Curtis Carmichael

These days, domain name parking services are abound — a quick Google search indicates 5-10 popular services and many other web sites offering the service.  Upon further research (and my own experience), I determined not many people have luck parking their domain names with a service.  Others, and myself are lucky to get more than 25-50 cents per day.  And I have over 100 domain names.  Not to complain because the earnings definitely rival most US-based savings accounts but one can do better and the cost/benefit doesn’t weigh out with each domain name costing somewhere in the range of $7-10 USD.

Of all the services, you’ll have the most luck with one allowing you to optimize the content/ads displayed on your domains.  Traditionally, the most successful domains are B2B related so you’ll want to concentrate on these ones as they will pay out better — in most cases, again, with my own experience and reading feedback from others on domain parking.  Some of the best domain parking services are GoDaddy’s domain parking service, RevenueDirect.com, Google’s new domain parking service (through AdSense), Sedo.com and SEOparking.com.  The later is setup in an interesting format — it takes more time to setup the domains but the end result allows you to display blog entries of your choosing on your web site on a WordPress blog.  Clever format but as a rule of thumb, I always like to have original content on my web site.  WordPress blogs do have excellent SEO capabilities however, as long as you don’t abuse SEO principles, etc.

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Web marketers must constantly keep themself updated with technology and marketing know-how in today’s ever-changing (and very competitive) Internet publishing landscape.  You can no longer ‘follow the lead’ and simply consider yourself a pure ‘marketing wizard’, IT professional or graphics pro.  On the contrary, one must wear many hats and ‘choose the path untaken’ to be 110% successful in this competitive arena.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a lesser-known web marketing tactic revolving around using RSS to automatically dump content into e-mails.  This is particularly useful if your business operation has limited time and resources.

A respected and very popular (but expensive) e-mail broadcast program called Lyris ListManager has this capability built-in, as does an alternative service at MailChimp.  Lyris ListManager can run as a hosted software solution on your own server or you can subscribe to have access to the software on a SaaS (software as a service) model with Lyris.  MailChimp functions as a powerful web-based software solution running off of mailchimp.com.

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I tend to use the analogy of e-newsletters, when used properly being comparable to modern day stealth fighters with relationship to web marketing campaigns.

E-newsletters tend to be either heavily bogged down with marketing/advertisements, swamped with articles and other non-marketing content or somewhere in the middle.  You’ll need to find the happy medium through A/V and multivariate testing and definitely want to make sure you don’t deter potential prospects by littering your content with too many ads and marketing ‘junk’ — emphasis on the later because no matter how well designed your campaign might be from a marketing content perspective, if it looks like spam/junk mail, no one will read it and/or no one will enable images to be viewed if applicable, disallowing accurate open rates from being tracked, etc.

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