Scott Fillmer » business

Bose Great Customer Service on Damaged In-Ear Headphones

Scott Fillmer — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:19:04 +0000

Normally I would not just do a post to plug a specific company, unless they had done something really outstanding (or perhaps done something really poorly), which Bose has done now, at least twice. Way back on November 26th 2008 I bought a pair of Bose TriPort In-Ear Headphones from Best Buy for around $100 including tax. At the time, they were probably the most expensive ear-bud type headphones I had purchased but looking back, it was the best money ever spent for that type of thing.

Not only do these headphones have the best sound quality of any ear bud headphones (see my product review on CNET) but Bose backs them up with a total and complete one year warranty. Big deal right, well, except for when you wear them every day in all different conditions and they don’t make it that one year.

In July 2009 the wires fried and my nice expensive headphones had lasted about 8 months. I contacted Bose and they replaced the damaged pair, for free, and in about a week I had a brand new pair of headphones. Those Bose sent me in 2009 lasted until last week with photo below, about another 8-9 months. So I emailed Bose again, thinking this time I was out of luck, and once again they offered to replace them for free. Not only that, but they even offered to upgrade the set to the mobile version with the inline mic for $29.

It seems that once you pay for something from Bose, if you use them like I do, you have a perpetual warranty.

Bose told me again that this new pair, being shipped around June 1 2010 will carry the same full one year warranty. Wow, just love when a company stands by their products. Our culture is fully immersed in the generic, low quality, disposable, product lines that flood our discount box stores, but there are still a few companies that make a high quality product, and usually the higher price is well worth paying. Of course, they also get my business beyond these headphones.

My wife has a pair of these headphones, and I also own a pair of their QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones (probably the best pair of headphones on the market for the price, see my CNET review), and their Bose On-Ear Headphones (an in-between model). Some audiophile will argue my point on sound quality, but for the price, and some are far far more expensive, Bose has found a great medium between price and quality

In this case, my high price of $100 for a pair of high quality in-ear headphones from Bose cost me about $0.08 per day if I include the new pair that are on their way. There are a couple of caveats with this of course. If your headphones last longer than a year, you are pretty much out of luck. I am probably not the most typical user of these headphones. I wear them, and have worn them, on a tractor cutting 40 acres of grass through the entire summer, in the woods, on a bike, a motorcycle, in the car, in the rain, snow, and every other imaginable condition.

Of course the negative you can take from this is that obviously, under heavy and daily use, these headphones lack a bit of durability, but as long as Bose continues to stand behind them, I’m ok with that at this point. Products today, even high quality products, anything that is mass produced, are really made for the “averages”. If you are an under-average user, you pay more and get less, and if you are an over-average user, you pay less and get more, simple as that.

Good customer service and high quality products are a hard combination to find today so I like to point it out when it comes across path. I can think of only a handful, like Apple, maybe Honda? What are some of the companies and products you have found today that have similar customer service?

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Are You a Linchpin, Answer

Scott Fillmer — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:05:47 +0000

This is a followup from my previous post, Are You a Linchpin, Assignment, see also Linchpin and the Art of Photography. The easy answer to this question is, yes, of course I am a Linchpin. It’s about like asking someone if they think they have any value in this world at all. Well if they didn’t think so, they probably wouldn’t be here. The hard part about the answer is not the yes or no, but the why.

Explaining to someone why you have value is not as easy to quantify. I have value to my family because I cut the grass and hopefully bring joy to their lives, I have value to God for a variety of reasons, but can you quantify your value at work? The value we have at work is the value we create. It isn’t given to us by our boss, or written in a manual, or presented to us on a nice easy to follow map. Value is what we make of it, and how we use this creativity of ours to add value above what we are paid, because we want to, not because we are paid to do so.

I add a created value to my team, not for the tasks that are easily documented, but for the unique perspective I bring that only I have because only I have lived my life. I am a technology troubleshooter, teacher, trainer, arbitrator, writer, photographer, problem solver, and all around idea negotiator, who generally doesn’t like hard and fast rules but concepts and ideas to work with. If it can be easily explained and easily written down, anyone could do it, anyone could easily replace my value. It is the unquantifiable that makes me a Linchpin.

To me being a good editor is an art, the art of a Linchpin. I know how to edit content and copy, but I am lousy at it. No matter how many times I read something I still miss obvious grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that leap out to a good editor, or even a fair one. We have a great editor on our team (@farrowj on Twitter) but even if you could write down exactly what she does, and if I tried to follow it, I would still be a lousy editor. I doubt she has ever written it down either.

Being a Linchpin or not is more about choice than destiny or fate. You aren’t just born a Linchpin and you are made one by your boss or customers. You are a Linchpin if you choose to become one, choose to share your unique art with others beyond what is written in a manual.

Are you a Linchpin, and if so, why?

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Linchpin and the Art of Photography

Scott Fillmer — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:41:08 +0000

This is the final followup from my previous posts, Are You a Linchpin, Assignment and an upcoming post Are You a Linchpin, Answer. I took the above photo of Seth Godin back in 2009, see Tribes, We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin // Review, and shortly after I took that photo shoot, I gave up my art for dead. I had spent the better part of 15-17 years chiseling away at my art of photography and had felt like I was rarely valued for that art (monetarily speaking). In fact, in over 15 years of actively shooting, I probably made less than $1,200 total ($1,000 of that coming within the last 6 months of that 15 years), on an investment of probably close to $30,000 or more in equipment. With a degree in Accounting, schooled in the ways of business, that didn’t compute. Expenses always have to be less than revenue, but I was looking at it totally wrong.

Rarely does a book motivate me to make an actual change. Many books motivate me, but not enough to do anything about it. Linchpin on the other hand was one of those that just happen to light a fire under my feet and get me to look at my art in another way. Mainly, that an art is done for the sake of the artist, and those who receive his gift. I knew this from the moment I picked up a camera, but over time and many other circumstances, I had forgotten that.

Profit, something which I was always taught was a simple mathematical formula; “revenue minus expenses equals profit”, was totally rearranged in Linchpin. Godin explains profit, from the business side, as the value you, the artist, add or contribute minus the amount you are paid. Same thing really as the MBA version, but when you look at the work, as “value” it adds something more than just money, it changes everything.

A fast food worker at McDonald’s can add a wide range of value to the company, yet they are pretty much all paid the same thing, minimum wage, so there is no reason to create or add value above a certain level, but that doesn’t mean some don’t create and add value where it is not needed or appreciated. Brother Lawrence was one such person. A 17th century monk, and someone who had enormous value to add to all of society in his book of letters, spent much of his life doing dishes, as a cook. His conversations with God and letters to his friends make an incredible book, and it is free, you can read it right now, doesn’t cost you a dime.

My art of photography had created value for years. I gave it away to the wrong people, businesses and companies, and tried to charge those in my close circle. So thanks Seth, I am going to get back to the business of creating my own unique art. I don’t know how I am going to accomplish that, I have no equipment, no resources to buy any equipment, and at the moment, no clients to shoot for, but those are just details. I have going on 2 decades of knowledge in my own art, the equipment is just a tool.

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We are No Longer Selling Books as Amazon Marketplace Sellers

Scott Fillmer — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:10:01 +0000

It’s official, we are no longer selling books on Amazon. For those of you who didn’t know, we have been selling books on Amazon in the Amazon Marketplace (those are the used and new books you see when Amazon is sold out or when you just want to buy the same book Amazon sells for $39.99 for $.01) for years. Yesterday we sold all our remaining inventory, some 4,000 used/new books in one large bulk sale to a buyer in Texas. For Deb and I, the books had become (as Andy Stanley put it last week) the old sofa that no one wants to get rid of because it has always been there.

We started selling book on Amazon at the same time we were full time eBay sellers (eBay lost out as a viable place to sell as a business long long before Amazon) back in 2005, and sold full time on Amazon in 2006-2008, and it was some of the hardest work, most laborious, and in the end least profit making work I can ever recall doing in my life. It came at a time when Deb and I needed to work from home, needed and wanted to work together, and many blessings came our way over those years of selling books online.

Over our selling life on Amazon, we sold over 9,000 books at a retail price of $65,000 (that’s not as much as it sounds when you divide by 3 years and then start thinking profit margins), kept a high feedback rating, and learned a lot about hard work and to appreciate what we were given. Not much different than what we gained and learned from our previous businesses we started and ran together, except that this particular one took over our entire house top to bottom.

After running several small businesses over the past 10-12 years I have come to understand that each business or product has a defined life cycle, especially when you are running very small self made businesses. Products come in and out, jobs, customers, and life in general, has a lifespan or timeframe where some things work well. The key is to know when it is time to move on and get rid of the old sofa. For the books, yesterday was that day, and we were both thrilled. There were many many reasons, but knowing it was indeed the right time to let it go was a good feeling.

Anyone that wants to know the inner workings of selling on eBay or Amazon feel free to drop me an email. Combined I think we have about 12-15 years experience selling on both platforms and we lived and breathed eBay and Amazon, so we do know our way around. We certainly know how to get in trouble with big brother, and how to survive when the rules get changed (and they always do).

Our online selling life was great, and really is always something we think about no matter what we are working on or doing. In those years, we managed to:

work together 24/7, netting 20,800 more hours spent together
fought off fraud
and copyright infringement issues
fended off domain landsharks
had $300,000 in sales without making a profit
sold alongside corrupt competition
continually fought customer theft
avoided a few lawsuits
didn’t sue a few times when we could have
were falsely accused of anything and everything
Witnessed to many (I hope)
were praised and awarded
ridiculed
made some great friendships
ate at a huge unknown number of restaurants
filed for our own patents and trademarks
never clocked in once
travel to every state in the country
live in a bus, apartment, house, tent, campground
lived in Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Alabama (and many others)
filled approximately 250,000 orders
counted approximately 2 million crystals
imported products from Austria
invented our own products
worked for a competitor
took 50,000 product images
went through about 30 computers
used miles and miles of tape, boxes, and packaging
cried, laughed, bled, and cherished every second

Thankfully for us, now, we have both moved on to a new chapter in our lives together and it doesn’t look like there will be much online selling involved, and that’s a good thing, because I am exahusted.

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A Real Nikon D700 Birthday Cake is Amazing

Scott Fillmer — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:11:22 +0000

I was sent this (the info not the cake) from Deb this morning and I just had to do a blog post about it. For any of those spouses of photographers, especially those Nikon freaks, it is time to step up to the plate and buy him or her that cherished Nikon D700 Birthday Cake. This thing is a replica of a Nikon D700 DSLR camera body with a carrot cake and vanilla buttercream (see Surprise Camera Birthday Cake and Camera Birthday Cake) insides. The attention to detail is wild but it sounds delicious too.

What was even more funny about the cake was the party was Maggiano’s restaurant in Bridgewater, NJ, one of my hometowns for more than some 4 years growing up. I would love to see some photos from the birthday party if any were uploaded to flickr. In the mean time, check out these awesome photos of the Nikon DSLR and NIkon D700 DSLR birthday cakes. I didn’t see how much these cakes cost, but I am fairly certain they won’t put you back the $3,000 that the Nikon D700 costs and it looks far more tasty.

Thanks to Pink Cake Box for the cake images. I love seeing businesses go out of their way to help their customers and the likeness of the D700 is just incredible. I am still finishing up Tribes by Seth Godin and he talks a lot about building a following like Pink Cake Box seems to have done with their masterpieces of sugar and flour. I spend a lot of time with my D700 and the likeness is great. Check them out if you are in the market for a wild looking cake.

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My Faith Renewed in the Kindness of People Today

Scott's Misc — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:01:20 +0000

Some times we go through our days gripping and complaining about this and that. Even though we know it is an unproductive and “ugly” quality, sometimes the day just gets the better of us. Yesterday, I was having one of those harder days of the week, and then I got this email.

Dear islandzephyr,
Hello, i would like to send you some more money for shipping and supplies and shipping insurance if possible, I would much rather you pack it well and i dont think 10.00 would cover that, I want to paypal you an extra 20.00. thanks paul

This may not seem like a whole lot to some of you who don’t go through the daily packaging and processing of orders, but in 15 years of doing business on the Internet, this is the first time anyone has ever sent an email like that to me. I have even had people complain about shipping when it was free, but not like this. My standard customer seems to be related to one of my previous rants, called The Complaining Christian Can Leave where we tend to get nickel and dimed to death over petty issues. Not this time.

It just reminded me of how something very short, and positive, can change the whole outlook of a day, and this goes both ways. It had nothing to do with the money, it was just the caring of the other individual. Thanks Paul for showing me another side of who our customers are, a stark contrast to the buyers described in my other article.

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The Complaining Christian Can Leave, Please

Scott's Misc — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:54:13 +0000

I really don’t like to do any sort of “non-positive” post, but sometimes it is just to much. I would love to have someone chime in below and hear their opinion after you read my rant, BUT, if you do not want to read a critical article on our faith, just skip this one and check out Blogger Small Group, James 2, for a less irritating post. My wife and I have been earning a living on the Internet for the last 15 years (current Amazon, see our Amazon store here, and our Amazon feedback here), so I can say with some confidence that we have had many thousands and thousands of customers over the years, and one group always seems to stand out to me. The Complaining Christian.

The Lost are Easier to Deal With, Really

I am not talking about some garage sale, few customers a week thing. We had over 10,000 individual feedbacks on eBay (meaning we shipped over 100,000 orders), and we currently work with about 100-200 new customers a week on Amazon. With this said, the most difficult customers, most complaining, disgruntled, and overall unhappy people turn out in the end to be Christians. WHY? I don’t get it, but I can tell you, I don’t want your business.

Inevitably after dealing with an unhappy customer I find out they are fellow Brothers or Sisters, and it is always over something really petty. And I am sorry to say, you homeschool moms buying A Beka books on Amazon, you top the list. (I have my own theory on the homeschool book issue but can’t get into that now.)

One Recent Classic eBay Example

The most recent was an eBay customer that was not happy with the selection of VHS tapes we shipped to her. I am not going to try the case here, but we always try to list as accurate a description as possible, and she received exactly what we said, then filed a credit card claim against us for shipping something “materially different”.

Usually this happens when someone doesn’t take the time to actually READ what they are bidding on, but the bidder will never admit to this no matter what, and then the ensuing emails begin.

After emails back and forth, with her accusing us of running an eBay fraud scam, purposely misleading bidders, and misrepresentation of everything, this was her final email to me, and the one that finally told me what I expected all along, she was a Christian (the CAPS are hers, not mine).

I HAVEN’T FILE A CLAIM AGAINST YOU I JUST TYPE WHAT I HAD TO SAY TO U AND I’M NOT A THIEF YOU KNOW WHAT I’M NOT GOING TO FUSS WITH YOU I’M GOING TO LET GOD DEAL WITH YOU AND LIKE YOU SAY OVER SOME LOUSY TAPES I JUST SAID I WOULD NEVER BUY ANYTHING ELSE FROM YOU U HAVE A GREAT LIFE ROBBING PEOPLE BUT REMEBER GOD IS WATCHING YOU

Nice. I hope God is watching me actually, thanks. Did I mention this was over a final bid of $10.51. This is a typical response I get from a fellow Believer when they don’t like the outcome. Yet, some of the nicest and easiest people to deal with are the lost. When this conversation first started, from the very first email, I told my wife, yep, here is a fellow Believer, guarantee it, you watch.

We are NOT in Business to Rip You Off

If you think I am ranting about some isolated incident, think again. Overall, our customers are happy. We kept a 100% positive feedback rating on eBay, and Amazon goes around 99%-97% (different system), so overall, our customers are generally pleased with the transactions.

But, there are always unhappy customers in business, no matter what you do. I have many that stand out in my mind over the last 15 years, and for one reason or another, what was most irritating about it is they were Christians. Over the years (keep in mind our products are generally under about $10/order), the complaining Christian has threaten to sue me, file fraud charges, contact the police, and overall rant about how we are just in business to “rip people off”.

I am going to write a piece in my business blog about the “rip people off” syndrome, but I had to personally address the Christian aspect of the topic, simply because it shouldn’t be this way.

We Should Not Be So Quick To Judge or Condemn

I say this for myself, not just the Complaining Christian. Should we not try to follow the example given out in Mathew 7:1-3. In business, I try to deal with people exactly how I expect to be dealt with, in a fair manner, with some expectation of intelligence on the part of the buyer (it’s assumed on the sellers part, to me).

I same “some”, meaning a basic level of understand of what you are doing at its most basic level when buying something on the Internet, like how to read and how the post office ships (i.e., we are not the post office).

1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. 3“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

We have not operated a business for more than 15 years just so we can steal from people. What this lady from today doesn’t realize is that most of what we sell on eBay right now goes to benefit a local missions store in town. But I shouldn’t have to explain this to her either, it shouldn’t matter, she should have the same response either way.

You Don’t Represent Me or My Faith

What I hate about the Complaining Christian is that they are examples of my faith as a whole body of Believers. We should be the happy-go-lucky people. We have the knowledge of the Truth. We should remember we are representing our faith to all those who see, and we don’t always know who those people will be. For the last 15 years this is something I have not figured out in business on the Internet. Why the Complaining Christian exists in the first place. Please, lets not be the Complaining Christian (TCC, I am going to deam it as). There are better ways to spend our days, our time, our money, our mental capacity.

There are certainly better ways for us as Believers to be effective witnesses?

PLEASE, chime in below and let me hear your comments on the subject.

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Is Twitter Really a Useful Tool for Your Business?

Scott's Misc — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:44:41 +0000

With all the hype surrounding Twitter I had to give it a go a few months ago. The big question for me at the time was, is Twitter a useful tool or another avenue that eats time on the Internet?

I am not sure that question has really been answered in my mind yet, but I have made some observations over its use the last month, and if nothing else at all it has connected me to some people in business and blogging that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. At this point, I only wish more of my existing friends were using Twitter.Â I do see some fluctuation where people do come in and out of Twitter so it can be hard to make acquaintances and keep them going if the someone you meet then jumps out or is never heard from again. I wouldn’t say this is the norm, and there are so many useful applications now that you can use with Twitter, it is hard not to jump on the Twitter bandwagon.

So Does Twitter Have Usefulness

What caught my eye and got me using Twitter was all the blog posts about its usefulness in business applications, and of course blogging. A few good posts I came across are:

Since most of these posts go into how Twitter functions I won’t try to repeat that here, but I have found a few good applications for its use. Blogging is all about networking of sorts, and Twitter is a social networking agent, so put the two together with a WordPress Twitter Tools Plugin and you have a great match.

Twitter Tools Plugin & Twhirl

This is a great plugin (and another great one by Alex King, whom I am starting to think is the king of WordPress plugins) that will automatically post a tweet when you post a new blog article. It is simple to use, and is loaded with options. This is the area on my sidebar that says “What I’m doing…” and it updates with blog posts and also @replies and regular tweet posts.

Then there is Twhirl. This is a standalone program that runs on Adobe’s Air platform that will allow you to use Twitter similar to an IM window on your desktop. They also just came out with a new version, info is on their blog at twhirl 0.8 released – adding friendfeed support. This and support through iPhone and other mobile devises make using Twitter easy.

Interacting is Networking

I found out that you really don’t want to call an automatic blog post entry the end of your Twitter use though. This is not quite the best etiquette to be used on Twitter. Like most things. To make them truly useful you really need to use and interact with them.

This is the case on Twitter as well. I learned how to use the @replies and general updates through a fellow user on Twitter and it expanded it use and productivity, at least as far as traffic goes, ten fold. I would highly recommend using Twitter for more than just blog post entries.

What has your experience been with Twitter? Do you find it a useful tool to use in business applications?

If you are so inclined, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/scottfillmer

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Steps to Build Your Brand Name and Make it Stand Out

Scott's Misc — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:00:28 +0000

How much have you worked on the branding of your intellectual or product information? So you have created a website, product, or a small business but you don’t have an identity yet?

There are many ways a customer will remember a small business. Good customer service, quality products, and reasonable or competitive prices are all practices that will make your business stand out and succeed. One that is often overlooked by small business owners is the importance to building company recognition, or branding. It could possibly be just as important to build a strong brand name as a small business as it is among the large corporations. You are smaller and harder to see, harder for your customers to remember. We can all remember who The Home Depot is without seeing a giant orange square logo but what person spending about 60-90 seconds on a page is going to remember what company that was a week from now. One way is to develop a strong brand name.

Logos, Icons and Colors

If you look at some of the higher traffic blogs you will see many of them have professional looking logos, icons, and colors. The color scheme and other design elements used becomes part of their brand. If you don’t have a logo yet, create one or hire someone to make one for you if you are not the graphics person.

A good example of this would be Vandelay Design. He has a logo and colors to match, and it is easy to recognize, even if you were just looking at the “V” in the blue background color. He also has a good article titled Who is the Focal Point of Your Design?, which also gives some good pointers on design, which is another important aspect of branding for your company.

It doesn’t have to be the most expensive thing to do. You can look at some different graphics designers, but check out who your competition uses, it may not be very expensive. I just ran a contest where I gave away a complete logo set to the winner, for free, can’t beat that. You will find a great difference in professional looking designs and someone trying to earn a quick $20.

Either may be acceptable depending on your budget, just expect to get what you pay for (except when they are free).

Use a Tagline or Slogan

Using the same company as an example above, they also use a slogan (or tagline), Website Design & Customization Services. A tagline should be a very brief set of keywords that adequately describes your company products or services so your customers can quickly gage what your company. Another eCommerce store example would be Etsy. If you haven’t visited their site before, their slogan is, Your place to buy & sell all things handmade. You don’t have to visit their site to have an understanding of what type of business they operate.

You may not know that they host individual marketplace stores where businesses sell their wears, but you can get a general idea of what they sell.

Trademark Your Company Name and Logo

Something many small businesses fail to do is register their trademarks. This is not hard, but does take time and money. Start at the United States Patent and Trademark Office if you are operating within the United States or check with your country’s government office that deals with trademarks.

You can register your trademark for your company name, logo, slogan, graphics, whatever you would like to protect legally. I registered a previous company name we sold last year, Pieces of the Past, and a product we invented and sold within that company name. The business name took almost 3 years to complete because we had someone who contended our mark, and the product took about 18 months.

Each application was done online and cost about $500 USD. You do have to follow directions and file the correct paperwork. If you don’t it just adds to the time it takes to complete the process. Once completed, you can add the familiar Â© symbol after your mark, but that’s not all you can do with the registration. Once completed, you can protect your mark from being used by your competition or from cannibalizing use on the Internet. A great example of this was when Shoemoney completed his registration of his company name and was able to keep others from bidding on his name in Google Adwords.

See the entire article titled, Stopping People From Bidding On Your Trademark – At Least On Google Adwords, here. If you have been successful at building your brand name, don’t let it become a generic name, protect it legally.

Get Some Merchandise Made

This is not only an outward marketing program for your company, it is fun. You can have all kinds of shirts made from just about everywhere today. My previous company attended conventions all over the country so we ordered several custom golf shirts from Lands End with our logo, product name, and slogan. Customers came to recognize us from our shirts with our logos on the lapel.

You don’t have to be a huge company to have merchandise made with your company information. I think we were charged $25 for the design work submitted to Lands End via their website, and we could buy all the shirts we wanted after that with our embroidery work included. ProBlogger and Shoemoney have a few photos that shows shirts with a logo for their company and even a great XML sitemap plugin. Some other suggestions might be:

Lapel Pins (these can be great fun to design and very unique)
Hats, Bags, Jackets
Coffee Cups
Mouse Pads

Use Your Created Materials

Once you have created your brand name, you need to use it. Put it on all your customer invoices and shipments and on your packaging if possible. Use it on your online profiles. You can use a logo on just about every social networking site and most any site you create an account when signing up for the service. Market your brand just like you would market your products or services.

When customers come to your store or blog you want them to remember you after they have left, right? Branding is one way to do that and with a little effort you can create and market a successful brand name for your company, products, or services.

What are some other ideas your company has for branding?

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Review of GoDaddy Cash Parking Which Makes Little Money

Scott's Misc — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:29:01 +0000

Do you want to make some money with your idle domains while you wait to develop the site into a huge success? Cash Parking is one way to monetize your portfolio of domains.

GoDaddy Cash Parking is one place to put your domain portfolio, but the real question is, is it going to be a good return on your investment (that would be the $3.00 a month you have to pay for the service) in the long run? If you are wondering how much cash you can make with the GoDaddy Cash Parking service, let me give you my $.12 below, literally. I love the graphic and stats GoDaddy uses to show how much cash you can make with your GoDaddy Cash Parking account over the other un-named options available. If you have 100 domains, and you get 45,000 impressions, that makes for 6,750 click through’s, with an average CPC (cost per click) of $.12, that gives you $7.92 per domain, or $792.16, and this is per month.

For those very casual domainers out there who’s portfolio is less than a thousand domains (and possibly less than a hundred), the GoDaddy Cash Parking offers little in the way of cash, and probably less credibility with Google and any kind of search engine rankings.

What is Cash Parking

You have probably come across many cash parked domains, usually when you “type in” a domain name instead of doing a search for the company or site. Sometimes this can be annoying to the visitor who really wants to be someplace else, but if you did a type in to find it, someone else probably will as well.

Cash parking is a method of parking a domain name with a hosting company that uses a portal or template based web page to show ads when someone lands on the index page of that particular domain. It is a way to monetize your domain name before you are ready to use it for its intended purpose. Each time a visitor clicks on one of the ads displayed on your domain you will receive some percentage of the revenue generated by the click through from the ad company setup with the hosting company. Some domainers use cash parking as a revenue generating business plan, and I am sure there are many who make quite a bit, but I was more interested in the mainstream casual domainer here, someone who owns a few to a hundred domains.

How to Setup Cash Parking

There are many different companies that offer cash parking, GoDaddy just happens to be one of the larger domain registration companies on the Internet, so many are familiar with their services. To setup a cash parking account, you will need to sign up for their revenue share plan (or cash parking plan), add your existing domains to the plan, and then setup the splash page or template you want to use.

Most of the time you can setup keywords that you want to associate with the domain name, and once approved, the ads will generate from those keywords. You can also choose from various template colors and designs to customize your look and feel of the domain. An good example of this would be my domain o2oil.com. When you go to that domain you will see a graphic at the top, and a few separated boxes for sponsored links and then related and popular searches. If the domain is for sale you will also see a graphic in the upper right corner that shows where you can place a bid on that particular domain.

How Much Money Can You Make

This is the question everyone wants to know of course, so did I, which I why I tried it, and are currently still using the service. The graph shows my actual results through this writing and year to date so far has been $.23 and I think a few of those clicks were from “friends and relatives” by accident (obviously not many though).

I have a few dozen domains parked with the service, and I started using their parked domain system about 6 months ago. I also automatically add new domains to the service until I figure out what I want to do with them.

My domain buying skills are improving but I certainly do not have a professionals eye on buying great domain names yet like Aaron Wall’s recent article, Selling Commodity Services: Controlling Cost vs Adding Value, where he talks about buying a domain for $2,500 and later being offered $17,500. He has been doing this a while and probably has a very good eye for domain names, but that is for another post. A little background information would give you a better understanding of the revenue potential, because how much money you make on cash parking will depend greatly on several variables.

How many domains you own
What those domains names are (good 3-6 character names or 25 character sentences)
How much type-in traffic you can generate with those domain names
How good you are at finding new domains to add to your portfolio
How long have the domain names been registered
Was there any existing traffic going to these domains before you purchased them

I am probably mediocre at best with the above items but trying to get better. But getting better requires you to actually do something and not just think about it, so go get a few domain names and give it a try if you are interested in seeing your own results. Doing a quick search through the forums I found similar results to what I stated above… yet to cover the cost of the GoDaddy Cash Parking account itself.

Check the Information About Parking Carefully

I did find several blogs and forums that have articles written about how much money they earned. Some blogs say $3,000 here, $500 the first month, potential earning is unlimited and so on. Check the source of the blog before you take what they say to heart. Are they a “make money online” or “spam” blog?

A good place to start is the bad neighborhood text link tool checker. This is not law, there are many good blogs that come up as spam on this check tool, but it will give you an idea.

I did find a few alternatives to GoDaddy Cash Parking that were popular on the forums but I haven’t had a chance to check into any of these companies quite yet. They are NameDrive, Sedo, Fabulous, DomainHop, Afternic, and NamePros among a few (there are certainly many more), but it could be GoDaddy that receives a lot of the business, probably due to their marketing and appearance of trustworthiness they have established. There are many other alternatives to using the GoDaddy Cash Parking service, even if you register your domain with GoDaddy, you can still park them with another company.

Is There a Search Engine Penalty For Parked Domains

I often wondered what Google does with all these parked domains with no content. Well, I think the answer is not much. I have seen one of my parked domains actually get indexed, but I think that is because I used it as an example in a post like I did here. Otherwise, with the content is king notion, your parked domains will most likely remain in never land on search results if you haven’t added any quality content.

I did email GoDaddy when I first started with the Cash Parking asking just this question. Their answer was pretty clear and to the point.

Thanks you for contacting Online Support.

1. The domains must actually be submitted to the search engines before the domains will appear. Although it is possible for the search engine to pick up the page, it is usually hit through direct traffic because the page has no actual content users would be searching for.

2. It usually takes a few weeks for the search engines to pick up the domain once submitted.
Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.

Best regards,
Frank
Online Support Tech

It may take a while for the search engines to pick up the parked domains but without any real quality content you are probably looking at just type-in traffic only. That means if they are new registrations, only REAL GOOD domain names will see some parked traffic.

Will your parked domains effect the traffic of your other, good content domains? Someone with a little more experience will have to answer that question but some initial research would indicate, I don’t think so. While parked domains don’t offer any real content or value for their visitors, they probably are not on a hit list, they just don’t receive any search engine rankings.

A Few Final Thoughts

I could have made a post with how great it is that you can make money just parking your domains, and many articles state just that, but it isn’t what my experience with the program so far has shown. It is certainly better than doing nothing I guess, but if you have a little bit of time you can probably develop your own program.

While I do use GoDaddy services, I don’t think the majority of us are going to make a huge killing with the GoDaddy Cash Parking service. You need to be much higher on the food chain of domainers, and if you are, you probably aren’t going to be using a GoDaddy parking service anyway. If you are looking for a cheap domain name and basic hosting services, they are a good place to start. If you are looking to make a fortune on cash parking services, you might want to put your efforts into another, more revenue generating, asset.

What has your experience been with cash parking services? Do you use cash parking for your idle domains?