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?

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.

Of course, you may ask yourself, is $8000 domain worth it? It depends. If you are starting a website on online grocery and searchguild.com is your domain, then you are probably not going get a good ROI. But of course, an SEO themed website would do much better than that. The challenge with less known domains is that you need to know what the owners have done with them. This is especially true with expired domains. You can generally snap up expired domains for cheap, but avoid deals that sound too good to be true. If someone is offering you smallbusiness.com for $6, would you take it? Should you take it? On the paper, it looks like an amazing offer, but what if the domain has been banned permanently by Google and other major search engines (I would still take the domain for $6, but I doubt anyone in their right mind would offer such a domain for that low of a price). But as you add zeroes in from of that $6, then the stakes get higher. You absolutely want to avoid getting into the whole Google sandbox trap, but at the same time you don’t want to lose your wallet for a worthless expired domain. Think about it! If people can’t find you on search engines, it doesn’t matter how good and short your domain name is.