Alternatives to Full Web Development and Domain Parking

7 Responses to “Alternatives to Full Web Development and Domain Parking”

1. Gard Jenssen says:

   October 13, 2011 at 1:40 AM

   Originally trying to solve the riddle “how to get traffic and revenue to domains with languages too small to generate seriuous type-in traffic” (which bascially means any language than English :-) we built a platform to do something better than domain parking and something faster to set up than any minisite service. We’re currently running about 1000 of our own domains off of this platform and several 1000s for pilot partners.

   What we find is that if you can spend less than 10 minutes setting up a minisite that’s not a whole lot more than what you’re spending setting up a proper parking page for your domain in GoDaddy or Sedo anyway. The resulting difference is huge, though. Most minisites will need in-links unless you find a niche completely without SEO competition so ranking for your domain name is usually out of the question unless you turn to blackhatting (which basically means cheating and cannot be considered a sustainanable strategy for domain development).

   Note that the kind of minisites we ended up making are not the ususal “12 page, WordPress, original content written on SEO steroids, with just one outlink to an affiliate ad/site”. The sites we set up are in principle niche news agents searching selected news sites every day with a proprItary news agent. Instead of setting up keywords to define parking ads (as you would with a parking page) your keywords are actually defining what the news agent should look for. If done right, all your articles will be thematically relevant as the site will be a pinpointed source for research about the topic you have defined for your domain. Over time our sites will therefore not really be minisites but self-updating news sites for a niche topic, often with hundreds or sometimes thousands of pages. This again means you site will tap into the “long tail” of searches done in search engines.

   This concept seems to be working well. We’re monitoring above all the kind of keywords people use in search engines before clicking through to our sites and 95% are typically spot on the niche theme. Also, our numbers are not bad (at least we’re happy with them). We’re mostly using AdSense which is reporting these average numbers: More than 3% CTR (that means 3 or more out of 100 visitors click on our ads), eCPM of more than $20, total revenue of more than $30 per domain per year.

   What we found is that you don’t need monster traffic to make a profit with almost any domain, what you need is long tail traffic that is thematically on-target to a site which provides both a useful service and useful ads. And if you do this, your domain will also become more valuable when you sell it since it has a thematically meaningful history with search engines.

   What we wanted to do for ourselves was first of all to create kind of minisite that would allow us to at least make enough revenue to cover the yearly fee. Secondly we wanted to understand as quickly as possible which domains in our portfolio could be worth devleoping into bigger sites. Then we got in touch with other domainers who asked to use our system, so now we’re a start-up trying to do for other domainers what we did for ourselves.

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2. david underhill says:

   October 11, 2011 at 6:46 AM

   I agree totally, having created 1500+ minisites over the last 7 years.

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3. Tim Hodges says:

   October 10, 2011 at 8:34 AM

   Although I never developed or used any of these alternatives for a website, I have much respect for anyone that can. Development is a skill set that I wish I had!…my ADD only allows me to buy and sell.

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4. Yaron says:

   October 10, 2011 at 4:00 AM

   Another options is to create a WP blog.

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5. John Lyotier says:

   October 9, 2011 at 11:35 PM

   Hi Tia,

   Thanks for writing this. It is great to help people realize that there are alternatives to parking or development outright. However, I should clarify that our approach at Left of the Dot is not your standard leasing in the way that LeaseThis operates. We partner with the domain holder to build out their asset (in what should be called a full site development). As part of our build out, we then lease of sub-domains to small businesses interested in the brandability of the sub-domain, its inherent SEO value, or the ability to use it in marketing campaigns to boost click thru rates. A few examples of recently deployed Marketing Names (as we call our sub-domains) include: https://Ireland.Importers.com or https://Tours.Oahu.com.

   In any case, good names should have something done with them, and ourselves and others can definitely help Domainers make the most of their assets.

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6. Tony Bellows says:

   October 9, 2011 at 11:23 PM

   Very useful article. Thanks, Tia.

   When you wrote “If you have a domain name that receives a decent amount of type-in traffic, domain leasing might be for you.” How much type-in traffic do you think a domain name needs to have for people to consider leasing it?

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   1. Tia Wood says:

      October 12, 2011 at 2:04 PM

      Good question, Tony. Although there isn’t an exact number range to determine what constitutes as “good type-in traffic” it really depends on the domain and if that traffic is converting. How to test this is by reviewing the click through rates when parking or see how much traffic converts to leads if not parking. Any data like this that you compile can be used to show the domain’s marketability when leasing the domain.

      A few hundred unique visits per day may or may not do it. Again, it depends on the domain, how commercial that domain is and if the audience is convertible so doing a small series of tests will help you determine if the domain is a good candidate for leasing.

      Reply