Parking Pages are just about everywhere — after all, they are easy money. But is it really a good idea to use them?

Parking Pages first started a way to make sure that the traffic to the domains was not wasted and you could make some money from the traffic by showing them advertisements. It was meant to be a quick-fix to make money from the traffic on the domain.

Even though parking pages started as a quick-fix but they have slowly turned into a big industry in itself — there are billions of dollars being made every year from parking pages. As a matter of fact, a lot ofdomainers make their money just from parking pages.

There are a few issues with Parking Pages that one needs to consider when one decides to use them.

1. No Search Traffic. Search Engines are looking for sites which provide real content to their visitors — after all, it makes business sense for search engines to provide the best experience to their users. It is next to impossible to rank regular parking pages in search engines.

Every Single Day, Google serves hundreds of millions of queries — by not having your domain ranking for your target-keywords, you are missing a big piece of action.

2. No Repeat Traffic. Parking Pages attract mostly type-in traffic. To be fair, you can indeed expect some people to visit your parking page again and again by typing in your URL, but most would never visit your page again.

Even worse is the fact that you can’t setup things like newsletters and member-registration, which will allow you to stay in touch with people who opt-in and attract regular visitors to your site.

3. Little Customization. When you are using parking pages, you have little control over the looks and layout of your parking pages. Not only that, you do not have freedom to add any other features to your site.

I am not trying to say that Parking Pages are that bad. A lot of people make a decent amount of money with parking pages — including us on some of our domains. The best part about Domain Parking is that it is easy — all you need to do is to change the name-servers and you are done.

There are some excellent parking companies like Fabulous.com which go the extra mile to help you squeeze the most profit from your parking page.

But, don’t forget that by using parking pages on your domains…

You Can Get Lots More Traffic. By having your site listed in search engines and having other sites to link to you, you increase your traffic — and hence revenue — exponentially. By using a parking page you are missing out on a huge amount of traffic that you could get by having a real site.

Multiple Revenue Streams. When you are using a parking page, your only source of revenue is pay-per-click advertisements. Essentially, if your visitors do not click on your advertisements, you do not make any money.

However, with a custom site, you make money not just from PPC advertisements but also from affiliate programs, cpa programs, ecommerce, sponsored reviews, subscription revenue and sales of text-links. As a matter of fact, I have some sites which make hundreds of dollars every single month from just the sales of text links and virtually zilch from Pay-Per-Click Advertisements.

Better Revenue Optimization. You don’t have any control over the optimization of revenue from your parking pages except setting-up the right keywords. With your own site, you have complete control over the revenue optimization and control of the placement of various elements that will make you money.

Capture Contact Information. One sure-shot way to attract repeat visitors to your sites is to capture their contact — either via newsletter sign-up or via a registration system. We use Aweber to capture contact on our sites and the response rates are totally amazing.

Needless to say, it is not possible to do this on parking pages.

Build Relationships, Sell More. When you are using Parking Pages, you have absolutely no contact with your advertisers. As a matter of fact, you have absolutely no idea about who is advertising on your domain. When you are directly selling advertisements on your own site, you get a change to build a relationship with the advertiser.

What this means is that you get a change to get to know the advertiser and upsell and cross-sell them. Which means much higher revenue and a potential for repeat business.

I could go on even more about why it is a better idea to develop your domain rather than throw a parking page but I hope that you get the idea.

Whenever I talk about this issue with most domainers, they reply that it takes a lot of effort to develop a domain name. That is just NOT TRUE until you are building the next Yahoo or Google.

I myself have developed hundreds of my own domains with simple strategies that you can copy too.

I am going to reveal the strategies that we use at our company to maximize the revenues from our domain in various posts on this blog during this week. Stay Tuned!

Follow-Up Post – How I Really Make Money From Domain Names.

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