To Park or Not To Part, Now That is a Heck of a Question
Domaining is now a fully fledged business for a lot of folks. Just a few years ago, when you had to pay $20 or more to register a .com domain for a year, ordinary folks used to settle for a domain or two without thinking the value that some of these domains may have. But if you take a look at the amounts that folks are paying to acquire some not very common domains, you are going to realize that we are indeed looking at e-Real estate.
These days, it’s not really difficult to get a domain. You can get a .com domain for as low as $3.99 from 1&1. That’s a very low price to pay to acquire a domain. I personally own over 500 domains, but I am a small fish in a big pond. I know colleagues of mine who own over 10K domains. For those guys, it makes sense to park their domains and market them to sell for the future. But should you?
When you buy a domain, you really need to figure out how it fits in your plans. You don’t necessarily have to have grand plans for it, but it’s good to know if you plan to start a business using that domain right away or in the near future. If that’s not the case, maybe parking it makes sense. I personally prefer optimizing my domains for core keywords in its related niches. Domains are like wine, and as they age they become more valuable. Google does pay attention to domain age when it comes to ranking sites, so I rather use a domain that is 10 years old than buying a new one. But if you take that extra step to put some relevant content on your pages, not only you are going to get the benefit of the age, but you may also get indexed and ranked on search engines. That’s something that can be useful to you or your pocket (folks pay a lot more for a domain that has a PR attached to it).
At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong here. I know folks who are making a killing buying and selling domains. I am more into buying and building sites and then selling them. For that reason, optimizing all my domains for organic search makes a lot of sense. But that wouldn’t be the case for everybody, now would it?
What’s your take: do you prefer parking your domains using a service such as Sedo, or do you build and optimize sites before selling?
i used to work for one of the domain parking companies and i can tell you that even just parking a domain that has some type-in traffic (people type in a URL based on keywords and see what comes up) you can make a significant amount over time. so pay attention to developing fads and grab the right domain name ahead of time and you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.
I didn’t suggest that you can’t make money parking domains but I rather build online real estate and sell it for a fortune. You are absolutely right about the type in traffic.