What is better:parking or affiliate programs?

[ebalyna]

Hi!

I am a newborn domainer of Feb 08...

I have mostly trendy/slang domain names, some hot topic ones (ie Spitzer type...) and the rest is all adult.

I have been cask parking these names for about 7 weeks at GoDaddy but seen hardly anything in terms of money. I realized that all my adult domain names did not have any ads and consequently called them to ask why. The answer I received was that they do not deal with adult type ads. When trying to move those names over to parked, I was told that there was a 60 day period during which I was not allowed to transfer the names. Not very happy about that, but...

As I am reading up on this business, I am starting to wonder: which one is more lucrative: affiliate programs, SEO and content, or cash parking?

I understand that even successful cash parking may require some SEO and some "promotional work" so, I am getting confused. I originally thought that cash parking was all about doing nothing. If money and time needs to be put into it, why not develop the domain into a site and make money with ads and affiliate programs that way?

Does anyone have any sound advice to give me?

[DDC_Cyn]

It sounds confusing but only because there's not one rule that applies to all and to top it off the rules of parking have changed drastically in recent months. Here's the basics:

Parked sites - you used to be able to help it along and send some traffic but you no longer can. A parked site must get traffic on its own. That means a good type in name like free.com or a typo or a site that was a site at one time and now it's just parked. The advantage here is the parking companies (I work for DDC.com) get a better deal with Yahoo and Google (we're a Yahoo partner) than the average person alone would so the potential for higher payouts is there.

BUT

If your domains don't get traffic then parking is useless. You will need to develop them to get traffic and use adsense and affiliate programs to make your money.

If you have a choice, sometimes developing is better if you have the resources to throw at it. It depends on the site name, the niche, so many factors. You have to put it out there and find out.

Does that help?

[Yofie]

FYI, you do not have to "transfer" a domain name to change parking providers. All you have to do is change your Domain Name servers. You can do this in your control panel at GoDaddy. Each parking provider has different dns etc.

For me, in the long run Affiliates seem to pay off the best, but using affiliates, you will also have to build a site.

The easiest is domain parking, but you will not do well, if your domains do not get any traffic.