If you have been in the Internet business for as long as I have I am sure like me you will have built up a whole range of domain names that you have parked away.
Some will have been bought for that brilliant idea you just haven’t got round to as yet, some will be domains you have bought speculatively in the hope they might be worth something, some maybe ones that clients no-longer wish to continue with and you have decided to keep hold of.
Perhaps more embarrassingly if you are like me some will have been bought when surfing while drunk, you wake up in the morning and that brilliant idea you had last night after a couple of bottles of wine just does not seem so good in the morning, but when you check your email through the fog of a hang over you can just about make out that invoice for the domain name you bought for your not so brilliant idea!
In all seriousness, I have built up a portfolio of domain names reaching into the thousands, some good and some not so good, most of which are just parked, so I thought why not make these pay? Even if that is only a few pounds per year at least they would pay for themselves covering the registration costs. This got me thinking about possible ways to monetise them, so here are my ideas, if you have anymore please do post a comment. Indeed if you have a funny story about one of those not so great ideas please do post those too!
1. Sedo or other Auction site – The option that sedo provides is actually a way of selling domain names, however many people use it simply as a parking service, you see you point your domain at sedo, add some details about a price you are looking for and then Sedo put pay per click adverts on the domain name, you get a cut of that revenue. The service is intended to sell the domains, however you can simply reject any bids and earn from the PPC. If that great bid happens to come in you can always decide to let it go.
2. Create your own ppc or affiliate landing page. Simply creating one static html page, put some PPC adverts or banner adverts related to the domains subject and leave it alone. You may want to track with Google analytics to see what people are searching for and custom your banners to them, but all I am doing is setting up those pages and leaving them. The aim of this is not to generate myself extra work, but to do something quick and simple that might drip some money in.
3. The final option that I can come up with requires some additional work but not much. If you have a merchant that provides a product data feed related to your domains subject, grab yourself a copy of AffiliStore (setup takes minutes), setup a data feed from a URL (which updates automatically). This will create an online store with all the products of the merchant. This advantage here is you are more likely to make commissions, but the disadvantages are that it takes a little longer to setup and also takes up more server resources if that is an issue.
With all of these I have decided to simply setup the sites or holding pages. I will not market them in anyway other than submitting them to search engines (which in most cases is already done). Then I will leave them until such a date that I decide to use the domains for something more productive.
In the mean time if each domain earns £5 per year, and yes my expectations are very low, then on the 2000 parked domains I have this will earn 10,000, this will cover the domain registration fees. If they earn any more then that will be great.
Useful links:
Web Hosting
Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name RegistrationAffiliate networks
TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate FutureText and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)
Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks
