Have you recently bought a domain?
Whether you’re interested in flipping it or using it yourself at a later point, domain parking can save and make you money in the process.
There’s no denying that there’s big money in domains. People have made millions from buying and selling highly sought-after domains.
However, nowadays, it can be a little harder to find and secure potentially valuable domains. Chances are you have to accumulate a collection of domains to start turning a profit on them. Holding so many domains can become expensive.
Domain parking offers you a way out of paying for hosting domains on their own IP addresses. Depending on how you park your domain, you can even generate a small stream of income from a parked domain name.
Keep reading to learn how this is done? Keep reading.
Domain Parking Defined
Parked domains are registered domain names that aren’t connected to services like an email or a website.
When you park a domain, you can choose to have it send visitors to a primary domain, display an error message or ads.
The exact steps to take will depend on whether you park your domain with your hosting provider, registrar, or with a domain parking service. Most hosting providers will allow you to park domains within a few clicks, but they don’t usually serve ads for you.
With a domain parking service or registrar, you can park your domain with them for free, and they will display ads on the page and split the revenue from this with you.
Check out this page if you want to learn more about how to park your domains.
Why People Park Domains
So now that we’ve gone over what is domain parking, why would you want to do it?
There are a few reasons why you might want to park a domain. If you aren’t going to be using a domain, then it doesn’t make sense to spend money on hosting a domain on its own IP address.
Depending on what your future use for the domain is, you might be interested in parked domain monetization.
Buying and parking domains is also a common practice for preventing cybersquatting and reserving domains.
Domain Investing
If you are buying domain names primarily as an investment opportunity, domain parking can be a cost-effective way to hold your collection of domains.
Domain names can sell for vast sums, but you have to pick ones that will become highly sought after. In the interim, you might have to hold a domain name for years until it can command a high price.
During this time, you might as well put your domains to work. By utilizing a domain parking service, you can effortlessly display ads on your domains and generate a small amount of cash from this.
Brand Protection
Another reason for domain parking is for brand protection. A lot of brands choose to buy up domain names similar to theirs and park these so other people can’t use them.
For instance, let’s say your company is called Hot Dog Shoes, and your website is Hotdogshoes.com.
To make sure people don’t accidentally land on the wrong site, you might want to buy up similar domains, such as hotdogshoez.com, hot-dog-shoes.com, or hotdogshoes.net.
You can then turn them into parked domains, and even make them point to your active site.
This helps to guide visitors to the correct website, and keep your online branding strong.
To Prevent Cybersquatting
Domain parking is also used to prevent cybersquatting. Cybersquatting happens when someone registers a domain name similar to that of a big brand, for the purposes of selling it to the company for a profit.
Depending on how badly the company wants the domain name, the owner can effectively hold it ransom, and ask pretty much any price they like. They can also host whatever kind of website and content on it.
This can be very detrimental to a brand’s image.
Cyber squatters usually target famous individuals and large companies, and it has happened to YouTube, Obama, Paris Hilton, Madonna, Nissan, and more.
Besides targeting versions of a particular name or brand, domain squatters also often go after typos. For instance, YouTube has recently had to secure five typo version domains of its name, including youtbe.com, youtub.com, and yutube.com.
If you need to buy up versions of your brand or site name, the most practical way to “store” these is by parking them. You can then direct the parked domains to point to your main site.
Reserving a Domain Name
You might also want to park a domain name if you are reserving it for future use. The last thing you want is to register your company or brand name, only to find that someone bought the domain in the interim.
Instead, it’s better to do an early domain name purchase and sit on it until you are ready to build out the site. During this time, it can often make sense to park the domain.
Waiting for Domain Expiry
Do you have a domain you want to ditch, and are waiting for it to expire? If so, you can park the domain until that date.
Different Domain Parking Options
If you want to park a domain, there are a few different options available to you. You can either choose to have managed ads displayed on it, self manage ads, create a sales page, or leave it as an error page.
Typically, domain parking uses a combination of:
- CPC (Cost Per Click) often referred to as PPC (Pay Per Click) or EPC (Earnings Per Click)
- CPV (Cost Per View)
CPC (Cost Per Click) ads
Often referred to as T1 or Tier 1.
When a visitor types in or otherwise lands on the domain you own, they will be presented with a parked page that shows a group of related terms.
When a visitor clicks upon a related term (1st click), they will see a group of related ads on the proceeding page. If a visitor then clicks on one or more of the ads (2nd click), as the domain owner you will be paid a percentage of the advertising revenue. The ads displayed are similar to those you see above and to to the right of search engine results after performing a search.
An example of a CPC Parked Domain.
CPV (Cost Per View)
Often referred to as Zero Click or T2 or Tier 2. When a visitor types in or otherwise lands on the domain you own, advertisers bid in real-time for your traffic and the visitor is redirected to another site whom was successful in their bid. As the domain owner you will be paid for each redirect i.e. every time a visitor is redirected to another site.
There are 2 types of ZC ads, Brand ads which are targeted and of high quality and RON (run of network) ads which are untargeted and of a lower quality.
- An example of a brand ad: hotels.com.
- An example of a RON (run of network) ad, ‘win a smartphone’ by entering a competition.
In September of 2020 Bodis.com dropped many of its T2 partners to improve the quality and relevancy of ads. Launching in 2022 Ads.com will only focus on high quality, highly targeted advertising.
With Managed Ads
If you are interested in parked domain monetization, one of the easiest ways to do this is with managed ads and a domain parking service or registrar.
Like we said above, these services allow you to park your domain with them free of charge. They will also manage ads on the domain, and share a portion of the ad revenue with you.
Although type-in traffic isn’t as high as it used to be, you can still earn a small amount of money, especially if you’re parking multiple domains.
Domain parking services typically will display the maximum amount of ads on your domain. This has the advantage of earning you as much revenue as possible.
However, over time this can hurt your domain’s reputation as users and search engines associate it with high ad content.
If you are planning to flip and sell domains, then this isn’t that big of a concern. On the other hand, if you want to utilize your domain in the future, but still want to earn a bit of ad revenue from it, then self-managed ads can be an option, providing you know how to implement this.
With Self-Managed Ads
If you want to implement domain monetization and not share any of the revenue, you can also do self-managed ads.
This way, you can manage the ads personally and receive 100% of the revenue. You will also have more control over the amount and type of ads that display.
This is ideal if you want to utilize your domain at a later date, and want to balance ad revenue with reputation and search engine ranking.
However, self-managed ads also have various drawbacks. Firstly, they require some coding knowledge to set up.
You also have to be registered with an ad network. In most cases, it’s pretty hard to register with an ad network if you only have inactive domains. Most ad networks require you to have an operational site that receives a minimum amount of traffic every month.
Lastly, you’ll also have to devote some time to managing your ad account.
With a Sales Page
If you have a domain you want to put up for sale, you can also populate your parked domain with a simple sales page. This will alert users to the fact that the domain is for sale, and give them a way to buy the domain or get into contact with you.
If you have a site with a commerce page for selling your domains, you can also point parked domains to this site.
With an Error Page
Finally, you can also park a domain and simply allow it to display an error message.
This will happen to your domain by default if you don’t choose one of the above domain parking options.
Error messages look different depending on the browser used by the visitor. However, they usually state that the site can’t be reached and that the IP address couldn’t be found.
If a visitor wants to find out whether or not the domain name is taken, they will have to do a WHOIS Lookup.
Do You Want to Make Money With Domain Parking?
If you are in the business of domain flipping, domain parking is a great way to make a small amount of re-occurring cash on the side while you wait to sell.
Do you want to make money with domain parking?
DominaParking.com is the #1 resource for domain parking monetization. We provide you with the info you need to start successfully monetizing your idle domains. Pay-per-click (PPC), also known as cost-per-click, is an internet advertising model that drives traffic to websites by having advertisers pay the publisher (usually a website owner) each time a user clicks on their ad. Essentially, it is the cost associated with getting an advertisement clicked. For search engines, advertisers typically compete by bidding on keyword phrases relevant to their target audience. In contrast, content sites often charge a fixed price per click instead of employing a bidding system. PPC "display" ads, also referred to as "banner" ads, are displayed on websites or search engine results pages that have agreed to show ads related to their content.
To learn more about domain parking, we’d recommend you next read our post on domain parking profitability. When a visitor clicks on a relevant keyword or enters a search term, a list of relevant advertiser links appears. Users can then click on an advertiser link or related keyword, or conduct a new search. As the domain owner, you earn a fee from the network every time a user clicks on an advertiser link and visits their page.