Domain parking has spoilt the whole domain industry. Get everything for nothing. Just register a domain name, change the name servers and bingo! You have a great looking site (parking page/template).
You sit back, and at then end of the month you have a checks rolling in. Who would live a different life if they didn’t have to?
Well parking is dying a very painful death. When I did in-depth research into domain parking I established in my mind that this was a system only to use while you can. The lack of transparency left the doors wide open for abuse by ALL parties, top to bottom. Period.
However parking had its very fruitful days, and some made a fortune. Myself included. Can’t complain.
Now the tides have changed. How do we switch to domain development? It will be hard. Domainers are not accustomed to thinking out of the box when it comes to domain name monetization. The hardest work some of us had ever done in our domaining careers was to change a few name servers or quote a few stats or browse a few lengthy expiring lists.
Although it would have helped with our domaining strategies, we didn’t have need for business plans and marketing campaigns and sales funnels and target markets and blah, blah, blah.
Now there are simply 2 ways to go about development. Go all out with one or two major brands or develop a series of mini brands.
The first option is risky, not because it involves more work, or takes more time, but it is the kind of thing that you will have to swear allegiance to. You would have to gain a “failure is not an option” attitude.
With the latter, you can try this today, get bored and try something else tomorrow. You can’t have that kind of attitude with a domain like the Toys.com or Camera.com. You have to be serious about business. Not about domains, but about business.
Minisite development is for domainers. Brand development is for business-minded entrepreneurs.
People who think mini sites are mostly domainers who still haven’t graduated from the domaining world. These are the people who think, well if I build a website and it does not monetize well, I will simply sell the domain name.
A businessperson thinks of a building a brand that he could sell one day for anything between 15 and 800 million dollars.
However, let me be clear here. You can make a lot of money with minisites. I heard an Internet marketing expert saying one day that you don’t need a fancy website to make money. You would be surprised to see that the ugliest-looking websites are the ones making the real money. It is all about the sales pitch and the marketing.
So, if you know what you are doing, get the sales pitch and marketing right, and sell products and services in the right niche, you could make boat loads of cash.
Think about it. Almost every ebook you have ever bought was purchased from a minisite. Most of them really are just one very long web page.
If you build minisites hoping to profit from Google Adsense in substitution for domain parking then you will not make money.
You will need to think and build ebusinesses! Sell products and services. What are you good at? How could you roll it up into a minisite and sell it like hot bread? Think, think, think!
The process is not simple; it requires for domains to choose their best sites for development. Then, they need to hire professionals that know the art of web development. Minisite creators, like Rick Latona’s AEIOU.com have their fair share in the market. However, for the few chosen sites out of dozens that will undergo full development, one needs to invest both time and money. Ultimately, if domainers are not happy with PPC from parking companies, they need to register domains that convert traffic better.
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I don’t know how accurate the last paragraph about hoping to make a profit from google adsense is not possible.
I have quite a few domains that made next to nothing at parking sites, that now do pretty well simply with adsense and a tiny bit of content.
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Acro,
I agree, it’s all about traffic. If the domain does not have inherent traffic then the minisite development should somehow help to earn/increase organic search traffic. Achieving this while obtaining decent monetization results requires skills and knowledge.
Grant,
The accuracy or inaccuracy of the paragraph would be judged on a domain-by-domain basis. There are quite a few factors to consider, such as traffic, keywords, site design, the placement of the Google ads etc.
My comment there is coming solely from the perspective of costs versus benefits. Parking pages are free, and almost all clicks convert to revenue. On the other hand, a minisite will cost money and the visitors may be distracted by the content and may not click on the ads. On parking pages, the only content sometimes is the list of ads. Visitors either click or close the browser window.
However, from my experience, normally the Google Adsense revenue per click is as much as 20 times more than that of parking revenues. Bear in mind as well that the revenue would depend on things like keyword, amount and quality of traffic and also page rank.
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