2 Ways to Get Your Unused Domains to Pay for Themselves

Whether I’m stuck in traffic, in the shower or shoveling snow off of my driveway, my brain is never at rest.  It’s the curse of the entrepreneur.  I constantly struggle to think of new online business ideas or to come up with improvements for existing sites or products.

If you’re like me then first of all, I’m sorry – I know what it’s like.  Secondly, I know that quite often those seemingly brilliant ideas you had while lying in bed at 3 am wondering why you’re not asleep at 3 am, may not pan out to be all that great.

On the other hand you also have your share of good ideas that for one reason or another need to be put on the backburner.  Either you don’t have the time, the resources or the focus needed to act on them right away.

Whatever the reason, chances are that over time you may have collected a number of domains for use with some cast-aside endeavors.  With prices sitting near the $10 mark it’s often easy to pick up a domain and sit on it for a year or twelve.  The problem is that your collection tends to grow from year to year as you continue to supplement your ceaseless ideas with potential website names.  After a while what seemed like a small library of prospective names becomes a large and somewhat costly investment.

So what do you do?  Do you sell the domains?  Keep them and incur the yearly costs?  These are questions that only you can answer.  What I can suggest are two great ways to eliminate, or at least decrease, the yearly fees.  Perhaps even turn those dusty domains into small profits.

These two wonderful solutions are Cash Parking and AdSense for Domains.

Cash Parking

Cash parking is a feature that some domain providers such as GoDaddy offer.  If you have a domain that you’re not using, you can add it to a cash parking account.  Any time someone visits your domain by typing its URL into their browser’s address bar, they will be presented with a page full of ads.  The page is generated by your domain provider and requires no work on your part.  Providers often let you select a topic for the ads so that visitors see links somewhat related to your domain.

The nice thing about cash parking is that it requires no attention.  Simply add the domain to the cash parking account and see what income your unused domain generates.  There is no other setup, no maintenance, really nothing outside of monitoring your income reports.

Some domain providers do charge a yearly subscription fee for this service so make sure you know what you’re signing up for.  You’re probably not going to make a large profit off of domain parking, so you don’t want extra fees sucking up your income.

AdSense for Domains

AdSense for Domains is almost identical to cash parking offered by domain hosting companies.  They difference is that you need your own AdSense account and have to manually change your domain’s name servers to point at values provided by Google.  The process is incredibly easy and takes only minutes to set up.  You can even batch-import your domains if you have that many. Once finished, you may need to wait up to 24 hours for the changes to propagate.

The other advantage to using Adsense for Domains is that the ads displayed are contextual and based loosely on the words in your domain.  In addition, Google provides you with a keyword tool that lets you suggest keywords for AdSense to use.  Ads shown on your domain’s page will then relate to your specified keywords.  As with most things Google, AdSense reserves the right to dismiss your suggestions but overall the process is very effective and incredibly easy to set up.

By using AdSense for domains you effectively cut out any middle men and generate your own profits.  However you lack the extra interconnectivity that are a part of other services.

Cash Parking vs AdSense for Domains

So which is the better alternative?  For me personally, I find that cashed parking brings in about twice what my AdSense domains make.  Sometimes a little more. This is probably due to providers optimizing the parked page layout making it more likely to get clicked on.  Also, they’re probably interconnecting parked domains in hopes of increasing traffic.  Either way the results show that for now my parked services seem to be outperforming my pure AdSense for Domains account.  That however doesn’t imply that your results will be the same or that things won’t change in the future.  Google is constantly modifying and improving its services.

Not All Domains Profit Equally

Don’t expect all of your domains bring in the same.  How much a particular domain yields depends on a combination of the domain’s name, it’s similarity to other, more popular domains and magic.  You’ll likely have domains that get no clicks at all and also ones that get way more than their fair share.

How Much Can you Expect to Earn with Parked Domains?

Certainly don’t expect that parking your domains will make you rich.  In fact, you’ll be lucky to get the price of the domain covered in a year.  The whole point of this is to offset the cost of owning an unused domain, not to make money.  But when you’re starting an online business and trying to keep costs low, cutting a bit of expense off of each unused domain can be a welcome treat.

Know the Rules

Before I finish this post and call it a night… or more accurately a morning, I wanted to stress a couple of very important points.

1. Do not click on your own ads.  If you’ve parked your domain then great.  Leave it alone, don’t look at it.  Enjoy the fact that you’re effectively cutting your costs and let it slip from your mind so that you can focus on more important money-making strategies.

2. Do not promote clicking.  If you direct traffic to your parked domain don’t say things like “support us by clicking”.  That will get your domain banned from the program.

3. Do not use online advertising to promote your parked domain.  I’m surprised at how often people park their domains then try to direct traffic to them.

You can see all of the policies on Google’s AdSense for Domains policies page.

Finding Value

There’s another hidden benefit to parking your domains and that’s the ability to estimating its potential.  If you have 50 parked domains and two of them are continuously making you money then you can assume that there’s greater value in these.  They may be related to a popular existing site or they may be something that people are actually looking for – diamonds in the rough.  Either way, knowing this can help point you in the right direction for your next online business project.