Knowing When Domain Parking Works Best
Well, I’ve finished testing a new strategy for a few of my domain names and came to a conclusion: I will probably never understand why things work opposite from pure logic and common sense. For the past quarter, I took my top performing parked domain name, and pointed it to an Amazon store to see how it would perform. The results astounded me.
The main domain I tested received exactly 300 clicks during the first three quarters of 2009. Given the amount of type-in traffic it got, I decided to go for the bigger game and attempt to sell products from Amazon. So, I set up a simple niche store and pointed the domain to it. I did no off-site SEO or any other kind of promotion – I just wanted to see how much more I’d make by selling things on Amazon. The result: $0.00.
I find it absolutely baffling. How could this domain make a steady income through clicks on a blatantly obvious parking page, yet, not even make a penny on Amazon. It gets even more interesting. Not only did the site not make a cent on Amazon, but the products only had a combined 8 clicks throughout all of October and November, as opposed to the average of 100 clicks the parked page’s links had. That means that people were 92% less likely to click something relevant and obvious such as a product as opposed to a plain old text link on a parked page!
With this being said, I urge everyone to test their mini-sites and affiliate stores with domain parking (I use Parked.com) if they are under-performing, yet, get type-in traffic. Personally, I am blown away at this test. It goes to show how unpredictable consumer behavior is on the internet…just when you thought a fairly logical assumption was right, you’re proven wrong.
Here’s an even odder story I can’t explain.
I have an .in domain with an exotic name. I developed it as a Blogger custom domain (meaning it’s on the Blogger platform but it can be reached by typing http://www.name.in with no blogspot anywhere in the name). It got almost no traffic.
I gave up on it and moved it to a famous parking company that put a very dull page on it. Lo and behold it got a handful of visits a day.
Hmmm, I figured that if an .in name can get some traffic, the same name.com can get more traffic. I bought the .com domain and parked it at the same company. It got almost zero traffic. The .in equivalent still got a handful of visits a day.
I moved the .com to the Blogger platform and developed it. No traffic worth the time.
Can anyone figger out why the .in got no traffic when developed, but some traffic when parked…and the .com equivalent is a pale ghost wherever it is.