Example of a quick and dirty Adsense lander
There's lots of talk in various forums lately about whether parking companies can be trusted to be transparent with their figures and whether there are better ways to monetise domain portfolios.
I've never been one for parking my domains, as I don't consider my portfolio to be particularly parking friendly - in so much as they don't get masses of natural type-in traffic.
The names in my own portfolio tend to be targeted towards particular niches that I know a little about, or have some kind of interest in.
For a more in-depth look at how parking may or may not benefit you, I suggest you read this post at Rick Schwatrz's blog.
Personally, on domains that I am testing (usually to see if I can get them ranked, or if I am considering selling them), I do a one or two page mini site using XSitePro.
I then add some content that I always write myself and then sprinkle in some Google Adsense and maybe even a sales message.
If people then happen to stumble upon the site, they at least have something original to read and I get a chance of getting a few cents from Google.
The approach isn't rocket science, but since most parking companies are simply syndicating ads from Google and Yahoo anyway, I just question the logic of accepting 65% of the click value when I can take 100% from the source.
Of course, the parking companies say that they achieve higher rates per click.
I've heard that argument many times. However, as Rick points out in his blog today, the parking companies are not exactly transparent about their earnings from other people's domain names.
Google isn't transparent either, but at least there's an element of control in what you can do with your own domain name.
Here's an example I knocked out quickly this morning. http://www.professionalfeeinsurance.co.uk/ (and yes, I have the .com too).
These sites won't win any design awards, but they'll earn a few pennies along the way before the domains are either developed fully or sold.
UPDATE 30 DECEMBER 2007
I was checking my stats on professionalfeeinsurance.co.uk today and was surprised to see a few hits from Google.
As usual, I checked the search terms and found that it's already listed on the front page for a few relevant terms, including of course, "professional fee insurance".
Just goes to show that XSitePro does exactly what I claimed it could do.
posted by David Carter @ 17:05
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I get better CTRs with my own sites, but it's true that parking services often pay more per click. Still, I agree that developing a simple website is a good basic approach, as it give you control and it makes your domain more appealing to buyers. However, I prefer blogs to xsitepro. For one thing, xsitepro sites tend to look spammy, and I'm afraid this is true for the one you knocked out this morning as well. Secondly, Google does not like xsitepro sites for some reason and will sometimes pull the Adsense ads from them, even when the content is original. Blogs also give you more options with plugins and themes.
My experience of XSitePro has been nothing but positive and I have never had an Adsense ad pulled from one of them.
Blogs are great tools but they are also hard work.
If you have 200 domains, would you be able to maintain 200 blogs?
With just one page on the site, do you attract any traffic from any other source than type-in?
If not, has it been worth it (more money earned as a result?) after factoring in additional expenses like image licensing costs, development time (no matter how small) and hosting costs?
To answer your questions, I get a mix of traffic from type-in and search engines on most of my domains.
The costs of doing a small site like this are negligable. The header and footer were re-used from a site I had made for me some time ago, development time was 30 minutes including writing the introduction and the hosting costs are virtually zero.
There's no secret, I have a shared hosting account for these, using www.carpathiahost.net
I also have a dedicated server for my larger sites and I might get another from which I'll probbaly sell hosted sites, though I am reluctant to do this, as I don't want clients, but a site I am about to launch might just mean I have to consider it...
Compared to parking, it's more effort, but when you first start out, what alternative is there?
I'm assuming of course, that when most people start out, they aren't necessarily well funded. I know I wasn't.
That cjhanges with time and these days, it's not difficult to find designers who'll do site headers and footers for very little money.
I have never made a site or lander that hasn't repaid it's investment many times over.
Hey David, I saw your site got a very high rank in Google's first page (google.co.uk and google.com), though you don't have many links to the site. I'm very curious about it. How did you manage to do that? SEO only? I usually need to do a lot of research, SEO, and bookmarking before I can get to the first page...
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