After my research into what people are doing with expired domains, it became apparent that parking those domains was a popular pastime. So I decided to have a go myself. In the past, I'd always been one to buy an expired domain and then develop it into something worthwhile, but if so many webmasters are snapping up domains simply to park, then surely there must be money to be made doing this.

It's all about the numbers and to maximise your parking revenue you need to keep track of those numbers. I'm a fledgling domain parker so I have only 4 domains parked at Namedrive. I've created an excel spreadsheet for each domain that looks something like this:

Using these spreadsheets I can keep tweaking the settings for each domain and then analyse the effect that each change has. The value I'm trying to maximise is the CTR (click through rate) and I can influence that by changing the template and keywords targeted. The template is simply the design of the parked page and controls the layout and colour scheme. The keywords affect the adverts that are displayed on the page. Keeping track of all the variables and what date you changed them is a difficult task - that's why you need to record them in a spreadsheet. Typically I'll change the settings for a domain and let it run for a month. At the end of that month I'll record the results in the spreadsheet and tweak the settings again. Eventually I'll have a good idea of what template and keywords perform the best and make the most mazoollah.

Domain Parking Revenues

To be honest, I'm making peanuts doing this. However, all that matters here is return on investment. As long as I can make back what I invested in those domains, I'm not running at a loss (casually dismissing the notion that my time costs something, a la Flippa cadets). To illustrate, here is a table showing how much I bought my domains for and their monthly revenues so far. I've even disclosed the domain names so you can get a better idea of what's going on.

If you check out any parked domain, you'll notice that the adverts displayed don't always match up with the niche of the domain. You can influence what adverts appear with the keywords you target, but that only works so far. I guess it depends on what advertisers are available to advertise on the domain.

As you can see, the biggest earner is kazaalitekpp.com, and this is no surprise given the niche that this domain is in - downloads. You can imagine visitors being a little click happy as they land on the domain with intentions of downloading music and ringtones. I paid $100 for this domain, and if traffic levels remain as they are (and nothing else changes), it's set to earn $194 in one year. That's a ROI of 194%. You won't get that kind of performance from a bank! Not in the current economic climate, anyway.

$194 isn't a lot of money, but if you had 100 domains performing at the same level, that's $19,400 revenue per year. Not bad for passive income.

The results for the other domains, whilst not being as good, are still encouraging. Here are the ROIs:

• gtacentral.com -  28%
• rctrevalutions.com - 31%
• glitterlicious.net - 24%

The revenues from these domains are miniscule, but when you compare them against their purchase prices you can see that they offer a good return on investment. When deciding whether to spend money on buying domains to park, ask yourself what return you'd get if you invested your money elsewhere.

What If...

My fear is that traffic levels dry up, and without traffic there is no revenue. Can parked domains maintain their traffic levels in the long term? My intuition says not, but we will see.

My question now is whether high traffic domains represent more bang for your buck. Yes, they will be more expensive to buy, but by how much will the purchase price be outweighed by the potential earnings that high traffic brings? It could be that one extremely high traffic domain generates more revenue than 10 lower traffic domains that cost the same.