What to do with Your Unused Domain Names: Part I

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This is going to be part of a series of post about what to do with you unused domain names. When I say unused domains I am talking about domains that are not developed into full sites, this includes sites that you are parking or selling to endusers. If anyone has any things that they do with their unused domains send me an email and I would be glad to mention it in a post.

Make Sure Your Domains Show Something!

The other day, it was 2 days ago I was looking through my Godaddy and Moniker accounts and I was looking for which sites I am going to work on next. While I was doing that, I realized that I have too many domains to work on right now and all of the domains just point to nothing. Many of them were even on godaddy parking pages earning them money!

I own many generic exact match keyword and product domains, but before the day before yesterday I was under the assumption that parking was dead and no one used direct navigation anymore. I thought that everyone in the world was like me and they just went to google for everything. But I decided to try parking all of the domains for some strange reason and boy was I ever surprised.

Using the bulk change interfaces in both accounts I was able to change the nameservers in about 5 seconds to the parking nameservers at namedrive, it was the only place I had an account from a while ago and I am now looking around for a different parking provider. I have heard some great things about Parked.com and I think I will try them out. At namedrive I was able to move all of me names that I am not working on to a 1 page lander and enter custom keywords and headers. The sites look ok but that is not the important part of the story.

When I woke up the next morning my account had over 50 unique visits and some ok earnings close to $1. I guess that direct navigation is not dead and people do still type in.

$1 a day may not seem like a lot of money and I am not saying it is, but that's around $30 a month. $30 pays for over 4 domains renewals or registration and then hosting every month. This is money I am doing almost nothing to get and it helps me pay for my domain portfolio.

If you have names that are just sitting idle, I would suggest you just move them over to a parking page to give them a try. I had no idea that theses names were getting any traffic and I was going to drop some of them soon. Now instead of me paying to renew my domains they are working to pay for themselves. I will talk more about this later.

And the best part is now I can list them all for sale. On namedrive I select to have a message show up on the site that says contact us this domain may be for sale. This way if endusers visit my sites they have an easy to contact me.

I am by no way saying parking is new or it is the best way to make money in the domain industry. This post is more of a reminder to domainers to think every once and a while and not to possibly just let a name and money go to waste.

I would love to hear what you have to say please leave your comments below.

Remember this is only Part I be sure to check back soon for Part 2 which will hit the RSS sometime soon!

Comments

One Response to “What to do with Your Unused Domain Names: Part I”

Jeff
May 27th, 2009 @ 7:08 pm

I have that in the past and still do at times. I did start making a small mini-site templates that I could set-up in a few minutes to help the domain pick up organic traffic stronger revenue. For a large portfolio it may be too time consuming to set up all at once. My plan is to develop the mini-site as an easy to deploy software package.