains, or even

astrology domains, domains "derogatory to a specific race or religion", drug

related domains, and gambling/casino domains.

Dotzup has a program where they will guarantee that they will beat your

current income for a given domain. It appears that these domains are

evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but it is a worry-free way to try this

service with some of your better-earning domains.

We are just beginning to test Dotzup and we don't have any revenue figures

at this time. An example of a Dotzup domain is YogaMedicine.com .

Sign-up to try Dotzup

Fabulous is a parking service with some fabulous features. They are also a

domain registrar, and they have tools to help you manage your entire domain

portfolio - even those domains registered elsewhere. Their parking tools are

some of the most flexible in the industry, allowing you to park using

Roar.com's pay-per-click service or Dark Blue's affiliate program. You can

create custom sites with their "Dynamic Generator."

Fabulous requires that you own at least 50 domains. Their portfolio tools are

excellent and highly recommended. Their parking and site creation tools are

not quite as user-friendly. Their Fabulous 5.0 service is designed for domain

professionals. It is reported to work well with high quality keyword domains.

Based in Australia, Fabulous also does better than most for gambling-related

domains.

Fabulous is also a registry with good prices on domain names; and they sell

premuim domains on the secondary market.

An example of a Fabulous domain is Classof98.com (but their domains can

look much better than this one).

Find out more about Fabulous

Gold Key is a domain parking service that uses PPC links from Google. Gold

Key allows a choice of landing pages,including choosing 1-click landers

(where you get paid for the very first click). They added graphic templates in

July 2005 that make the landing pages look more like real websites. Their

sister site Active Audience is open only to larger domain holders. Both sites

now allow:

•

The ability to set domain names to 1-click or 2-click landers

•

The ability to place your own custom logo on the top of your sites

•

The ability to upload your own main photo image for custom pages

•

Improved ability to test keywords in rotation for auto-optimization

•

The ability to customize sites with up to 21 of your own hand-selected

keywords.

Pure type-in keyword domains and domains with search engine traffic seem

to work best here. In some cases you can more than double your income on

these high quality domains. Some people make a lot of money here. There

are special tools available for high-traffic domain owners. (Mediocre names

may do better elsewhere, and names with trademark issues may be

rejected.)

Stats are very detailed. Gold Key and Active Audience domains seem to do

better with search engines than domains parked with other services. This is

especially true if you park your domains by using their nameservers (rather

than by redirecting the URL). In both cases the developers worked to make

the domains look like real websites to search engine robots.

An example of a Gold Key domain is recoveryhealth.com.

Click for Gold Key

Do you want to put your domains on auto-pilot? iMonetize is a service that

claims to test your domains at many of the services listed here. They

consider themselves to be a "meta-ppc provider" - testing your domains on a

daily basis and parking them with the service that is paying the best on that

particular day. After their testing is complete your domain may be parked

with Domain Sponsor on Mondays and Active Audience on Tuesdays, for

example.

Is this really possible? We've started testing their service to see. In theory

this could work well especially on high-traffic domains. Low traffic domains

don't seem to generate enough traffic for comparisons to be made.

iMonetize takes a cut of between 5% and 15% - but they also negotiate

deals that may be better than what you would otherwise get. You also have

access to programs that might not othwewise accept you. In theory you

could do better with them even after they take a cut, but every middle-man

does mean a little less money for you. One strategy to consider would be to

park domains with them that get a lot of traffic but are not bringing in the

income that you think they should. If income goes up - then keep them

there.

Find out more about iMonetize

NameDrive exploded on the scene with an easy-to-use service and a

different approach. If you keep your domains parked with them for one

month, they will offer to buy the domain for an amount equal to between 6

months and 8 years of the traffic generated. You don't have to sell to them,

of course, but it's a great place to park if you also want to sell a domain.

NameDrive surprised many people by being named the number one parking

service in an early 2006 survey by Domain Name Wire. Their popularity is

probably related to the "park and sell" but they also offer free telephone

consultations and free portfolio management services for anyone who parks

100 or more domains with them. Popularity has dropped off a bit as their

returns seem to have flattened-out.

The people wanting to buy your domains are investors and venture capitalists

who will pay a wholesale price and value your name strictly based on its PPC

income. I'd rather sell to an end user at at least twice the price, but that

approach also takes longer.

NameDrive's services are very easy to set up and use. There are no lengthy

waits for approval, and you can create one-click landing pages on demand.

As with any service, these pages should accurately match the traffic coming

to your site.

Their landing pages are attractive and flexible. If you view your domain

portfolio settings ("Domain Portfolio" tab, and "Settings" tab) you will see

small magnifying glass icons toward the middle of the page (between

'keyword' and 'header'). Click on one of these and you will see a preview of

how your domain looks - along with a number of different options of how it

might look. You can change the settings and see the result in real time, then

apply the changes for real if you like them.

Examples of NameDrive domains include 4s.org and ToneBody.com.

Check out NameDrive

Parked is an excellent service from DirectNIC that has improved their

performance and is now highly recommended. They pay out twice a month,

which has attracted people looking for a faster return on their money. They

have also been aggressive in fighting click fraud - canceling some accounts of

people who appeared to be generating fraudulant clicks. (To be fair - all

services do this. Be sure to never click on your own ads.)

Parking pages are very neat and attractive without a lot of content (that can

sometimes distract viewers from clicking). Their stats are not as detailed as

stats at Sedo or ActiveAudience, but this can be a good thing. Their simple

interface is easy to navigate. Domains at Parked