Thread: Parking domains for income and investment

I know a few of the members here are expert domainers, and I could just ask you in an email, but I thought I'd open this up so everyone can participate.

I've heard that buying domains, either existing aged domains, or newly registered domains can be profitable if parked.

Here are my questions;
How much traffic does a domain need to be viable when it's parked?
If a domain has no traffic, should a domainer promote it?
What else should a domainer do if a domain has no traffic but is still a good investment?

• What counts for a parked domain is the Click Trough Rate. This varies a lot per domain, per parking company and per page layout that the parking company is offering. Some domains domain have a lot of typein traffic but no significant CTR and vice versa.
• You can promote a parked domain but parking companies generally only count direct type-ins.
• If there's no traffic, then develop or wait until the keywords become popular.
  
  my 0.02c

OK, what you're saying makes sense. My followup question would be how do I know if a domain has traffic or CTR without first parking it or developing it? A domain with no site attached, and not indexed, is not going to have ant stats, so are there any tools domainers use to assess traffic and CTR?

Without parking or developing I believe there's no other way to determine if a domain has traffic or not.
Some domainers are 'tasting' domains. They buy the domainname, park it for a couple of days and see if there's any type-in traffic and if so, then they will keep the name. Otherwise the name is cancelled with the registrar and only the icann fee has to be paid and the registration fee is refunded. Some registrars do not encourage such procedures. It is quite a controversial procedure in the domainname industry from what i understand.

OK, so I guess my options basically come down to making a punt on a domain and make the most educated guess I can about whether it is better to develop or park, then just wait for the stats to prove me right or wrong?

Yes, I agree that an educated guess is the best you can do. If you park it, stats will become available immediately so those will give a good picture after a couple of days of parking already. If the stats don't turn out to be in your favor then you still have the option to try and flip the domain to someone who sees value in it.
In addition I have to mention that I never owned a successful parked domain, the best ones where having avg 8 type-ins a month.

if you are hand-registering domains, they probably won't have much type-in traffic - most expert domainers already have those ones.

instead, you could look to buy domains that have proven track records (traffic) - as most legit domainers looking to sell will provide data over a set period of time.

I myself have done very well with dropped domains/sites - you can normally get them really cheap and make money from the traffic that still comes to the site

With dropped domains, what's a good way to judge the previous site traffic?

Alexa, Backlinks, Archive-org, etc.

You can also "taste" the domain and evaluate the traffic yourself.

How Does Your Domain Taste?

That is a good article about domain tasting Shenron.

#1 rule seems to be that you have to be ready for purchase once you look for availability. There are too many stories of people who 'lost' their wanted domain because they were hesitating to buy it after looking up the name with their registrar.