So what does one mean by parking your domain? Parking your domain is an advertising practise used predominantly by domain registrars and internet moguls to create money from type-in traffic to an underdeveloped domain. The domain will usually resolve to a page consisting of only adsense ads or links to affiliate programs. There is usually no useful information of any value to the web user who usually 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 resulting benefit derived from these 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 every month. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Venture Capital companies. 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 URLs resolve to a parked domain page consisting of advertisements. This person is reported to make millions of dollars each month, his share for helping the Cameroon government monetize this occurrance!

My personal experience with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty lousy. I had five websites with Sedo for just over 24 months and I made roughly 1 cent per month! Not even enough to bare the cost of the domain name registration fee each year. GoDaddy was even worse. They wanted me to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your page with them. I had 1 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 guess that if you're a bulk domain parker with thousands of sites, you might achieve a lot more traction than I did. But I wouldn't count on it.

Before you think that you can go out and buy a few domains and snowball your parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the game. It's now a highly cut-throat playing field and there are several thousands of experienced domainers struggling to make income from domain parking. All of the 2 & 3 letter domains are all gone and so are most of the four letter domains too! Getting type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Venture Capital firms getting in on the action, there's more than enough money being thrown around to buy up all the possible dictionary words and their possible combinations.

However, you don't need to completely dismiss the concept of domain parking. There are still a few ways to make some money. Some of them involve creating MFA (made for adsense) domains that have a tiny bit of content which brings organic traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is a bit more involved than ordinary domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are methods to automate this process, but many of these methods require a certain amount of cash outlay for software tools that all create the same duplicate content for everyone. Making unique content is highly 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 article.