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

Is it possible to make income from domain parking? Yes it is! Some domainers have portfolios of thousands of such sites that make hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Private Equity funds. One Canadian domainer has managed to sign an agreement with the government of Cameroon. Cameroon sites 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 paid links. This person is reported to make millions of dollars each quarter, his reward for helping the Cameroon government monetize this situation!

My personal experience with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty lousy. I had a handful domains with Sedo for just over 24 months and I made about 1 cent per month! Not even enough to cover the cost of the URL registration fee each year. GoDaddy was worse. They wanted me to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your site with them. I had just one site for several months but I was unable to make sufficient 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 bet on it.

Before you think that you can jump in and buy several domains and snowball your parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the show. It's now a highly competitive playing field and there are tens of thousands of cyber squatters trying to make income from domain parking. All of the 3 letter domains are all gone and so are most of the four letter domains too! Capturing type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Public firms 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 totally give up on the idea of domain parking. There are still a few tricks to make some money. Some of them involve generating MFA (made for adsense) domains that have a little amount of content which brings search engine traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is substantially more involved than ordinary domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are ways to automate this procedure, but many of these processes require a certain amount of cash outlay for software tools that all generate the same duplicate content for all users. Generating unique content is really very 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.