What is Domain Parking and How to Make Money Parking Domains

Domain Parking occurs when a person registers an internet domain without using it for web hosting or email services. Essentially, the domain does not do anything. However, such domains could have landing pages, holding pages, or some “under construction” notice. Domain Parking is not a common practice because registering a domain costs money, letting it sit without really achieving anything does not benefit anyone. But there are situations where domain parking could be beneficial to the owner, generating some side income. We would get into how people make money by parking domains later in this article.

You’re not sure what a domain is? Not to worry, domains are things you use every day to access various websites. They are addresses specifically made so humans can easily remember them. Rather than trying to remember IP addresses that are just strings of numbers. Domains are made up of the website name and an extension. Examples are twitter.com or even google.com. The extensions here are the .coms. There are, of course, other extensions like .edu, .gov, and so on.

Why do people Park Domains?

There are some reasons why people would actually opt for parking domains

• To Prevent Cybersquatting: Cybersquatting means to profit off an already registered trademark by registering and using a domain name with that trademark in it. A good example is this: Assuming Walmart does not have the Walmart.com domain registered, someone else could register that domain and uses it to sell products, benefitting from Walmart’s popularity, that’s illegal. If the products that the person sells are somehow harmful, it further ruins Walmart’s reputation. Walmart is a well-established franchise, but apply that scenario to smaller businesses. To prevent this, a lot of businesses register domains relating to their brands, even when they do not need them.
• Great Domain Name Idea, No Clue What to Use It For: Domain names can be a huge factor in driving traffic to a website. Generally, short domain names relating to a particular field, or domains that mean something could become a great tool in the hands of whoever owns that domain. However, you can’t always get whatever domains you want. If someone else registers that domain before you, and you need it, you would have to convince the person who initially registers it to sell it to you. And so, the best practice is, when you have an idea for a domain name you believe can generate a lot of traffic, register it before anyone else gets the chance to. Hence, Domain Parking could happen when you have registered a great domain name idea, but you do not yet know what to use it for.
• Business Not Yet Up and Running: This also stresses the importance of registering a domain name before someone else has the chance to. Assuming you intend to start a business called Premier Wigs, to sell wigs online. One of the first things you need to do is ensure you get the domain name, premierwigs.com if it is not already being used by someone else. Getting that type of domain for your business would be a massive boost. Now, once you get the domain, but you have nothing else ready, parking the domain until you have other things in order is not a bad idea.
• They intend to Flip the Domain: Domain Flipping is a different business. It’s when you buy or register a domain, hoping to sell it to someone else later at a higher price. When flipping domains, the best practice is never to sell immediately. It is best to buy when interest in things related to the domain name begins to develop and sell when interest is almost at its peak. This way, you can get the most profit from whatever domain you invest in. During the period before you sell the domain, parking is a great idea. This way, when you want to sell, you can use your traffic data to push the price up.

In the introduction, we mentioned that Domain Parking could act as a way to generate a side income for the owner. So, keep in mind that even when you do any of the things we have listed above, you could still make some money from that parked domain.

How Can You Make Money Parking Domains?

Through advertisements. Technically, domains with landing pages and domains with “under construction” notices are parked domains. However, the parked domains with landing pages showing ads, are the monetized ones.

When you decide to park domains with a domain registrar service after opening an account with that domain registrar, the domain registrar works with an internet advertising publisher, like Google, to display ads on the website that are similar to the domain name.

Here’s an example:

In the image, the name of the parked domain is SoftwareOnline.com, all of the ‘related links’ are then adverts which would lead the site visitor to other sites. But if you look closely, you would notice that all the related links are things that have to do with software, online, or online software. This way, if the visitor was indeed looking for something related to online software, he/she is not at a dead end and can click any of the presented links to move forward. Domain owners get paid for every click on an ad.

You might be wondering, how do people and on these domains if there’s actually no solid content on them. There are two ways this could happen

1. The users type it in. This happens more often than you’d think. Some people intend to search for something but end up putting a .com or a .net behind it, this could change their results and lead them to your domain instead. This could also happen when they misspell the domain names of the website they intend to visit.
2. Visitors could also arrive at your domain from inbound links. This usually happens when you pick up an expired domain. In cases where the previous owner had links to the website on other parts of the internet, whenever someone clicks on any of those links it brings them to your parked domain.

This brings us to the best types of websites to park.

• Expired domains: As you must have guessed from the previous section, expired domains still tend to generate some reasonable traffic, which means chances are that you will end up making more by parking expired domains, especially since they come cheap. Even if you intend to flip the website, parking it before you do is still a great idea.
• Domains with misspelled domains: Like we pointed out earlier, a lot of people tend to misspell the domains they intend to visit. If you manage to get some interesting misspelled domain names, it could generate reasonable traffic. However, if you intend to do this, you need to make sure you are in no way cybersquatting.
• Brand new domains: This works perfectly especially when you still have plans to make use of that domain name in the future, probably for a business idea you intend to build on. Why not make some ad revenue from that domain before your business eventually takes off.

If you intend to begin parking domains, the best domain name registrars for this are Sedo, Namecheap, and GoDaddy.

Please also keep in mind that the income from ad revenue on parked domains is not a lot, so we wouldn’t advise you go into domain parking full time.