Promoting Parked Domains

At this point, one question you might be tempted to ask is whether or not it's possible to park a domain that has no existing traffic...

At this point, one question you might be tempted to ask is whether or not it's possible to park a domain that has no existing traffic, and earn money from it. The answer is yes, it is technically possible, but you need to have a solid plan of how you will generate traffic to it.

Unfortunately, when you park a brand new domain, you can pretty much forget about getting a good ranking in search engines. Sure, your domain can get listed just like any other site, but since most parking services use frames or redirects, the pages themselves don't usually get spidered. Even a search engine did manage to access your parking page somehow, the pages themselves aren't optimized, and they have no real content, so they'd never get ranked for anything. This means that getting traffic to your domain is all a question of brute force promotion, which is generally (but not always) quite expensive.

The most likely way that you can generate traffic is to build a network of incoming links that point at your site. You can't reciprocal link, or course, and very few free directories will link to a parked domain. This means that your options basically consist of linking to your domain from your own site, buying links from other sites, or using PPC search engines.

Linking from your own site is a good way to earn a little bit of extra PPC revenue. For example, if you have a content based site about vitamins, and you have a parked domain which includes the keyword "vitamins", you might want to strategically link occurrences of that word to your domain. That way, visitors might click on the keywords, visit your parked domain, click on a link there, and earn you money.

The second option, buying links from other sites, is expensive, but could be quite lucrative if you can get yourself a good deal. The trick is to find relevant, high traffic sites that are willing to link to a parked domain. Due to the fact that you aren't using the link for SEO, the site's PR and keyword optimization don't matter. All that matters is that it gets a lot of targeted traffic. Finding such a site is no easy task, to be sure.

Another way to get traffic generating links is to buy paid placement in a directory of some sort, which basically just amounts to buying an incoming link. Searching the internet for "directories" should bring up some good possibilities.

The final strategy mentioned (pay-per-click search engines) could potentially be extremely expensive, and is thus very risky. My advice would be to never bid more than a few cents on a keyword, or else you'll never have a hope of recovering your bid. Always run small test campaigns before dedicating much money to any one keyword, and never deposit more than you can afford to lose. This is essentially just a form of "traffic arbitrage", and while it could technically be profitable, it is a very risky game. You shouldn't employ this strategy for parked domains unless you are very good with PPC search engines, and really know what you're doing.