Domain Parking 101

[tekz999]

Domain Parking is when you temporarily direct your domain name to a website, who in turn, will pay you for the traffic that is received who in turn, ends up clicking on the featured advertisements.
Two of the more popular choices amongst domainers is www.Sedo.com and www.Afternic.com
These two parking services have been around for many years and are both reliable in terms of payment and in providing accurate statistical data.

With Sedo, they will indicate whether the domain name you are parking has existing traffic, and of course if it does, you can price your domain name at a higher range.

Sedo also creates a domain name sale page for you, which visitors to the domain will see whenever they visit. This means that you can end up selling domain names by doing absolutely nothing if someone stumbles across your domain and sees it for sale on Sedo.

Of course, you can choose to deny their offer if you aren’t happy with it or accept it for prompt payment from Sedo, who will take a percentage of your sale and pay you the rest.

To register for a free Sedo account, visit http://www.Sedo.com and click on the “Create Your Free Account” link to begin.



After you have created your account, Sedo will ask you to enter in any domain names that you wish to park with their service.

You can enter in as many or as little as you like, or you can skip this step altogether until you are ready to come back to it at a later time.

If you do decide to enter in domains at Sedo, you are able to specify a category, your asking price, and a minimum offer for each of your domains.

If you enter in a minimum offer, potential buyers will be required to bid that amount in order to even be considered. This can save you a lot of time and eliminate ridiculously low bids of a few bucks.

I always enter my minimum bid to be at least $15 above my registration cost.

Here are a few reputable parking service providers:

www.Sedo.com
www.Parked.com
www.Fabulous.com
www.Bodis.com
www.NameDrive.com

In order to direct your domain to your parking service, you will need to update the nameservers associated with your domains.

By default, your nameservers will point to the main page of whatever domain registrar you choose, for example, if you register a domain name with NameCheap, your domain www.xyz.com when loaded, will bring visitors to NameCheaps' main page until you update the DNS.

It's quite easy to do this, and depending on your register the exact area in your account where you update this information will vary, however the best way to begin is first by creating your account on the parking service you choose to go with, such as www.Sedo.com .

Sedo will provide you with nameservers that may look something like this: ns1.sedoparking.com and ns2.sedoparking.com

After you have these nameservers written down, log into your domain account and search for the "NameServer Update" link (It may be called DNS update, Web Hosting Update, etc).

You may need to contact your domain registration provider to ask where to go about changing this information if you are unable to locate it within your account.

Shortly after you update the nameservers, your domain will be pointed to its new parking home, and you will be able to see this by entering in your domain name and seeing where it leads you.

If you update your nameservers and your domain still remains pointing to your registrar, don't panic- - it can take up to 24 hours for your domain's nameservers to be successfully updated, so check back at a later date to confirm that your domain name is now pointing correctly.

It's important to get to know your way around your domain registration interface because once you sell domains, you will need to transfer (or push) them to your customers.

For registrars such as www.NameCheap.com, you can click on the "Push Domain" link and enter in your customers username and instantly push the domain into their account, without them even having to accept.

For GoDaddy.com, transferring a domain name is a bit more complicated, as you will be required to enter in personal information regarding the customer who purchased the domain from you, but after you've done it a few times it will be extremely easy and quick to process each order as your domains sell.

Note: Don't be afraid to contact your domain registrar for assistance should you be confused about how to transfer domains, register domains or update your nameservers. They are there to help you, and with many of the more popular domain registration providers, they offer live help, toll free support and online help desk should you need to get in touch with a support representative.

[myst woman]

good intro, the base facts.

[bought]

Probably a silly question, but one thing I'm still not quite clear on:

When parking, your domain still remains with your registrar, but only redirects to the parking page, correct?

[draggar]

Correct bought.

You just forward the domain to the parking page or point the DNS to the parking company.

[bought]

Thank you.