How to Monetize Your Domain Name Portfolio

Owners of undeveloped real estate have several options for monetizing their land while waiting to develop it. The land can be rented out to ranchers for grazing, or to harvesters for timber. In cities, it's common for a parcel that's awaiting development to be used as a parking lot.

Internet domain names can be monetized in the same way, with domain parking.

Domain parking is essentially a way to earn advertising revenues from the traffic that come to your domain name. Traffic can come from several different sources, but the main sources of traffic are:

• Type-in Traffic: Type-in traffic is usually more common among intuitive domain names. We have a domain name in our portfolio PhotoStock.com, for example, that gets pretty good type-in traffic from people looking for stock photography. If you visit the domain you'll see that it is currently parked, and generates advertising revenue through one of the leading domain parking companies.
• Expired Domains: One strategy in domain investing is to find expiring domains that have a lot of existing traffic. This might be a domain that was used for a past event or political campaign, or any website that has been up and running for a while, and for whatever reason has been abandoned by the current owner. There are ways to check the traffic of expiring domain names to determine which ones may be of value for their existing traffic. Some services now offer a 4-5 day free "Catch and Release " registration period where you can test the amount of traffic a domain gets before you commit to purchasing the domain.

There are a number of domain monetization services, and depending on your domain names, each offers slightly different advantages and disadvantages.

The most popular domain parking and monetization services are:

• Traffic Club: Traffic club has the advantage of allowing you to distribute your traffic to a number of different services and formats to determine which one is the best for your domain name name. The system can automatically optimize services for your domain name, or you can manually set the percentage of traffic that will display the various formats. This system works well for domains that have specific relevant keywords in them (such as PhotoStock), but since you can't set the keywords for your domain manually, a domain that is less obvious to a computer may only deliver generic ads, rather than more relevant topic-specific ads. The 4 formats currently available are
  • Domain Sponsor generic landing page
  • Domain Sponsor optimized landing page
  • A system called Skenzo
  • Google ads
• Active Audience:
ActiveAudience, a division of NameMedia is a newer company that has partnered with Yahoo to deliver ads to your site. The advantages of ActiveAudience are that you have more control in designing the look and feel of your landing page so that it looks more like a real website. You can pick the color schemes, the topic, and even enter certain keywords to deliver more relevant ads. This system is better for domain names that don't have an intuitive keyword in them. Active audience also provides more detaileds stats that show you what keywords people are typing to arrive at your domain name and what region they are from.

We've looked into some other domain monetization systems, but for various reasons did not find the service to be as attractive as TrafficClub and ActiveAudience.

• DotzUp.com: We didn't ever end up trying out the DotzUp service simply because the graphic design of the landing pages is not very good, and the company does not offer any other templates. Even after offering a portfolio of some very high profile and intuitive domain names, we were not able to get a more customized design
• Sedo.com: Sedo.com is one of the larger domain registration, sales, and monetization services.
• ParkQuick.com
• ParkingDotz.com

Feel free to post your comments about these services and other domain monetization services you've found useful.