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Wednesday, 03 June 2009 15:05 |
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The relative merits of domain parking versus minisite development is a hot discussion topic in the domaining world right now, but which is the better choice? Here is a brief rundown of the pros and cons of both options.
Parking is the tried and tested way to monetize domain names - you place a page of adverts on your site - people visit and then click on the advertys, making you money. Easy right? Well yes, but it's not all sweertness and light in the world of parking.
Parking Advantages:
- Easy to set up - with a service like Sedo, you can have a site up and running in minutes.
- Relatively high payouts per visit: because all you users can do when they get to a parked site is click on adverts, quite a high proportion of them do just that - so for a domain with guaranteed traffic, this is a safe and quite predictable income stream.
- Parking templates have improved over recent years, and companies like Fabulous.com create some quite nice looking templates for parked domains, with section headings and related links.
Parking Disadvantages:
- Parking revenue has been reducing over the last 18 months, so 1000 visitors to a parked site generate a lot less income than they used to.
- Parking can cause problems if the adverts generated infringe on a trademark holders rights, and even generic domain names can be put at risk if they are parked without considering this. Veteran domainer Gregory Ricks ran into trouble parking his domain BME.com when it showed tattoo and body modification adverts, infringing on the rights of BMEzine.com. Read more here http://domainnamewire.com/tag/gregory-ricks/
- Parking sites are increasingly excluded from SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), so unless you get type in traffic, your domain will be invisible to search engines - even if someone types in your domain name asa search.
Which brings up to minisites. Minisites is a catch all name generally used for any small site development. Minisites are usually made up of 1 or more keyword rich pages, designed to rank the domain for searches of it's keywords. Monetization on minisites usually takes the form of advertising through a system like Google Adwords, but increasingly other techniques are being used to generate cashflow from these domains, such as lead capture, eBay sites, or mailing list promotion.
Minsite Advantages:
- These sites are great at getting much needed traffic to domains, and are especially effective for domains that are keyword rich but that have little or no type in traffic.
- Minisites can help protect legal ownership of a domain name - it's difficult to argue that a domain is being "cybersquatted" or used in bad faith if there is an actual service on it.
- Minisites increase the resale value of domain names - traffic equals value, and domains with existing traffic and search engine rankings are more valuable that pure domains.
- Minisites can give additional revenue streams - as indicated above. The initial traffic gained from a minisite development can also be used to fund more resource intensive development.
Minisite Disadvantages:
- On a CPM (money generated per 1000 visitors) basis minisites generally pay less than straight parking pages, so for traffic domains they need to be given time to mature before they produce a return.
- Minisites are more labor intensive that domain parking, as you need to create the service, and not all minisite developments will produce a return on investment.
- Generating traffic with a minisite is at best an unpredictable business. In popular areas the minisite is competing with a lot of well funded real services, who are all doing SEO work to gain the top SERP slots, so without SEO work, or at least an understanding or how SEO works these sites can languish way down in the rankings, producing no traffic and no revenue.
- Google ranks sites by (amongst other things) the number of sites linking to them, and it can be difficult to get links to your minisite without breaking "Google's Laws" on what a site is allowed to do. Sure, you can buy links from related sites with a decent Pagerank, but if Google disciveres this your site could get blacklisted.
So there it is - Minisites versus Parking. This is by no means an exhaustive look at the balance between the two, but does cover some of the key issues. My recommendation? Well, Give site development a try, but don't bet the house on it, and remember that sites that do not get natural type in traffic are probably the ones most likely to benefot from this approach. There are a lot of great 2 and 3 word search term domains still out there, but be prepared to give site development a try in the long term - traffic doesn't happen overnight with any development.
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