Most people who wish to find something on the Internet simply go to Google or Yahoo! and enter their search term. But a growing population of Internet surfers simply type the name of their search or website in the uniform resource locator bar located at the top of nearly all web browsers.

These "type-ins" usually add a ".com" to the end of a keyword and simply assume that the resulting webpage will be the authority site for that particular subject. For example, someone looking for satellite radios would type "satelliteradios.com" into the URL address bar and press enter. What many savvy tech investors realiized a decade ago was that this could be very valuable traffic. If you owned the domain satelliteradios.com and wished to monetize the domain you would not need to own a store selling such radios. You could add targeted advertising to the page and send your traffic to retailers that sold the product.

You could, using our example, "park" a series of links on the page pointed to various sellers of satellite radios. When a user clicked on an advertisement link on satelliteradios.com you would be paid a small fee for directing that traffic to the retailer's site. Domain Parking as it is known has turned barely useful generic domain names into a very profitable enterprise where individuals, known as domainers, buy a large portfolio of generic domain names and park advertising links on them.

Type-in traffic from around the world go directly to these sites and sometimes click on an ad link. The domainers make a few cents per click per domain but if you multiply that by thousands of clicks per day across a portfolio of names and you can see why this little known area of Internet marketing is growing in popularity.

Rick Schwartz

Rick Schwartz boaught his first domain name in 1995 when he laid out $100 for LipService.com. 8 years later in December 2003 he sold one, Men.com, for $1.32 million in a deal that was reported all over the world.

In August 1997, he paid $42,000 to buy porno.com, even though the seller had just bought it a week earlier for $5,000. But even at $42,000 the domain turned out to be a huge bargain. “What surprised them and was impossible to keep secret was porno.com earned enough to pay for itself in just a few weeks! They discovered that it was akin to buying real world property and paying off the mortgage not in 30 years but in 30 days!” Schwartz said.

Yun Yee

Yung Yee, a Chinese citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia and owner of possibly the best domain portfolio ever available, sold his portfolio several years ago for $165 million to Marchex, a publicly traded company.

Yee, owner of the Name Development portfolio (more commonly known by domainers as the Ultimate Search portfolio) a collection of over 100,000 domains, assembled the portfolio using a propietary system for grabbing dropped names faster than any other software anywhere in the world.

A talented programmer, Ye used his software to build the bulk of his domain holdings in the late '90s and early 2000s. He became a master at "catching," or buying up domains that were dropping because people gave up on them or forgot to pay an annual registration fee.

Frank Schilling

Frank Schilling is one of the world's largest holders of generic domain names. Many people didn’t renew domain names in the dotcom crash of 2001 and Frank strenghted his effort to pour all his revenue back into buying generic keyword domains.

A reclusive man who has quietly become one of the world's most powerful and respected domainers, Schilling bought the name "eatingdisorders.com" in late 2002 for $1,100 snapping it up in an auction. "What I didn't realize," he says, "is that more than 100 people a day blindly type the name into their address bar." Today, he says, the site gets around 120 click-throughs a day, providing steady income. He's added another 100,000 names to his portfolio, bringing his holdings to more than 300,000 money generating generic domain names that are attracting well-financed potential buyers.

Kevin Ham

Kevin Ham owns a domain name portfolio worth about $300 MILLION and runs his empire from a swanky apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ham is a devout Christian. Trained as a family doctor, he put off his medical career to focus on his domain name business. Since 2000 he has quietly put together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. 

Working mostly by himself, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle -- even inventing a few of his own -- to expand his business. He wrote software to snag expiring names cheaply. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one try.

Domainers park advertising on their domains but that is not the only way to earn money with your domian names.

One of the most popular ways to make a killing with your domain name is to build an affiliate marketing sales page on it. Affiliate marketing is simply driving traffic to a specifc sales offer. If a sale is made via your redirection to the retailer's site you earn a commission of a few percentage points of the sale to many dollars per sale.

If you owned this site for example you could add a sales page on the domain that touted the benefits of buying the cheapest but safest home insurance from a particular company. You would then add a link to the particular company's web page where a visitor would be further encouraged to buy an insurance product. If the sale is made then the owner of this site would earn a commission for the sale.