Do you have a domain name sitting on the internet wasting its potential away, doing absolutely nothing for you.Is it just costing you an annual registration fee from your pocket? It doesn’t matter why you bought the domain. Whether it’s because you want to protect your brand from cybersquatters or because you want to save the domain for future use, there are actually many ways you can make money with it.
Here they are:
Domain Parking
You register the domain with registrars like www.freeparking.co.nz who offer domain parking services. They connect the domain to a single-page website where they list adverts and links in the hope that people will type in your domain name in their various URL bars and click on the ads or links. When this happens, the parking company pays you a cent or more for each click. The amount becomes reasonable if your domain receives a lot of type-in traffic per day.
This is why it’s important to use domain names integrating high-traffic keywords, if you hope to make money from this.
Affiliate Marketing
Instead of letting your domain registration fee go to waste, you can go ahead and take out a cheap webhosting service and fill your website with adverts of products and services. When someone clicks on an ad and purchases the advertised product or service, you earn a commission—a percentage of the profit made from that sale.
Your domain needs to be pulling in much traffic for this to work. So it’s also important here to use one with high-traffic keywords and possibly develop the site in order to benefit well from traffic from search engines.
Learn more about affiliate marketing here.
Become a Pay-pay-click Advert Publisher
This is similar to commission-based affiliate marketing in many ways. You still take out a cheap webhosting service and fill your website up with link and image adverts, except that instead of earning only when a click turns to a sale, you earn a few cents whenever someone clicks on an ad. This is simple; other sites pay you to direct traffic to them.
This is also much like domain parking, except that you don’t go through a domain parking company. Again, a domain name based on high-traffic keywords will pay off here, and developing the site can increase your chances.
Here is more on how pay-per-click ads work.
Domain Leasing
You can, for a monthly payment, actually lease your domain name out to a company or person that needs it. Depending on the value of the domain name, you can lease it out for up to $1000 or more. A company or person that rents a domain name from you will probably do so because they don’t have enough money to buy it. While this could mean that your leased domain may eventually sell to the person that rented it, watch out for downsides like your inability to sell the domain during the lease term if you get an offer. This can be especially frustrating if the offer is big.
Sell the Domain
Some people actually thrive on this—the buying and selling of domain names—and they are called domainers. In fact, some individuals have madee millions of dollars through selling a single domain name. A good example of a huge sale is VacationRentals.com, which sold for $35million in 2007.
If your domain name seems promising, then you can sell it via sites like Sedo and Godaddy.
Develop the Domain
If none of the above-mentioned options works for you, then perhaps you should consider developing the domain by building a proper website and selling your own product or service on it. Or simply blog about something you are interested in and then try integrating that with publishing adverts either through commission-based affiliate programs or using pay-per-click ads.
It’s your domain name. You can do whatever you like with it.
