Domain Name Development on investment: Minisite vs. Domain Name Parking

Domain Name investment is very tricky, domainers invest in countless domain names and would wait for a buyer to come along and buy their websites for a very high price. However, it might take a good few years before a sale can occur and with the world economy going into recession, there might be a longer waiting time. Domain Name investors are therefore trying to make money out of their domain names to cover their registration costs (and profit if possible), one way is to park their domain names or make minisites for each. So here are the comparisons:

Traffic

– Which of them gets more traffic –

Domain name parking usually displays a page full of advertisements to visitors of your website, the website somehow looks like a search engine results page. Sedo allows users to have different themes for users to choose from which can change the layout of the page and the picture in the page. There are no useful content in the website and therefore is not useful for the user and might just be a one time visit. Traffic is great if the keyword is low in competition (against other websites) and if the domain name is exactly the keyword that the visitor is exactly searching for in the search engines or their address bars.

Minisites, on the other hand, are websites that are built for the sake giving useful and relevant information but full of advertisements. The look is usually an old webpage that has a lot of Google Adsense type of advertisements all around the content. Contents might be around 2 or more pages and is relevant to the domain name. Users might visit once and get all the information they need and might come back for reference later on. Traffic is also great in if there’s low competition in keywords (against other websites) and if the content and domain name matches the keyword.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

– What’s more SEO friendly? –

We all know search engines account for more than 50% of our website visitors. And for Domainers, having a great relationship with the search engines is the key to be able to increase the value of their domain names.

Domain Name Parking is very bad in SEO, it is because it doesn’t offer any actual and relevant content. At the same time, search engines know that there’s nothing useful that their visitors can get out of it. Sedo has a feature for optimizing your domain name for the keywords, it is great but once search engines find out that it’s a parking page, your domain name is taken out of the list.

While Minisites are actually given points for their relevancy with their contents. What’s great is that you get domain name age points (being on the search engine for longer) and shown in search results on certain keywords. With Minisites, you could play around with SEO and get more and more keywords related to your website and therefore gets more traffic. It will definitely increase your domain name’s value later on.

Earnings

– Which Earns the person more? –

If we were to analyze domain name parking’s earning we’d have to take into account the two previous factors. For Domain Name Parking, earnings per click is pretty low, earning around $0.02 per click (others are higher depending on topic). Traffic really depends on how well fitted your domain name is to the keyword, which is SEO points. Visitor loyalty is none, whoever visits it will definitely not come back later on. However, the layout itself is optimized for that, the visitor would at least click on one of the links and therefore generates revenue.

With Minisites, earnings per click varies with the advertising network that you join. But certain topics would yield at least $0.10 per click which makes it higher than Parking. But with higher traffic thru the use of SEO and possible future reference of visitors in the future (little visitor loyalty) earnings could be higher. But the limitation is that, people might not click on the advertisements as the page is not optimized for advertisements to be clicked all the time unlike domain name parking. With Google Adsense, limiting to 3 advertisements per page, it might not be enough to cover the content provided. Click through rates may be smaller.

Who’s the winner?

The clear winner is Minisites, as it gives a value to visitors which makes it useful for them and is therefore ranked higher in search engines. The minisite’s earnings might not always be higher, but the good thing is that it is indexed therefore can get good SEO points. And as it ages, once you’re ready to resell then the value would’ve increased at a higher rate. However, if you have hundreds and thousands of domain names then of course parking it first would be the logical way first and then slowly develop them up (or get an investment and start mass producing).