So what exactly is parking your domain? Parking your domain is an advertising practise used mostly by domain registrars and internet advertising publishers to create income from type-in traffic to an blank domain. The url will normally resolve to a page consisting of nothing but google ads or links to affiliate programs. There is usually no useful information of any value to the user who usually clicks on one of the ads just to get away from the page. The domain owner is normally paid based on the number of clicks and the following benefit derived from such clicks.



Is it possible to earn money from domain parking? Yes it is! Some webpreneurs have portfolios of thousands of such sites that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Private Equity firms. One Canadian domainer has managed to sign an agreement with the government of Cameroon. Cameroon domain names end with a ".cm". Many internet users mistakenly type in ".cm" instead of ".com" and all of the unregistered sites resolve to a parked domain page consisting of advertisements. This person is rumored to make millions of dollars each month, his reward for assisting the Cameroon government monetize this phenomenon!

My personal experiments with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty lousy. I had five domains with Sedo for just over 24 months and I made approximately 1 cent per month! Not even enough to cover the cost of the URL registration fee each year. GoDaddy was even worse. I had to to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your page there. I had just one site for several months but I was unable to make enough money to even reimburse the cost of this fee, even though it wasn't a lot to begin with. I'd imagine that if you're a bulk domainer with thousands of domains, you might achieve substantionally more traction than I did. But I wouldn't count on it.

Before you think that you'll go out and buy 5-6 domains and snowball your parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the show. It's now a very cut-throat playing field and there are tens of thousands of experienced domainers struggling to earn income from domain parking. All of the 2 & 3 letter domains are all gone and so are nearly all of the four letter domains too! Capturing type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Public companies jumping in on the action, there's more than enough money being spread around to buy up all the possible dictionary words and their possible permutations and combinations.

However, you don't need to completely dismiss the concept of domain parking. There are still many tricks to make some money. Some of them involve generating MFA (made for adsense) domains that have a minute bit of content which pulls in organic traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is a bit more cumbersome than regular domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are ways to automate this process, but many of these processes require a bit of cash outlay for software tools that all create indentical duplicate content for all users. Generating unique content is incredibly critical for ranking high in the search engines and getting their traffic. There are ways to automate this process without spending any money but thats a new topic for another day.