Seriously, I just wanted to buy a domain today for a new site idea I have. I spent some time thinking of decent names and then armed with whois had a look to see if any were available. I checked 6 names in total, all of them had the .com taken. However when I went to visit the sites all but 1 of them were parked doing sweet f*ck all.

I wouldn’t have minded if they were all in use, I’d just keep trying, but 5 out of 6 just bought so that they could point at a parking space and hopefully make the owner a few quid. That just really pissed me off.

Of course this has nothing to do with my own experiment into domain parking which has so far netted me two thirds of bugger all! Well, just over 2 dollars to be precise. I could settle for the .net domains but I really was hoping to host this on a .com. Therefore I wish unpleasantness on all those people who have all the domain names I want. This includes the owner of stansfield.net who wouldn’t back down from his, frankly hilarious, asking price of $650.

The last 6 days I’ve made a grand total of 0.02 US Dollars. On the plus side I’m now just one cent away from the 2 dollar milestone.

Clearly something needed to be done so I’ve added some spam, err I mean useful links, to the sidebar of my blog. Hopefully these might get picked up by google and others as some of the domains have never received a visit from anyone other than me. I’m pretty sure once I can get people onto the sites themselves they’ll be falling over themselves to click as many links as possible and the money will roll in.

The total I made in the last 7 days is a slightly disappointing 0.11 USD. But you’ve got to keep your chin up, there will be good times and there will be bad times.

As for the domain name I was searching for that started this whole waste of time. I offered the seller 50USD for it. He countered my rather generous offer with his own of 2250 USD. This, I thought, was perhaps a little optimistic. Admittedly I could go higher so I did, 55 USD I countered his counter with. Back came his counter to my counter to his counter to my original offer, 650 USD. I’m now trying to decide how much to counter (his counter to my counter to his counter to my offer) with, it’s a hard decision to make whether I should go up just 5 USD or stretch myself to 10 USD.

I will of course keep you updated on my domain parking successes and my ongoing negotiations.

Currently my grand income is, drum roll please…

$1.86

That’s right, I’m just over 1 GBP better off this week all thanks to the wonders of domain parking.

Buoyed by my success I decided the next part of my strategy, if you can call it that, is to buy a topical domain or two and see if we can raise a little extra green. I decided that finance is the topic of the day and so enter:

SurviveTheStockMarket.com & SurviveTheStockMarket.co.uk
Category: Finance – Stocks & Shares, Keywords: Stock Market Advice

UKReg are doing a deal where you buy a .com and get a .co.uk for free so it was a fairly cheap investment, though slightly more than my income so far but it’s early days. Just you wait!

Will let you know how my early retirement plans are coming along in another week or so.

All except one were in use. The one that wasn’t was pointed at some domain parking service. I’d never taken much notice of domain parking before. My automatic reaction is to just close the web browser as I would to any other spam. However as this was a domain I was actually interested in I had a look at the page and spotted a link at the bottom where I could offer to buy the domain. I followed the link to find the owner wanted at least 50 USD for it.

I decided to think about it but meanwhile I started to think about the whole idea of domain parking. I wondered what was the point as the returns must be tiny. I did a bit of research and found if you put in a lot of time and effort the returns could be fairly rewarding. I read a few peoples stories about it and some forums where “domainers” chatted about the best parking services and good keywords to use.

I found this quite interesting and having a bunch of domains I don’t use and a free saturday afternoon decided to experiment and see if someone could make any money in a totally half arsed attempt.

I sorted through my domains and picked the ones I really didn’t use which, to be honest, is most of them. The next part was picking a domain parking service. I had seen a few mentioned in the forums and just picked one at random. The service I picked was NameDrive.com, they seemed pretty popular and quite easy to setup. I wanted this to require as little effort as possible. It seems some of the services also require you to have a large portfolio of domains I and only had 7 spare.

I signed up to NameDrive and gave them the names of the domains I wanted to sacrifice. Once signed up you then configure each domain. You give them a category, sub category, some keywords and then pick a template to be displayed to the person landing on the page.

The adverts they see are based, from what I can tell, on a combination of the categories you pick, your domain name and the keywords. These were:

quynh.co.uk – Category: Travel – Luxury Holidays, Keywords: Travel Asia

hail-to-the-king.co.uk – Category: Leisure – Cinema, Keywords: Evil Dead

sexfilledsanta.co.uk – Category: Romantic Gifts, Keywords: Sexy Lingerie

casualgenius.co.uk – Category: Electronics, Keywords: Gadgets

iprotest.eu & iprotest.org.uk – Category: Politics, Keywords: Political Protesting

I also setup one domain that I tried to point to mental health but for some reason namedrive insisted it was Adult so I changed it to adult. I wont link to that one

The plan is to leave them there for a month and see if I make any money at all. I’m highly doubtful