Domain Name Parking

You may have seen a parked page before...it's a confusing looking page with a bunch of links on it, and you can't quite tell what you're looking at. A parking page is just that: it's a domain name that's not particularly being used for anything (yet, or ever), that is displaying pay-per-click links. In essence, the domain name owner is holding on to the domain for safe keeping, but is monetizing it in the meantime.

Domain name parking has been around for as long as the commercial internet has been in use. While most people find parked pages to be confusing or annoying, domain owners find it to be an attractive way to do something with their domain names that are not currently being used. On this page, we'll review the business of domain parking, and how you can get started parking your own domain names.

To park domains, of course, you'll need an account with a parking service. Domain name parking services typically offer domain parking for free; that is, you can add your domains to a list in your free account, and earn each time someone clicks the links in your domains.

If you own a domain name, you may have noticed that your domain provider has a bunch of options you can set for it. In this case, you would be looking for the "Nameservers" option. In this sense, nameservers are identifiers that will point your domain name to your parking service account. Your parking service will tell you what nameserver to set your domain names to, in order for them to forward over to the parking service.

For instance, here is GoDaddy's nameserver input screen. To get there, you simply click the nameserver icon at the top of your domain list screen, choose the "set custom nameservers" option. There are always 2 nameservers: an NS1 and NS2. You'll need to include both, and they usually look something like: NS1.PARKINGSERVICE.NET and NS2.PARKINGSERVICE.NET (of course, you'll have to read your parking services' FAQ guide to find out what their nameservers are). Once you've added these nameservers to your domain names on the domain hosting account, and have added the domain names to your domain parking account - your domain names should now display a parking page!

The truth is, it's impossible to know until you try. You could make dollars (or just a few cents) per day, depending on the quality of your domain names. Here, 'quality' refers to how good your domains are. If they're short and are exact keywords of a phrase that internet users search for every day, there's a good chance that some regular traffic is coming to your domains...but, you just don't know it yet.

This question is entirely subjective, and depends on three aspects: 1) your domain names themselves, 2) the kinds of ads that these names trigger, and 3) the amount of natural traffic coming to your domain names. Here's a better explanation!

• Your domain name itself depends heavily on how well it will do in domain parking. For instance, .com's always get the most traffic, because they're the first extension that people use when they type in a domain to see what shows up.
  


• Backlinks pointing to your site from other sites, or a regular linking campaign you've maintained, should bring in some traffic to most domains.

The only way to actually know how well you'll do with domain name parking is by actually trying it out, and giving it a month or two. Keep in mind that domain name parking is a great way to get your domains spidered and "aged," while you're waiting to develop them into sites. Domain name parking is typically a low-profit venture. Only domains that get a lot of daily type-in traffic will do well with domain name parking.

...is a flat out dumb idea, and a quick way to get banned from a parking service. These services are tracking your IP address, computer addresses and other information, and are smart enough to know when you're trying to cheat the system and click your own ads. Simply put - don't even try it, much like how you wouldn't click your own Google AdSense ads!