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.

If you want to consider running your own domain parking service you might want to take a look at a program called Domain Trader.  Looks like a great program but you’ll want to take a good look at this before moving ahead and purchasing.  I haven’t used it because I’m not sure if the $$ income benefits would be worth the investment based on my experience in this area.  Some of the sites the software developer mentions no longer appear to be active as well, for what it’s worth.  You might be able to find a few other ‘out of the box’ programs available on the web and another option might be to develop your own system, perhaps just to serve your own domains on your server or virtual host account.

NamePros.com is an excellent resource where people who are in the business of domain name parking share ideas and feedback.  If you are new to this area, you may find posting forum inquiries on the site beneficial.  The Lazy Domainer is another good resource but is setup in ‘infomercial’ format — does have some nice information however.

Pending review/approval from your legal department (or sole legal advisor), if you do not use your domain names presently, I strongly suggest you consider domain parking options.  If you don’t your domain registrar tends to collect 100% from ads displayed on your temporary parked page by default (if applicable, but usually the case with GoDaddy for instance, at the time of this writing).  You may or may not collect big $$ from this, but it will at least help you gauge which domains might be worth developing first based on pageviews, ad clicks, etc. your domain parking service you partner with may report.

I personally park my domains with RevenueDirect.com not necessarily because of the payouts (it is about the same as others*) but because of the vast amount of reporting available.  My thought process is in the time being, rather than have my domains not pull in any $$ at all, I’d at least be making some money — as Ben Franklin once said “a penny saved is a penny earned” can be applied to some extent here.  My second motive is having a gauge to help me prioritize plans on developing the domains on my own — perhaps a simple web site at first displaying Google AdSense ads.

*Interestingly, in my review of various domain parking services, I noticed the ads displayed tend to always be the same.  My thought is the services must be utilizing Google’s AdSense API for customizing the look and feel of the contextual ads displayed on parked pages.

First, you will want to make sure your domain name is memorable and high-impact. Try to stay away with including hyphens in your domain or numbers as this decreases the value of your domain and makes it increasingly difficult for your customers to recall. Also, although domain names can be up to 256 characters in length, long domain names have like consequences and reduces the likeliness of your customers to type in the domain into their web browser if they didn’t find you on the web and could otherwise click on a link.

Try to secure all top level domain (TLDs) suffixes such as .com, .net and .org for your business, especially if you believe you have a solid business idea. Your competitors might try to grab alternate domain name suffixes or you might have unscrupulous ‘investors’ who see your business thrive, register the names and then try to ‘blackmail’ you in a sense by refusing to transfer the name to you without paying a large sum — in the past these people have even gone so far as to setup a placeholder page or small site with pornography, leftiest or far-right political messages, etc. to try to leverage their goals in this end. If you own a trademark (and I suggest you at least register your trademark on the state level, if not a federal trademark through the USPTO) — you have some legal recourse through intellectual property (IP) lawyers and perhaps the domain’s registrar such as GoDaddy’s legal department or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can provide you with some assistance as they are the governing body for all registrars.

To search for a domain name, go to a domain registrar’s web site to see if it is available. You can go to other domain search sites but there is no saying on whether available names are flagged by these sites – an alert mechanism in other words – that lets the Webmaster know a top quality domain is up for grabs. That’s why I tend to always do domain research on a major domain registration web site such as GoDaddy.com because I doubt they have such a mechanism in place and even if they did, their business plan requires them to focus on other areas so there would be very limited resources situated for this endevour… and they would also be bound to ICANN’s rules and regulations which may actually prevent them from doing this. Slight tangent… but an important item to get across as I have had a few excellent available domains ‘stolen’ from me when I did not act fast enough to register them while researching on smaller domain name availablility checker sites and/or WHOIS tools.

When searching for a domain, you might want to pull up the following web sites to assist with your search:

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) web site at www.uspto.gov to determine if a name is registered as a trademark, to avoid a potential legal dispute down the road (suggest you query plurals, hyphens, spaces, etc. where appropriate and like-sounding names).
• Thesaurus.com — because most likely your domain name is taken, but you can use this site to help generate similar words to generate a new creative trademark/domain name. GoDaddy’s domain name search area lists suggestions for you as well but the best alternatives generally would come from you vs. an automated suggestion system for alternatives.
• Google.com (or similar search engine) — suggest you use this to query words associated with your domain name to determine popularity, possible trademark infringement not found through USPTO’s tool — if someone didn’t register their mark with the federal registrar, etc.)

If you plan on registering a large amount of domain names (and registering names can be quite addictive to some), GoDaddy.com offers a Domain Discount Club where you pay X amount for a subscription allowing you to take advantage of “rock bottom” prices for new domain name registrations and renewals for many domain suffixes. Example: as of this article entry, a .com registration would cost only $6.85/yr plus possible ICANN fees which make this a few cents extra. Suggest you weigh pros and cons subscribing to this service however because it may only make sense if you plan on maintaining ~100 domain names/yr or so.

A few other domain tools you may wish to explore can be found at www.domaintools.com — I will attempt to go into some detail on the various tools available for you to use here in a later article. Their WHOIS tool specifies whether a domain name has been registered before, based upon their historical WHOIS information.

A few of the most popular domain name registrars:

• GoDaddy – www.godaddy.com
• eNom – www.enom.com
• Register.com – www.register.com

This article is more of a brief synopsis of domain name crafting — you may also want to review registrar web sites as many of them expand upon the above and provide you with supplemental information you may find helpful with this process. Might also find information on creating trademarks useful via a Google search.

A few of these programs you may be interested in:

• WordPress AutoBlogged – http://www.autoblogged.com/ (did not respond to an e-mail inquiry of mine regarding links to sample sites created with this tool but still might be legitimate — saw them advertised on Facebook ads)
• WP AutoBlogger – http://www.wpautoblogger.com
• AutoBlogger Pro – http://www.autobloggerpro.com/

The tools are a bit pricey but they may prove to be an excellent investment if leveraged appropriately. But before opening your wallet, you may want to take a look at an open source alternative — which I consider an excellent CMS designed for a niche group involved with onling news publication. This program is called Pligg (www.pligg.com) and appears to have a solid community base supporting further development of the software. If this program does not have all the features available with the commercial applications, you should have no problem finding a freelance PHP/MySQL programmer on the web that can implement those features for you.

On the subject of blogging, you might be interested in visiting http://www.problogger.net/ for useful tips and resources geared to help you become a successful blogger. The author of this site apparently is able to make a living blogging full time so you should be able to learn quite a bit here.

• Listing your items on product comparison web sites and carefully monitoring success via click-throughs, etc. and optimizing the feeds as necessary.
• Listing your items for sale on eBay, via an eBay storefront.
• Creating 2 storefronts, each acting as if they are separate with varying SEO/marketing strategy tactics used (this helps to determine what’s the best e-commerce strategy to use).
• Applying to be a supplier with Internet-based wholesalers such as Doba.com and Shopster.com.
• Sell your products on Amazon.com (create a merchant account).
• In terms of getting your products to brick and mortar retail stores, you may want to consider supplying to traditional wholesalers (not Internet based) and start negotiation channels with those responsible for purchasing new items ( i.e. I believe Wal-Mart does all their purchasing and selection from their home office).
• This one would take some time to develop but may be worth the investment… you can offer customer support, order fulfillment/distribution, returns, etc. to entrepreneurs who want to sell your products by creating portals displaying your products they can arrange and mark up under the vise of their own store logo/branding, etc. ‘in partnership’ with company X (if you don’t want to use your current company name as the trademark).

A common misconception with new online entrepreneurs is that one can no longer become wealthy pursuing web ventures today. Many believe the more desirable opportunities have already materialized and thus all playing fields realized, which to some extent is true but opportunity does, and always will knock. It could be said, regarding traditional inventions that most everything (at least at the most basic, primitive level) has been invented and that new inventions are essentially improvements/enhancements of existing inventions or share common characteristics of previously new product deployments on the market (i.e. a 3-in-one scanner/copier/printer machine, a fiberglass hull for a sailing vessel, etc.) Likewise, on the web, individuals seeking desirable income through this medium must research opportunities in-depth, particularly seeking niche markets with good potential for development while at the same time posing as a true interest of their own (passion is key towards developing a successful Internet venture.)

If you have good business sense but lack web design or development skills (or simply want to jump-start your business), no problem. You can find a number of professional quality web site templates at Template Monster, TemplateWorld and others. HotScripts.com is a popular resource for turn-key open source and commercial web-based software packages you can (usually) install within minutes on a web server. A web site hosting provider is necessary to host your site (make it visible to the world). If you are new to web development, ASP and PHP are currently the most popular web-based languages. Selection of one of these languages is necessary for choosing your web hosting provider as ASP requires a Windows-based hosting provider while a UNIX/Linux hosting provider is recommended for PHP-based programs. It depends on what language you are most comfortable with, or it may come down to what language a specific web program you like is based on (i.e. a photo album program called Gallery is written in PHP so you would need to find a UNIX/Linux hosting provider.) There are more open source programs available written in PHP and generally-speaking, you would need to invest more money with Microsoft ASP solution as quality ASP programs are usually commercial applications requiring you to purchase a license. A recommended UNIX/Linux hosting provider is HostGator while CrystalTech is a good Windows-based hosting provider for small-medium sized companies, assuming you do not mind having sharing your account/web site with other web sites on the same server. If your web site requires a mission-critical solution, requires a high degree of security, etc. you should do some research into companies offering what is called dedicated web hosting where you can rent a web server dedicated exclusively to your web site(s) or perhaps a semi-dedicated solution where you might share the server with a few other companies while realizing slightly less security risk, etc. than a purely shared solution at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated package.

Whatever solution you choose, you should ultimately find setting up and maintaining a web site is relatively easy, especially if you are accustomed to Microsoft Word, Publisher, etc. Microsoft FrontPage is a good novice web publishing tool featuring what is called WYSIWYG technology (What You See Is What You Get) meaning you can design or modify web pages/sites with a high degree of flexibility. Setting up new e-mail accounts, etc. can usually be done through your web site’s control panel provided by your web host (i.e. cPanel for Linux/UNIX accounts, CTsitecenter if you subscribe to a CrystalTech Windows hosting account, etc.)

Your web presence requires a clever .com (formally what is called a domain name, which can actually end in .net, .org, etc.) A good domain name provider is GoDaddy.com, which offers some excellent domain name administration tools, an intuitive domain name portfolio if you end up registering multiple names, etc. (there is a domain name search tool on their home page). Unless your trademark has these characteristics, it is generally not a good idea to include hyphens or numbers in your name and you should keep the name as short and easy to remember as possible (after all, what good is relaying an Internet address on the radio, etc. if someone would have difficulty remembering the name later?) It may be worthwhile to also register your new business name as a federal trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Regarding building your web site, W3 Schools offers some great web site creation tutorials for free and you also might find a site called Webmonkey a valuable web development resource. When your site is ready to upload to the World Wide Web (share with the rest of the world), a good open-source (free) program to use for this purpose is FileZilla and you should find some useful file upload tutorials offered on this site as well.

So how can you make money on the web? That is largely up to the marketability of your idea (and perhaps how well you can keep your business idea secret). Many successful entrepreneurs have earned a considerable amount of money through web blogs by placing ads on their web site (such as affiliate-based marketing through Commission Junction or even the online giant responsible for the affiliate marketing buzz, Amazon.com. Successful blogs also tend to feature ads automatically driven from Google’s free AdSense service which displays ads relevant to the page content and pays you every time a visitor clicks on one of those ads (not a bad deal considering the ads are typically non-intrusive and the revenue has a potential of adding up.) Other’s have been successful creating targeted storefronts (i.e. an e-commerce site devoted to selling say posters) while selling their own items or participating in a relatively new trend called dropshipping. Worldwide Brands is a good drop shipping source if you are a bona-fide business with a federal tax ID (you’ll need to apply with the individual drop shippers) or Shopster is a great alternative designed to appeal to the masses, not requiring one to have a federal tax ID to sell their products.

From time to time you may want to consider redesigning your web site to maintain fresh appeal with your site’s audience, along with any other web templates you may use for perhaps any e-mail newsletters you send, templates used with your eBay marketing initiative, etc. If you are a retail company, you may want to consider creating a product feed for Google Froogle and/or Google Base for greater product exposure. You may even find some of the products you submitted with Google Froogle appear among the top 10 organic (standard, non sponsored) keyword/phrase results on one of your product queries, which places you at a certain advantage among your competitors. For more on search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM), you may be interested in reading the various articles at WebProNews, SEO Chat or pursuing professional certification with WebCEO, considered to be the forerunner for SEO/SEM training (their SEO software is great to use as well.)

If you plan on building an extensive web site, you may want to consider implementing a site search function and researching what is known as page includes (allows you to embed multiple web pages within a web page, such as a header, footer, left side navigation bar, etc.) which helps you save time if you ever need to update a common page component on-the-fly across your web site. Dynamic features are nice, such as subtle Flash animations along with adding roll-over effects (when appropriate) to navigation components and keeping the site navigation as simple as possible. There is a good book on the later subject called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug you may want to look into.

In the past, allowing one to contact you by phone, fax or e-mail from your web site was the norm but nowadays many web sites (i.e. Verizon, Bank of America, etc.) implement a live chat feature which allows your visitor to contact you to ask questions about a product or service. A popular live chat program, called BoldChat even allows one to upsell/cross sell products and services through initiating a conversation, while viewing visitor activity on your web site in real-time (knowing what page they are on at all times while being exposed to information regarding how they landed on your web site, any keywords/phrases they typed into a search engine, etc.) Likewise, if you run an e-commerce site and none of these visitors convert to a customer during their session, you would have knowledge of their IP address/DNS equivalent which is sometimes indicative of the visitor’s company/physical location, presenting a higher probability for a sales conversion to happen if you decide to ‘cold call’ any of these people later on.

This article has been designed to serve as a quick overview of the various components of setting up a web site and some ideas to help you get started building a potentially valuable web-based enterprise. There is certainly much more material to cover on this subject but this should help with your business endeavors. Feel free to contact me at cgcarmichael04@alumni.plymouth.edu if you have any questions.