Making Money with Domain Parking

Domain parking is when someone registers an Internet domain name without creating a website for the domain name to point to. The act of domain parking has evolved over the years since the early days of the World Wide Web. In the early days, domain parking was done simply to get the desired name registered before someone else took it. The domain owner would then simply place an 'Under Construction' or 'Site Coming Soon' page on the site until the content was ready.

As the Web grew in popularity, obtaining highly desired domain names became competitive and people began grabbing up these domains and parking them with the sole intent of selling them later to someone who actually wanted to build content under that domain name. This became an industry unto itself and domain reseller sites sprang up where people could park and resell the domains they had registered.

Finally, as these parked domains began showing up in search engines or as a result of someone typing a domain directly into the browser, people figured out how to make money on the parked domain while waiting to sell it. This, in turn, became another industry, known as monetized domain parking.

In this variation, instead of a simple 'Under Construction' banner, the parked domain contains advertising links which generate revenue for the domain owner. It didn't take long for entrepreneurs to discover that ad placement could create residual revenue that exceeded what they could get for selling the domain. This practice evolved into the development sites specifically to park domains and generate revenue from ads.

The better of these sites will add content or allow you to content based on your target audience. For instance, the site may allow you to specify the keywords that you want to attract and build content designed to bring that traffic to you. Or you may design content specific to the type of ads you are adding to the domain. The sites may also help with Search Engine Optimization to bring even more traffic to your parked domain.

In return these sites use a variety of methods to generate revenue from your parked domain. They may charge a flat up front fee for parking your domain or a fee which allows a certain numbers of domains to be parked there. In contrast, the site may want a percentage of your ad or click-through revenue. Still other sites may be a hybrid of these two models, depending on how much work you want them to do versus you doing all the design and set-up yourself.

If you are not a programmer or webmaster, you will want to find a host that will build the site based on your specifications. This will cost a little more up front, but you can get up and running a lot quicker with much less work. The best of these type hosts will have a simple form you fill out and then they build the site that sits on your parked domain.

The amount of money you can make domain parking is only limited by the amount of time you are willing to spend promoting your websites and selecting domain names and keywords that will attract traffic. Like many ways to make money on the Internet, there is no free lunch or get rich quick opportunity. But if you are willing to do a little research and spend some time and money buying and setting up parked domains, there is money to be made in this emerging market.