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?
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After all the posts I read this week about the page rank update I told myself I wasn’t going to post anything about the topic. I thought it had all been said enough (and that is still probably true), until I noticed my page rank actually went up. [A little disclaimer here, before last week I had a PR0 and now I have a PR2. So, I had no place to go but up.]
There are other examples surfacing now that also show increases in PR’s like, PageRank update in process, this time for real, where AdesBlog talks about a few of his sites that have increased their page rank. Another recent post from ProBlogger also touches on several of these current topics in, The Google Page Rank Pendulum Swings…. Again, and if you are still interested, there are hundreds (if not more) of posts on the Page Rank update.
Some PR’s Are Going Up, Some Down
In a recent post I did on the goals of this blog, Reaching a Set Goal and Working on Others, a the Page Rank was not even listed as one of the top ten because I thought it was pretty much out of the question for the age of my domain, and the fact that I was still trying to build quality content on the site. Little did I know, all I needed was an update to Google’s Page Rank system.
Here it is only one week later and I have gone from a PR0 to a PR2 this weekend. I started looking at some of the other sites I own, and it was a mixed bag. Most of these domains are either new (mostly content based), or developed storefront pages (non-content based), and they are sites I either own or work extremely close with on a daily basis.
- chipseo.com – PR0 to PR2 [content / blog based] | NET +2
- islandzephyr.com – PR0 to PR1 [mixed info / content] | NET +1
- ki4wlr.com – PR0 to PR2 [content / blog based] | NET +2
- site 4 – PR0 to PR2 [content / blog based] | NET +2
- site 5 – PR4 to PR3 [storefront / sales based] | NET -1
- site 6 – PR3 to PR1 [storefront / sales based] | NET -2
- site 6 – PR2 to PR1 [storefront / sales based] | NET -1
Have You Checked Your Storefront Pages?
I checked a few eCommerce / storefront sites and pages I am familiar with and it also seems to be a mixed bag. Two high traffic storefronts in the craft industry, Artbeads.com and Fire Mountain Gems, both had PR4′s and both maintained their PR4, at least to this point.
Both of these eCommerce stores are very established online businesses, and both have a good combination a product catalog sku’s and content for their customers in the way of guides and reviews. Both stores also have almost no online advertising to speak of since they are selling their own products (they probably wouldn’t promote someone else’s on their store), and one uses the Yahoo Store shopping cart system and one is independent. If you have your own online storefront, check your PR and see what the results look like. Do you have a good combination of content to help your customers, and a SKU based catalog / shopping cart system? If you sell on multiple sales channels like many businesses, has one been effected over the other?
Is There Anything To Conclude From This
If you look at the list above you will notice a few things. One, none of these sites I mention are super high traffic ranking sites. Two, it is a mix of non-content informational, content based, and storefront based sites. Three, all of the content based site rankings went up, all of the storefront selling sites went down. I don’t really think there is anything to conclude from this information. I have seen just as many high quality, high ranking sites go down over the weekend as well. I am not going to touch on the link selling issue to much, there are enough blogs posting on that already, but I will say that none of the examples listed above are real high text link selling sites (most none at all), and I have tried as much as possible to maintain the Webmaster Guidelines that Google has put forth on their Webmaster Tools site.
Because buying and selling links is not to much of an issue among the examples put forth above, and some went up and some went down, you could say that Google is placing a higher emphasis on content, but all you have to do is read a few posts from the high traffic blogs to discount that, so, I just offer the information for what it is, a mixed bag of ups and downs.
Another Goal Reached Anyway
One of the milestone goals for this blog was to reach a PR1 in a certain amount of time and instead it reached a PR2 in less than 4 weeks. It does looks like there has just been a complete rearrangement of the PR system, so I am not sure what to think of my new found PR2, but it was one of the goals I had set for this site and I am glad to have reached it so quickly. Have you had any sites move up in rank this weekend? If so, are they content, informational, or storefront based sites?
Update to Google Page Rank [September 2008]
Google updates their page rank system every so often, almost like a software update. It will often be announced on Matt Cutts blog. When the update is going to happen he will often say, there is a page rank update happening this weekend. When you find this out, just make note of where you were and where you ended up. It may tell you something about your traffic and how Google sees this traffic and its importance and you can improve your blog accordingly.
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There are several good steps you can and should take to improve the seo for your ChannelAdvisor store pages and categories. This is part two of a two part article where I first outlined some steps you can’t take from within the store administration pages that are items you probably would like to implement in good seo practice, but really can’t for one reason or another, What SEO Steps You Can’t Take With ChannelAdvisor. I will now take a look at what you can do to keep your store’s SERP as high up as possible (titled: SEO Steps For a Better ChannelAdvisor Stores).
I realized that some may not be that familiar with using a ChannelAdvisor Store itself, even when using the products that put in place for eBay. Most of ChannelAdvisor’s business is in the auction management software area, so if you haven’t tried their store services as well it might be worth a look. It is another channel opportunity for those who don’t want to be so dependent on eBay for all their sales. For many online retailers, this is the key, finding alternative channels to selling on eBay so if an eBay crash comes your business isn’t dead. Infopia is another company looking at these types of alternative channels to eBay, embracing multi channel – cross channel selling companies (I will review their services in full in a later article) to go beyond eBay.
For many PowerSellers, eBay is just the beginning. With Infopia’s Marketplace Manager, you can drastically increase your sales by pushing your products out to more online marketplaces and create a multi-channel, online selling strategy.
ChannelAdvisor also has several other very useful products but this is in specific reference to the storefront. So, assuming you have opened a ChannelAdvisor Store, there are some needed steps to get the most out of your eCommerce storefront.
Customize Store Name and Logo
This would be the first stop. Log into your administration panel and click on the menu at the top for “store”, then go to “store name & logo” and you will see several fields explained below. This is usually completed during the setup of the store, but double check, you may have only put in your url store name. You will see several different boxes, store name and url, logo, and html page information. Make sure all these fields are filled in, this is where all the meta data is taken from when your index page is shown.
Store Name
If you are choosing your the store name, keep is short. Use your company name but don’t use something like “my store and all my products where you will love to shop store”. It will be used in many different places on your store, so think about it like a good domain name. If you have a company name just place it here. Think about dashes or underlines ahead of time, changing this after the fact is not going to be an easy move, especially when your customers have bookmarked where to find you.
Store URL and Domain Forward
Store url is what domain name you are going to have, so follow the above rules and all that you know about good domain names, keep it short, easy on dashes, try not to use mis-spelled words if possible, in general, use your company name or a version thereof. If you have an existing domain name you can use the same thing here since it will render the url from within the servers from ChannelAdvisor.
There is also a link where you can make any existing domain name url’s forward to the ChannelAdvisor url you just created. You will have to change the name servers on your hosting company so proceed with a little caution. It is not difficult but it does require a little more than just filling out a keyword. Using their forward will render your own domain name on the storefront and is certainly a good option if you can do that.
Store Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
This is probably the most important set of fields, and probably the most commonly left blank. These fields will be visible to customers, show in the search engine results, and help in your rankings. Your competition is probably using these fields and if you are not they will have an unneeded advantage over your store.
Store Title
This is what shows on the top of each page viewed by your customers. Not only that, it is what will show as the first line in the search engine results when someone does a search on Google or Yahoo. It should usually include your store name and a few details about the products you sell or your slogan or tag line. Make it descriptive but not too long. When someone clicks through to a category page it will show all the information on the categories and also the store title. Using ChannelAdvisor as an example their title reads: ChannelAdvisor – The Leader in Online Channel Management Solutions and Services.
Meta Description and Meta Keywords
The meta description is the most important field on this screen to complete in my opinion. The meta description is what will show as the first line or two of the search engine results and are often given more search engine relevance then the keywords themselves. Keeping with the ChannelAdvisor example, look at the screen shot below. The first few lines are the description of their services. Use full short sentences with good keywords, but don’t use just keywords only. Notice the quote below, it has some good keywords but is not just keywords separated by commas.
ChannelAdvisor combines best practices, innovative software and integrated technology to help retailers maximize their profits across multiple e-commerce…
The keywords are just what they say, a set of keywords that best describes your store products or services. Pick these carefully and do not use the same word more than once. Use 10 keywords at the most, more and it starts to make the other words a little less relevant.
Manage Categories
This would be the next big thing to complete in the store administration pages. This will be a little more time consuming if it has not be completed before and if you have already established categories. Go to your admin console and click on the menu for “store” then “manage categories” and it will take you to the category pages.
Category Names
If you have already created your categories (and sub-categories) you will see a list of the categories on this page. If you haven’t created them yet, use short one or two word category names, these will be used in the url in your store and should be something keyword friendly. Keep the caps in mind too. Either will work but what ever you use will be a permalink from that point on. If you create a category with a blank space in the name it will render on the url in ChannelAdvisor as “%20″ which is not something all that great for the search engine bots.
A category name called Non Fiction will show up on the url address line as /mystorename/Non%20Fiction/ and the category name called Non-Fiction will show as /mystorename/Non-Fiction/ and it works the same for all the sub-categories down the line. Use three or four letter words with spaces all the way down the line and it will not look so great. A screen shot example from ChannelAdvisor’s case studies on their website shows a url with categories that have spaces used in the names along with the subcategories. You can see the results below.
Images, Keywords, and Descriptions
Next will be a short description and long description, basically meta keywords and meta description, sort of. Use the same rules as listed above for these two items, keeping in mind the self imposed 10 keyword limit and perhaps show a few less on the categories. When you enter this information it will show up on the title page just after the main page title, so if you use a big list of keywords the title will look a little strange.
It may take a little time to put all this information into each category but it will improve the quality of each category listing and should improve search engine results.
The steps listed here are some very basic seo steps for your ChannelAdvisor store, but they are needed. If your competition is not using them you will have a little ahead, but they probably are and you don’t want to be a little behind. These steps can also be applied across several different sales channels, including eBay and Amazon. eBay in particular allows their store users to adjust the keywords of each category, but not quite to the extent that ChannelAdvisor allows.
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Do you want to look more professional and drive more traffic to your online store on one of the big auction sites like eBay, Overstock, or Amazon, and earn some eBay affiliate commission at the same time? Registering for your own domain name is a good place to start. This may sound very basic at this point in the online shopping game, but if you haven’t done it yet, what are you waiting for. This is one of those things for small businesses that is easy, probably costs less than your lunch, and can have a real impact on customer perception and even make you some money like paying less for your listing fees.
I am not really talking about registering your own company name, I assume you have already done that if you are serious about your Internet store and marketing your company name. I am talking about not having to use that really long url address that these sites use, and in the process, making it easier for your customers to find you.
Normally when you setup shop, you are using the servers of the company you sign up with. Using eBay as an example, if you have an eBay store site, your url address is going to be something like http://stores.ebay.com/chipseo-marketing. Something hard to just tell someone, also a little less professional looking, and just hard to type in, bookmark, or even remember (especially for your customers).
Having your own domain name changes that. I just randomly picked one from eBay Stores above, so hopefully this store won’t mind a little publicity (they have some great feedback and have obviously been selling on eBay for a long time), but from the screen shot I can count 51 characters in the url not including the http:// part. I tried to do a search on eBay’s store search page for this store (see below) and it didn’t show up under the keywords for essential oils or 02 essential oils so it might be a little difficult to find by just using a keyword search for their products. The issue of getting your proper keywords available so people can search for them is a topic for another post, but getting a good domain name is a start.
You can do a quick search to see if a few domain names of your choice would be available. Most all hosting companies allow a search, some of the easier ones to use are GoDaddy, Hostway, or Networksolutions to check on the availability of a domain name. In the example above I found some good choices with just a few minutes of looking, and might be something like http://www.o2oils.com or even http://www.o2oil.com.
Often times today it is very hard to find a short domain name, especially in the 5 four to five character area but if you look, eventually you will find something that will work for you. If you get one and don’t like it, you can always add a new one later and then you have two addresses that will both point to your store.
eBay actually makes it a little easier to setup than some of the other sites if you already have an ebay store. You just log into your store and scroll to the bottom and click on the link for domain registration and follow the steps outlined on those pages. Even if you don’t have an eBay Store yet, they are easy to open (just click here to open an eBay store), or even if you are not on eBay at all it is easy to setup. Remember, you are not actually setting up an online store or a web page, this is going to be a forward (also called a 301 Moved Permanently in technical terms) where you type in the domain name and then it redirects users to your eBay store.
For example, this site has a permanent redirect domain url of http://www.auburnseo.com, mainly because the keyword for Auburn is used in my business and it might bring in more typed in traffic, but it still works the same way. Now, when I go to http://www.auburnseo.com my users will be directed hopefully to where they wanted to go in the first place. Some companies will also give you a code to append to the end of the forward address that will give you an affiliate payment of some kind, like a discount on the fees normally charged or a payment for referring other people. In the eBay case, they will give you 75% off your final value fees (FVF), called a Final Value Fee Credit. That is not bad at all. Imagine taking 75% off that FVF bill each month. We used this FVF credit for about a year and saved almost $10,000 in fees over the whole year. That is not an actual payment in cash handed to me, but what’s the difference if you are paying the fees that many are on eBay.
To receive the FVF credit, you just need to append the forward to address with ?refid=store which is what eBay uses to track the domain forward. That is not the domain name you just registered, it is the ebay store name. So in the example used above, it would be http://stores.ebay.com/chipseo-marketing?refid=store for the address you will use as a forward to your new domain name.
When you set up your custom domain name on the registrar’s site, eBay will prepopulate your Store’s URL as the destination that your domain should forward to. We will also include a code at the end of that URL (?refid=store) to track when a user enters your Store from outside of eBay. If the user purchases an item, you can earn a Store Referral Credit. For more information, see the eBay Stores section in the eBay Help Center.
The refid id tag is specific to eBay so it may or may not be something you will need to add on other store pages. It will be slightly different for each company so check and see if there is something special they do with their credits or affiliate programs. With eBay there is both, and nothing says you can only do just one domain name either.
You do want to do a few things to make this happen of course. Some of the steps involved are going to be:
- Choosing a domain name – there are some basic do’s and don’ts to this and I have an article I will post soon on the specifics to picking out a good domain name. In the mean time, here are a few pointers.
- Choose something easy to remember
- Spelled correctly
- As short a name as possible
- Avoid the dash “-” in the name if you can
- Use something that may combine your company name and shopping store
- Be careful not to use a copyrighted name
- Decide what registrar company you want to use – ebay recommends two different companies, Hostway and Network Solutions, but there are many many different companies you can use. They all do the same thing. If you are comfortable with using one of the two companies above then by all means go ahead, they are both fine companies. We used Hostway for our eBay forwards just because they were a little less expensive.
- Apply the forward to your new domain – this is usually just a matter of copy and paste into a text field in the user options for your domain
- Promote your new address – this is an important step. The way the FVF credit is given is if someone types in the address you just bought, so you need to USE it. Basically anywhere you want to promote your products and services.
- Put it in your email signature
- on your email invoices
- your paper invoices
- on a flyer or promo in your customers orders
- If you advertise in a magazine
- If you don’t want to mess with it, find someone who will set it up for you – services like this exist everywhere. I can and have setup domain names for people for a small fee or do the continued maintenance on them each month for a small monthly fee. Either way, it is not an expensive business decision to make.
You can do the same thing for affiliate programs you participate in as well. eBay has its own affiliate program where you can use an amended url just like above (but a little longer) and you get paid for each bid, and for each new ebay registration that comes from your link (eBay uses a company called Commission Junction to take care of the complexities of this task). This doesn’t have to be the same domain, you can one for each purpose and then you will be on your way to start looking for ways to track and rank your domains and affiliate commissions.
Using additional domain names in your business is simple to set up, affordable, and a great way to expand your reach beyond the basic store url you are given when you sign up.
Implementation Rank
[1-10]: Technical [2] | Cost [1] | Revenue [3] | Customer Service [8] | Time [2]
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WOW, that was quick super fast. Well, there is the answer to my test to see how long it would take Google to index my new site, completely new url and domain name for this blog. It took less than 6 hours. Now being in the business we are in, I totally understand that indexing it totally different than a Google pagerank or Alexa ranking (which I would expect to show no data yet) of course, but you have to admit that was pretty fast.
The total time elapse from registering the new domain name to indexing was less than 12 hours total. In fact, the cashed page that Google has is one that was taken before I added my theme to the site, and that was the first thing I did. The three screen shots posted below are taken of the indexing that Google did at 17:50 on October 2nd, 2007.
The registration information for the domain:
Domain Name: CHIPSEO.COM
Created on: 02-Oct-07
Expires on: 02-Oct-08
Last Updated on: 02-Oct-07
I would like to hear from others that may have tried this and would like to know what their results were as well. Post your comments and let me know. I will update this post later with some of the information I used to create the data.
So far there is no other search engine that I can find that has indexed this site as of this writing, Google seems to be the only one so far. Now I just need to see how long it will take to get a PR7, I am guessing a year or more (probably more), but a PR2 or PR3 would be nice in a few months time. We will see.
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I decided to move my blog and all its contents and everything that goes along with it to a new domain, now http://www.chipseo.com, to give it a better match of content to search structure for our company (Island Zephyr). Now, we can do a good market test to see how long it takes for Google and Yahoo to index our site and start pulling in all new traffic.
Starting over again was a big gamble but in the end I think it will pay off with better results. In the mean time, this will be a good test to see how long it will take for the search engines to index this url site and start to get steady traffic again. I have actually been blogging for many years, so don’t let the short dates of content on this site confuse you. Our company is dedicated to providing good reliable information for those who sell online and are interested in using multiple sales channels to sell their products or services.
I will post the results soon and let you know what steps I took to get the new url into the search engines. For this test I am really just using common sense SEO work and a few links. I have setup so many domains, urls, and shopping cart systems but have never actually looked at the time it took to get the pages indexed. We will see now.
