Would you like to make a passive income with your unused domain names?

Domain parking monetization would be the answer to the thousands of Internet entrepreneurs who registered new domains and buy expired domain names quicker than they can build content for the websites.

If you are not aware of domain parking monetization, then you would have only 2 options.

1. Park it with your registrar for free
2. Create a new hosting space, and put up a “under construction” page.

Option 2 is the preferred method if you have the spare web space and time to tinker with the web page. More importantly, you put what you want on the website.

However, most people will opt for the first option and just park it with their registrars. It is simply more convenient to do so.

Free Domain Parking is Not Free After All

However, do you know you could be losing money if you park “free” with your registrar.

Take Godaddy as an example, it provides free parking for your domains. Your “parked free” domain will displays Sponsored Links and other ads put up by GoDaddy. In fact, I think it looks better than an “under construction” page.

When people come to your domain and click at those sponsored links, GoDaddy get paid - not you. Your domain is now making money for your registrar!

You can stop this!

You can park your domains with paid domain services and get paid for all those clicks.

Paid Domain Parking

There are a host of domain parking monetization providers that will help you to earn domain parking revenue with your unused domains.

• DomainSponsor.com
• iMonetize.com
• Klickerz.com
• RevenueDirect.com
• NameDrive.com
• Fabulous.com
• Sedo.com
• GoldKey.com
• ActiveAudience.com

I do not used all of them. Just a selected few.

You will get a better comparison of the various paid domain parking services at www.parkquick.com.

The selected few paid domain parking services which I am using are Klickerz.com, iMonetize and Afternic(ActiveAudience).

I started with Afternic because I’ve put up some domains for sale there and conveniently park with Afternic. However, ActiveAudience which Afternic is using to serve the parking pages, are forward to Sedo parking pages. And I don’t like it.

SEO Friendly Domain Parking

One thing I am particular concerned, beside higher earning per click, is whether the pages serve by the parking service is SEO friendly. You don’t want your domain, especially if it already has a Google pagerank(PR), to have the following SEO taboos:

• dynamic URLs
• HTML frames
• forwarding to external pages

For various reasons, including SEO concerns, I will recommend Klickerz for better earning and GoldKey for SEO friendliness.

I believe many people will love to see their blogs or blog posts being ranked top in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live(MSN) Search.

And I thought I would prepare a 90-minute seminar to introduce working executives to SEO and Blogging with a catchy title… (more…)

I found blogging so much more fun after I started using MyBlogLog. Now, whenever I’m online, I’ll login to find out who’d been to my blogs!

Initially, the motivating factor for me to trade my name and email address is the free tracking service offered by MyBlogLog. And I have no idea how powerful MyBlogLog can help me to grow my readership and traffic with its social networking model.

The traffic to my blog exploded and I have many more readers. I call this phenomenon, viral blogging.

Exponential Growth in Traffic with Viral Blogging

I started my membership on 3rd January, 2007. The traffic to my blog has since grown exponentially - from Alexa ranking 5,000,000 to 228,228(as of Jan 26, 2007). My blog communities have 16 Contacts and 7 Admirers!

Social Networking with MyBlogLog

In less than a month, I am already addicted to MyBlogLog - not for it’s free tracking and statistics services but for it powerful social networking features. I’ve found many blogs in my area of interest: SEO and Search Marketing. I am connecting to people interested in SEO and search marketing, and many bloggers from Singapore.

I think Singapore is becoming the Blogging Nation. My unofficial statistics rank Singapore first in the world for the number of active bloggers per capita.

Visit The MyBlogLog Blog and get to know the great people behind this fantastic service and find out loads of new MyBlogLog features.

[UPDATE Feb 2, 2007] Just discovered that Lee Oden of TopRankBlog.com got an interview with MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer.

This public toilet prank video is really very funny. Go get a good laugh now…

So be careful the next time you’re in Japan using the public toilets.

This blog is now ranked PR4! That is, Google has pagerank’ed this blog from PR 0 to PR 4.

Thank you, thank you… to all those who link to me. I appreciate your reading and citing of what I’m ranting writing here.

I’ve noticed Google dancing over the past 10 days. A couple of my websites suffered a drop in pagerank - from PR4 to PR3. I think it’s because I’ve neglected them(for a long time, maybe more than 9 months) and have not been adding new content and implemented new link building campaign with them. So it’s sort of expected.

The good news is, for those websites that I actively SEO and build links, the pagerank have improved. I have a couple of web pages gained from PR4 to PR5. One point to note is that, these websites are focusing on Singapore-based traffic - in my own jargon, it’s Singapore SEO‘ed!

However, gaining higher pagerank is one thing and actually gaining higher position in the search engine result is more important. Isn’t it?

I thought such thing happens to you and me but not to a billion dollar company like Google.

It was report in WebProNews that Google Slips Its Leash and lost control of its domain name Google.de. I guess such slip-up happened because the German does thing differently from the American or there might be a difference in culture as far as running a big corporation is concerned.

Some third party managed to catch Google’s expired domain name and registered this prized domain name.

Google must be embarrassed by the fiasco. However, it resolved the matter quickly and went back to business as usual.

So What Happened?

I guessed it was a matter of expectation and the lack of good communication.

Did the Americans try to speak Deutsch or the Germans try to speak English?

I suspect that DENIC, the German domain registry, does thing different from its American counterpart and the Americans have not appreciated this difference in the work culture and renewal procedures and regulations.

There is definitely a lesson to be learned here. We are dealing with the Internet, there is cultural difference and the way you work in your country may be different from how things should be done in the host country.

Cross Cultural Differences

I’ve worked with Americans in the USA and the German in Deutschland. They behaves differently. Even the Americans from west coast (e.g. LA) work differently from the people from the east coast (e.g. New York).

Being a Singaporean living in this multi-racial country, I believe we are used to such cultural differences. And we tend to handle such differences better - that is a very special trait that most Singaporeans have.

Don’t you agree?

Before I could get the time to upgrade my WordPress 2.0.6 to 2.0.7, WordPress 2.1 (Ella) is here!

So I want to know what’s in it for me to upgrade to the new version. When I read the features list, I am glad to know that…

You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

I will definite install Ella 2.1 and try out the CMS features.

The other important features to me are:

The Autosave. I tend to lose my writing and have to resort to using a text editor to compose my post before copying it to Wordpress and format it.

New version of Askimet. I believe the new version will catch more SPAM and honest readers will not be mistaken for making comment at this blog.

New, more efficient database code which translates to faster page loading when I add a post, update a post or displaying my blog on your browser!

However, I don’t quite understand this…

New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.

Maybe you would like to comment on this and enlighten me what’s this “privacy option”.

Now, I know why people are turning to Youtube.com instead of watching the TV. And it has a lot to do with The Long Tail phenomenon.

Don’t know what is The Long Tail? Then you need to go get the book by Chirs Anderson at Amazon or if you are in Singapore, grab it at Popular Bookstore - it’s 20% off!

The long-tail phenomenon will “re-shape our understanding of what people actually want to watch”…

With Youtube, people can select what to watch and when to enjoy these short movies. And this is what the long tail is all about - virtually unlimited choices.

Youtube is like a huge video library with unlimited racks filled with users contributed video clips from all over the world. These may be home-made or recorded from TV broadcast or professional produced movie trailers.

And I think I’m addicted to Youtube the long tail concept already!

Here’s an example of what I enjoy - although I don’t understand a single word of what they were talking!

Via Random Good Stuff

However, with the really bad not-so-good video quality of Youtube, I am not really looking to be entertained but rather to gather information. I hope the day of dvd quality streaming will not be too far away so that we can really replace the TV and be entertained with HD images and surround sound.

Yesterday, less than 14 hours ago, I installed Wordpress 2.0.6 to my domain Shi.SG and now they have Wordpress 2.0.7. I guess I’ll have to upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.7. It is uncommon to have a upgrade so soon unless there’s a really urgent need to do so. Right?

I am going to work on Wordpress as my preferred blogging platform. There are just too many benefits with Wordpress for me to adopt this fantastic blog engine despite the hassle of installing and constant upgrading my website so very often.

And here’s just 2 of The Most Important Benefits…

Search Engine Friendly

Wordpress is definitely more flexible for me to to SEO optimization. One of the biggest advantages is that you can use search engine friendly URLs e.g.
http://shihengcheong.com/blog/2007/01/predictions-for-2007/
which is preferred by the search engine rather than
http://shihengcheong.com/blog/?p=49

Trackback

One of the main reasons why this blog did so well, in terms of Alexa ranking, is because of the trackback feature. You see, when I quoted others’ blog posts, Wordpress can automatically create a comment at the post I quoted. And I am getting a lot more visitors to my blog because of these comments.

This is one of the most powerful way to promote your blog. I guess this is also part of social media marketing.

Still on the domain name trading matter because I have been spending a bit more time recently to study the investment potential of domain names.

When we speak of domain name trading, people tend to think of registering a new name and selling it for a profit.

In actual fact, in domain name trading, I am talking about selling used domain names. “Used” in this case means the domain is actually pointing to a website with content and preferably indexed by the major search engines.

When the domain is used and has several backlinks(inbound links), there is a good chance that traffic is already coming to this domain. The more traffic coming to the domain, the more valuable. Because, you can monetize this traffic and also further improve your revenue by search engine optimization.

It is for this reason that savvy domain investors are paying top dollars for expired domain names.

What are the other reasons that people are pay thousands of dollar for an used domain name?

(It was reported that Diamond.com was traded for US$7.5 million)