I went retro to review some notes I had written last year when a lot of bluster and fluster was being whipped around attacking “minisites”. (I was also inspired by Elliot’s excellent domain site buildout articles lately). Several smart domainers asked the detractors: “Just WHAT is a MINISITE?” Remarkably, after reading 20 blog articles and over a hundred comments, nobody, including myself, has defined what a “MINISITE” is. I still don’t know what that is.

Why doesn’t someone DEFINE what a minisite is, in detail, once and for all?

I’ve seen some “on target” comments from some domainers saying there are those domainers who create limited developed sites in preparation or anticipation of building out larger sites that establish a solid presence on the net.  So how can you “rate” an unfinished project? Is it a “minisite”? Does anyone want to call a website they’re building a “minisite”?

This brings us to the breakdown of the monetization pieces that form the puzzle of a good generic domain that doesn’t get profitable typeins.

Here’s the facts:

1) You parked your domain at a Parking Service (PS) and watched it for a month or two. If you didn’t get more than 100 unique monthly visitors and $.75 a month in PPC revenue, did you realize immediately that you have a domain that needs to be re-evaluated for its worth, because you have a domain that isn’t “self-supporting”? (A quick way to determine if PPC parking your domains is [temporarily] financially smart is to check the monthly rev performers in your report down to $.75. Simply multiply $.75 by 12 months and you have $9.00 a year in revenue – enough to renew the domain if you’re at the right registrar).

2) Most domainers portfolios have 90% of their domains NOT PERFORMING through PPC (PS) landing pages. That means hundreds of thousands of domains owned by domainers need to be evaluated on something different than PPC income. The most glaring change that has occured in domain investing since 2007 is:

Very few domainers actually asks for “multiples” on a domain they want to purchase anymore. Nobody with a knowledge of this business today decides on a domain based on non-transparent PPC revenue. It’s fairly common knowledge that basing your purchasing interest solely on PPC income means you don’t know the domain business. I would confidently state that most successful PPC domainers have lost over half their monthly income since 2008. Because of that, it’s all about potential brands, end-user sales, CPA’s or serious buildouts by the domainer. A domain at a parking page depending on PPC’s is really just losing a lot of money by not expanding into other monetization areas, regardless of how much PPC they’re earning.

3) There are about 300 lucky domainers with one word popular domains who can rest easy (temporarily) because they’ll always know that their domain has great value on several different monetization platforms, including the “top” rev choice, the true “lazy man’s” way to riches – PPC.  However, they rest on the PPC income until they decide when and how to pull the monetization level up for the domain. However, for most domainers, it’s a tight squeeze for their domains to find the monetization bulls-eye because they don’t get that typein traffic that makes it all “so easy”.

4) IMPORTANT FACT THAT MANY DOMAINERS WISH TO OVERLOOK LIKE THEIR DADDY’S CHEATING WAYS: Today’s reality for domainers is that we need to find another source of monetization for those non-performers because PPC has revealed its non-transparency, and their overall control over you and your domains. It’s a unilateral agreement for anyone parking their domain looking for PPC. You don’t even know what you SHOULD be earning, you just have to take what they give you. Personally, I don’t base my domain purchasing investments this way, and neither should you.

5) BOTTOM LINE: The only true way to get the absolute best value from your clearly generic keyword domains is to develop or sell them to an end user. Period. This has been my rant since 2004, and still is.

Look at #5 above:  If you want to enhance these two major options for domainers wanting to make money from their domains, you can’t do this by parking your domain at a landing page hoping for PPC. If you aren’t getting the typeins, then you need to build the domain out with content. Whether you build it small, medium, or huge — anything you do with content that’s relevant for your domain name will be better than letting it rot on a parking page getting no uniques.

Here’s the mistake made by many domainers: Thinking that a “minisite” is an auto-generated website system with identical content that will destroy their domain names by being “blacklisted” by Google or some other SEs. What the detractors of so-called “minisites’ fail to point out is the caveat of “Oh yeah, ummm… this domain would never be SE-indexed anyway if you kept it at a PS with a landing page (PPC).” All those who attack sites that offer auto-content don’t discuss that on most content-development sites, you can make just a few simple changes in your content, including the graphics and the page design, to bypass the “mass produced” tag. It takes less than five minutes to do this for one site.

Putting just five pages of original content on your longtail generic will bring you more value than if you parked it. I had a domain I just sold for five figures that I had parked for 9 years of its 11 year existence. At the PS, it never appeared in SE results. What a waste of 9 years on this domain being parked at a PPC landing page, even though it made enough money to renew itself and a 20 other domains each year. Once I put it up on Whypark and created some custom pages with original content… the buyer appeared and made an offer I couldn’t refuse (no, there wasn’t a head of a horse in my bed).

My favorite site for brand/generic domains that don’t get typeins is WhyPark.com. Many people think that WhyPark.com is a minisite generator. It isn’t. You can use WhyPark to make small to large niche content websites. You can also use WhyPark to develop full-blown websites that most likely will get SE indexed within 90 days.

From my own experience, the 275 domains I have slowly parked at WP are now making about $100 a month revenue. Not a lot of money, except these are also reseller domains that have lured in buyers (whose purchase prices for the domains they’ve bought already weren’t factored in these monthlies), scared competitors in the relevant prodserv market enough to inquire about buying, and the domains weren’t making squat when I had them parked at PS’s.

Do you see my advantage? The longer I have these domains with SOME content on them up on the net, the better chance I have to push them up the SEO hill and impress potential buyers.

My Whypark domains are a sweet deal for me mainly because from experience, I’ve seen many end users who are impressed by a website with content. Most every internet user today can easily spot a parking page, and click away from it just as fast as they came in.  Here’s something for my fellow domain flippers to consider: I can ask a higher price for my domains at WhyPark because the end user sees their competitors’ content on the site, (or even the potential content they might compete against if their competitor buys the domain) and my buyer feels good “taking that visibility” away from their competitors.

FOR COMPANIES WANTING THE ULTIMATE ONLINE ADVANTAGE: A company that controls the generic descriptive domain name/phrase that their competitor MUST use in their advertising for their prodserv, is the death knell for that competitor’s ability to promote that same phrase in their ad copy. Why? Because every time a competitor uses the exact word/phrase of a (.com) domain, the owner of that domain instead gets the promotion to that domain website, so their competitor is promoting the domain name. EX: If you sell “baked green oranges” and own “bakedgreenoranges.com”, each time your competitor uses the phrase “baked green oranges” to sell THEIR “baked green oranges”, they are actually promoting your domain name.  Nice!

But back to the subject at hand — just what is a “minisite” to someone who hates them?

I’m not saying I have the solid answers, but my first step when I realized PPC was dying 18 months ago was to assure my domains at least gain “recognition”. This is why I signed on at WhyPark.

I was dismayed in late 2008 and early 2009 that each portfolio I parked at three of the top PS’s (Parking Services) dropped from close to $1000 monthly to a little over $220 a month in less than a year.  That’s an 80% drop in PPC revenue.  In a year. I’ve heard over 100 stories as bad or worse than my own… so being the suspicious guy that I am, I decided something fishy is going on. I’m not an expert in fishing either, so I couldn’t provide answers, even after talking to the “fishing experts” so to speak.

For some strange reason (and people, you can check this out for yourselves on your own parked domains), my CTR has dropped from an avg of 15%-20% to below 5% at some PS’s.  The only PS that didn’t drop in CTR or CPC significantly was Parked.com, but now I’ve seen the CTR and CPC drop there in the last three months.

Since transparency isn’t a “right” we domainers can request for our investments in our domains’ lives at PS’s, we have nothing to ask. Typein traffic (or “direct navigation,” “name direction,” etc) has now become a term that doesn’t necessarily mean “revenue” if you’re parking your domain. Nobody talks about buying domains at “multiples” anymore. Notice that? I have.

It is old news by now that PPC revenue as a main revenue source for domainers has died, and nobody in the Parking Service Industry (fictional organization) is pitching a more jolly future for PPC. Why not? Why aren’t the biggest PS’s blasting out news releases, exhorting a future where domainers can keep parking for good revenue? Why aren’t they pushing a bright future for domain parking in their emails, in the top domain forums and on the popular domain blog sites?

I haven’t received any emails from any PS telling me to “hang on, the future is bright because ‘XYZ’, and ‘ABC’ is going to happen to increase your payouts by continuing to park with us.”  Just ask your PS rep to explain in detail, why your payouts have decreased over 50% in the last year. I am welcoming everyone to post here any “reasons” you’ve been told why your domains are earning less and less each month with PPC.

True domainers can’t wait for the “Spin of Payout Perdition”. Our business isn’t Fox News. Happily, other options offer more value and success for domainers than traditional PS’s. For domainers and their non-performing longtails and niche generics, it’s quickly going to be about content, and more content, and then refcomms, ebooks, storefronts, and more useful content which will prove where the real value is for a domain’s future. Bottom line, a domain name is only a tool for an END USER. You heard it here first: The value of a domain name is determined solely by the end user. Not PPC through landing pages. (That doesn’t mean YOU can’t become an end user of your own domain.)

If domainers don’t connect with a viable end user demographic,  they will have to either:

1) Become an end user (try building out a directory to sell ad spots to your domain’s relevant end users)

2) Suffer through poor PPC payouts and measure the annual revenue from each domain to see if it even pays for itself.

3) Sell the domain quickly for cheap, because all the facts of the monetization power of the domain haven’t yet been gathered or developed.

Do you have the money to hang on to hundreds or thousands of your niche-powered descriptive domains when the easy days of PPC landing pages no longer pays out? Even using your own Google/Yahoo adlinks doesn’t guarantee revenue on SET (Search Engine Traffic). Maybe affiliates can convert for you if you spend time capturing the SE indexing power of your site.

Domainers have to make a decision about their portfolios quickly, or they might find themselves with hundreds of decent generic domains coming due for renewal each month and none of them are producing revenue. You’ll be spending hours each day deciding which domains can be quickly sold at bulk discount, slashed prices, or which domains can be renewed again for another year while you figure out how to monetize it. Great niche phrase domains that corner a certain market can take your finances down while you’re figuring out how to pay for their renewals. I’ve seen many of my clients go through this problem, and it’s always the same — Great domain, doesn’t get typeins, and if it does, those typeins are no longer producing decent revenue.

The thing that makes me the most suspicious is that the uniques haven’t dropped on my domains, but the CTR has.  Suspicious of what, I don’t know. Maybe someone can tell all of us what is going on.  Maybe a “Domainer Union” needs to be formed so we can put forth a voice that asks the companies that make millions off our domain traffic every month what we want to know.

Do we have questions on why uniques are staying strong, but CTR is dropping 70%? CPC’s dropping 50% and more?  Is this because of a drop in online advertisers or bid pricing for Google and Yahoo click ads? I don’t think so.  But I also don’t have an answer for this almost total destruction of PPC payouts for non-Naturals. I’ve talked to the execs at every top PPC company, and their answers are almost identical — “Blame the source – Google, Yahoo, whoever, they are paying out less”.

Thankfully for me and hopefully others, I don’t depend on domain PPC revenue and never have. I’m a domain flipper so I make my money on domain sales. and that’s where having content and SE indexing is so important. It’s like this: You’re driving a Porsche Carrera to find a treasure you know is at the top of a mountain, but when you get there you find the treasure is a box full of Enron stock certificates and the ghost of Kenneth Lay guarding it with a poster of GW Bush. You quickly start looking closer at your Porsche, and determining what its value is. Are you going to race it or sell it?

The most important thing you can do for any domain that you aren’t making any revenue on by parking is to take advantage of the free content development services that WhyPark.com provides. I advise my readers and my clients to check their monthly PPC payouts and redirect all their domains that are making zero moolah to WhyPark. You can bulk upload them with no effort. Fine tune them later. At least you’ll have the chance to get the domains indexed on some search engines, which will give you an edge in flipping the domain to an end user.

Stay tuned.

Here is the news you’ve been waiting for! Domain history has been made today with the top PPC company acquiring the top domain development company.

WhyPark has been acquired by Parked.com, a  great PPC company run by an experienced team. Sig Solares, Donny Simonton and their crew, Christian Higgins, Monty White and the rest have been in the forefront of PPC services, appearing and sponsoring almost every domain conference and buying domains at their auctions. Parked.com has been consistent in their PPC payouts and showing us they are in this game to stay.

What does Parked.com bring to WhyPark.com?

Here’s the first thing to report to make all WhyPark users ecstatic – you all get Parked.com‘s adfeed and expertise in the domain monetization arena. Parked.com has premium feeds, and their payments are made twice a month!

So, for a perfect world joining two powerhouse domain monetization solutions, Parked.com has acquired WhyPark.com.  FINALLY WE HAVE LIFTOFF! It’s doom for domainer gloom. CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR JUMPSTART ACCOUNT AT THE NEW WHYPARK

More benefits for you: WhyPark.com is integrating Parked.com’s relevant targeted ads that utilize both WhyPark’s and Parked.com’s technology to pay the maximum revenue. An added benefit for WhyPark users is Parked.com’s historical data on search terms where known terms convert the best and pay well based on the domain’s theme. This is a godsend for people with ccTLD, gTLD, SLD, and longtail domains that don’t get typein traffic, and need to get organic traffic with powerful adfeeds.

Ultimately, using WhyPark, backed by the power of Parked.com’s adfeeds, will get a domainer the best possible revenue and help get your domains indexed on the SE’s. A double-burger of domain revenue opportunities, and you have your choice of cheese and other delicious extras! Made YOUR WAY!

This acquisition clearly provides you with the first BULK DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM that you can easily manage, whether you have a small or large portfolio. The joining of these two companies creates synergies from WhyPark’s unequaled strength in developing organic traffic with Parked.com’s winning competitive advantage in monetizing that traffic. In other words — WhyPark now provides the domainer the best of both worlds. You no longer have to choose if you want to develop traffic or monetize your domain with the best adfeeds available – it’s now all in one platform. WhyPark. Click here to start your FREE ACCOUNT at WhyPark.

HOW MY STORY STARTED WITH WHYPARK (The Boring Part of the Blog):

Back in 2002, about four years after I had first started dabbling in domains as an investment, I began to see a need to have my domains built out to websites that people would bookmark. I wanted the “sticky” factor for my domains, and the content would be relevant, helpful, and lead my readers to select and support products I featured on my site.  Six years and tens of thousands of dollars later, I was frustrated and looking for someone with the right solution. I had hit brick walls, fought with several “site developers”, and generally thought “This idea just can’t be done.”

Then I got a call from Craig Rowe, President of WhyPark.com, inviting me to come on board and give my best to help this already incredible company with some new ideas and create a positive buzz in the industry. After ten minutes of checking out WhyPark, my prayers were answered. Somebody was doing what I’ve wanted to do for years, and they were doing it RIGHT. It was pure Zen. I jumped at the chance.

No other company that has hired me for my domain consulting ideas was as exciting as WhyPark, with a likable and brilliant president/owner like Craig Rowe.  His genius was inspiring to me, and I had to be a part of a team that I trusted, and one I would be proud to say I endorsed and worked for.  Craig Rowe is the “Honest Man’s Man”. I would trust him with my life.

My biggest joy from WhyPark, besides working with them, including the wonderful Kelly Urquhart, was that their system gave me a better chance of getting value from my non-typein generic domains,  a generic longtail, for example. That main value came from getting the domains indexed and showing endusers what that domain could produce for them. Even better, it showed relevant content to their own prodserv and that the domain can either be a competitor or be in their own arsenal. It’s a great selling point for domain flippers.

So getting some content on my longtails and other niche domains, especially my ccTLD’s, showing the endusers that I have a domain/website that is already creating a “competitive” edge against their product, was a great strategic move in managing my domain portfolio to be “attractive” to the enduser.

IN SUMMATION:  WhyPark is the undisputed leader of domain website development, and it is now backed by powerful adfeeds through Parked.com, a company known as the leader in putting PPC payouts in your pocket.

I am sad to say that my work is now done with WhyPark as an executive there, but my goals were achieved and I am dedicated to supporting the growth of WhyPark for years to come!

If you like how WhyPark has progressed in the last year, sign up now!

I’ve got two other hot projects to work on, with plenty more innovative exciting news to reveal for domainers in the near future, so stay tuned! The sky is the limit!

Peace to all…

As most of you know, I’m the VP of Business Development at Whypark.com and I have worked closely with Craig Rowe and our team for almost a year to make the best domain development service ever created. I think we have achieved that and more.

Here’s first proof:

WE ARE NOW FREE. (click here now to get started immediately!)

Yes… no other domain development service can claim that. Now that we are FREE, if you are a domainer with generic longtails, ccTLDs, and SLD’s, this is your CHANCE to get all your domains over to Whypark and take advantage of potential search engine indexing with the content and ability to customize your sites.

The income possibilities for your domains that make nothing with traditional PPC services has CHANGED. It’s a new beginning and an answer to all domainers’ prayers of “please let me quickly find a way to increase the value of my non-performing domains!” No more excuses of “can’t afford the cost” to use WhyPark! Yes, it’s true – content on your domains, customization, and SE indexing potential is FREE and UNLIMITED for the amount of domains you want to submit. I am personally inviting my readers to take advantage of this unbelievable opportunity!

I invite everyone reading my blog to get a quickstart jump on everyone and get over to WhyPark. We give you unlimited domains in your free account. Just click here to get started!

Like I’ve been saying for almost a year — “change is coming, and you’re going to be happy you’re a domainer!”

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me here and I’ll give you free advice on how to make those domains you see with ZERO revenue each month on your PPC accounts begin to start making revenue, and even turn up in SE results!

…and… more good things coming. Stay tuned to my blog and hear it here first! WhyPark rocks!

The link is: http://www.whypark.com/successclick

If you are a reader of my blog, I am giving the first 100 respondents ten domain buildout opportunities in a 90 day account at WhyPark.com.  This means you’ll be able to create an account at WhyPark, then select ten of your domains you love (but don’t seem to be making any revenue), and then watch as WhyPark makes those ten previously non-performing domains morph into websites that make you revenue.

It’s fun to see relevant content appear on your previously dead domains. I have hundreds of killer generic domain names that make no money or traffic when parked at my favorite parking sites. However, once I moved them to WhyPark, I started seeing more traffic, and then revenue. I parked NutritionalNews.com at WhyPark, and within a month I was making revenue on a beautiful domain that wasn’t getting any typein traffic when I parked it at a traditional parking service. I haven’t even spent more than a few minutes on each domain, like I should, to build each domain out to it’s full potential at WhyPark. But I know the features and functions of this unbelievable domainer website is going to change the face of domain investing.

What’s interesting is when you see new content appear on your domain websites as the weeks pass. And best of all, it’s a great day when you are informed that a prominent search engine has indexed your domain name.

Remember, parking your domain at a traditional landing page with nothing but ad links will not give your domain its most important achievement:  Being indexed!

If some of your favorite domains just aren’t getting the typein traffic they need to perform at traditional parking services, you need to think “time to build content and bring in revenue” at WhyPark. ($.99 a domain to start for your first 100 domains. But for now, ten domains for 90 days testing for free!!)

Best of all, WhyPark isn’t a domain service that competes with your favorite parking service. We only want the domains that do NOT get a lot of typeins. Keep the heavy traffic domains at your favorite parking service, but don’t lose revenue from those killer generic domains that don’t get typeins. Park them and get content provided by WhyPark and watch the incoming search engine traffic roll in.

Thanks for supporting my blog, and have fun everybody!

P.S. Please don’t contact me for your domain support at WhyPark.  Contact Support@_Whypark.com

Stephen Douglas

The root of our intent is fairly clear: teach the end-user the value of owning the generic descriptive domains for their products/services (prodservs). No domain investor will argue against this.

The destiny for domain names aren’t about parking them, that’s only a stop-gap revenue generator while we wait for a smart, financially-capable company to make the right offer to purchase the domain that defines their company and its products. It isn’t just the domain’s worth at that moment, but for what the domain’s value will be far into the future. A killer $1 million domain can create massive profits for a company for years beyond their initial investment. In fact, even a small niche domain for $1,000 can help a small company capture their online market in the same way. Even beyond that, a good domain name is a constantly rising value. The more the company defines the domain and their website with their products, the more the domain’s value appreciates. (Appreciable Marketing Asset – AMA)

This question is addressed to the business sector: What is your company’s domain doing for you right now? Does it tell your market what your company is all about? Does it direct internet users to your site when they’re looking for your products/services? Is your domain name (website URL) remembered when potential customers see it in your advertisements?

If you step back from your company, and look at it from a generic standpoint, how do you define your prodservs? Do you control the name direction usage of potential customers? If not, what’s holding you up in building a large portfolio of generic descriptive domains (GDD’s) that you can point to your company’s website when your potential customers type in your generic prodserv phrases? HINT: Do you have a high-powered ad agency who steers you to buy domain names that match their ad campaigns instead of educating you on the fact that category-killing generic descriptive domains on your prodservs can bring you hundreds of thousands of eyeballs to your company in a year, every second of the day, and at a fraction of the cost that the ad agency is charging you for their ad campaigns?

It’s hard to gauge the “knowledge” of marketing directors of companies, or whoever is in charge of advertising and marketing at smaller companies. Although there have been a lot of articles written on domain names and their value in topnotch publications such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN.money, Business 2.0, and hundreds of newspapers and other media sources, we domain investors really don’t have an idea on how the people at any company in charge of selling the company’s prodservs online understand domain values.

It’s to the advantage of every domain investor to push these types of questions into the mainstream media. It’s to every domain investors’ advantage to find out how educated every business is about domain names and their pinnacle value over every type of marketing their company engages in. Ultimately, the real advantage goes to every businessman who learns and experiences the value that domain names bring to their company. If this happens, will there be a gold rush on domain names?

Only if the we tell the world where the gold is.