Should you park your unused domains? That’s what most folks are asking themselves these days. Many domainers use services such as Google Adsense or Sedo to park their domains. They make a few buck here and there, but the real money in the domaining business is earned when you sell a $9 domain that you buy for $30K or more. But the practice of parking domains has been and still being used by too many people.

I personally believe that parking brandable domain names is just a waste of time and value. The traffic that you receive with a parked domain will not earn you too much money, and you end up devaluing your online asset by parking it. In most cases, you are not going to get any SEO benefit for your troubles, and you will have to split your revenue with those domain companies. Why park when you can optimize your domains for SEO?

As you probably know, as your domain ages, it becomes more valuable. Google does put more trust in domains that are older. The least thing you can do is put your own text ads up and add your own content to customize your domains for search engines. You can also put Wordpress on these domains and completely optimize them for keywords in their related niche. Either way, you are going to build your assets and add value to them whereas by parking them with a traditional domain parking service you are going to devalue your domain.

Parking domains is very easy to do, but why settle for less when you can build assets in your sleep. A domain that comes with a PR of 3 or 4 is worth way more than a domain that has been parked and gathering dust over the years. So in that sense I do agree with the folks at WhyPark. Parking a domain is a waste of a valuable asset. Building long-term assets is way more lucrative and way more rewarding in the long run.

What’s your take: do you still prefer parking your domains with sites such as Sedo?

Believe it or not, Domainers are now becoming like real estate moguls as they are practically registering every name under the sun. Everyone dreams of selling a cool domain name such as iPhone.com or CreditCards.com for millions. Not to forget that many registrars are using the shady practice of domain-hogging in order to get your business [for those of you not familiar with the concept of domain-hogging, it is the practice used by a few registrars to keep you from going to their competitors. Basically, when you search for a domain name, and it turns out that it's available, you either choose to buy it or wait for a couple of days. Domain registrars will register the domain automatically if you don't buy it. That way you can only buy it from them should you change your mind.]  But is the whole domaining phenomenon helping or hurting us consumers?
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I am sure you have heard stories of individuals who struck millions by selling well known domains such as iPhone.com or creditcards.com. In fact, Business 2.0 had an article on these guys a few months back, and how cellphones.com fetched over $4 millions in cash. Of course, acquiring such domains is so difficult that you may ask yourself, why bother with buying useless domains?

Simple! Domain buying is like buying real estate. Think of it as long term investment. If you are lucky and hit the jackpot you may end up making millions in the process, but even if you are not lucky there are good reasons to buy and keep buying domains. One simple reason is that as your domains age they become more valuable. Think of them as a wine that ages and becomes better. Not actually but close. Older domains get more trust from search engines than brand new ones, and by planning for the future you can save yourself a lot of hassle.

Also, domains are like houses. We only have a limited number of really good domains but demand is very high for them. Apply the supply - demand rule to it and bam! we have an arbitrage opportunity. Many have made millions using this simple concept as I am sure many will in the future.

I personally wish I was smart enough to register iPhone.com 5 years ago. I just couldn’t see it coming then, and I just can’t see what’s coming in the next couple of years. But those who can have real advantages over us mortals. I guess iPhone was a lucky shot, but those who registered smallbusiness.com or creditcards.com understood the supply-demand early one, and that’s why they are probably sitting on a beach right now enjoying their lives. Very good domains are too expensive, but there are other domains that you can buy for cheap and utilize in the future (either in form of starting your own business or selling it to those who need it). You may not fetch millions, but still the arbitrage opportunity is there. Just ask BuyDomains.com.

Have a good domain name? Share it with us and you may find someone who’s willing to pay $$$ for it.

I am sure you have heard of SEO professionals who claim magic pills that will push you to No. 1 on Google if you take them twice a day for a week. If you haven’t, then you are better off. SEO is no magic pill and in general there are no overnight winners in SEO. But if you are thinking of opening up a business or a Weblog, there are things that you can do to reduce the work needed to get good rankings on major search engines. One of the things is trying to snap up popular domains on auction sites such as Sedo. Aaron Wall, the author of SEOBook, had a good post a few days back about the company that bought searchguild.com for $8000. Not only those guys got the backlinks associated with searchguild.com, they avoided the possibility of suffering from Sandbox effect that Google enforces on brand new domains. (more…)