The Best Places To Make Money Parking A Website Domain Name

^{At spotcoolstuff.com we usually write about unusual hotels, great gadgets, cool music and things that make us go WOW. Recently, we've gotten a lot of questions about the more mundane stuff of starting a website. So we're taking a quick interlude from our usual topics to write a series of five articles on web hosting and website domain name procurement. The other four articles in the series:}

• The Best Companies For Buying Domain Names
• How To Buy (And Sell) Domain Names Through eBay
• The Best Website Hosting Companies: The Top Two Hosts
• The Best Website Hosing Companies: The Two Best Value Hosts

_{And with that . . .}

If you have a spare domain name earn extra income by "parking" it. Many companies out there will host your domain name and dynamically build an ad-filled page for you based on keywords you suggest. The best of the services will also give you some control over how the page looks, usually letting you pick between templates and photos; no programing knowledge needed. See an example of a parked page at budgettraveler.com. Parking services are not created equal. We know the best ones . . .

WhyPark

Parking a domain doesn't make you money if no one visits it. That's why WhyPark's unique parking service is so superior. Their parked pages include useful articles, automatically selected based on your chosen keywords that visitors to your page will theoretically actually want to read. These articles make visitors stick around longer, increasing the chances they will click an ad. More importantly, these articles also ensure that your parked page shows up in Google's search results.

The catch -- and isn't there always a catch -- is that their service costs $100 per year. However, for that fee you can park up to 100 different domains. Furthermore, WhyPark gives you 100% of the income the ads produce -- they make all their money from the sign-up fee. Add up those costs and benefits and we figure the break-even point with WhyPark is around four domains (depending on the quality and topic of your domain name, of course). If you have five or more spare domains WhyNot wins hands-down as your best domain parking source.

GoDaddy or Sedo

The realitiy is that you will not make much money parking only one or two domains unless that domain is gogle.com or yaho.com or some variation name of an extremely popular site. Given that, you may as well park the domain where you bought it (since doing otherwise would cost you a transfer fee). GoDaddy (our top selection for a domain registrar) has a adequate parking program and is also a good place to sell your domain.

Another registrar that offers decent domain parking is a company called Sedo. Sedo is one of the more internationally oriented parking companies. This makes it your best choice for parking your country-specific domains (.uk, .de, etc.). They’ve recently upgraded their reporting tools allowing you to keep track of where visitors to your parking page are coming from.

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