As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

• It’s Easy. You can pretty much set it and forget it. Most of the parking services have landing pages with high click through rates, so you will not have to spend any time optimizing the site.
• Works with any domain.

Disadvantages

• Unless you have a huge domain portfolio, the parking services will take a sizable chunk of the revenue.
• For some domains, you may not be able to come up with relevant keywords that will pay well.

I have had some good luck with both DomainSponsor and Sedo. There is also a post over at WickedFire recommending a few other domain parking services and DNForum has some great posts on reviewing parking services.

2.) Redirect to Affiliate Programs. Recently, I have been experimenting with redirecting some of my unused domain names to relevant affiliate programs. For example, on CollegePower.com, I wrote up a quick little PHP script to redirect visitors to one of five scholarship programs on Azoogle and HydraMedia. I have also tried this with a few typo domains that are very well targeted to affiliate programs. I am currently redirecting Blinkco.com to the ringtone offers on Blinko.com. I am not yet ready to discuss my results with this technique, but I certainly see some potential here.

Advantages

• With well-targeted affiliate programs, this can be more profitable than parking services.
• With a simple redirect script, you can test multiple affiliate programs/offers on one domain.

Disadvantages

• Not all domains will have an affiliate program that is a good fit for it.
• You must remember to change up the site if the offer that you are running expires.

3.) Domain Resale. One of the best techniques I have used to monetize my unused domains is to resell some of my holdings. After I sit on a domain for a year or two, I usually consider reselling it if I will not start using it within the next six months. When selling my domains, I have had success using DNForum, Webhostingtalk, and Sitepoint forums. If you find the right buyer, you can get a good price for your domain. For example, I have sold techcoupons.com and webhostinglab.com for a few hundred dollars each. This was a huge return on my initial investment.

Advantages

• Lump sum of cash upfront
• Reduces your overall domain portfolio which can be good if your unused domains distract you from focusing upon your mains sources of revenue.

Disadvantages

• May require some time investment to find interested buyers.
• Obviously, you can no longer use the domain after you sell it.

4.) Build an Automated Aggregator Site. I do not have much experience with this, but I have seen unused domains monetized by setting up blogs that republish (scrape) RSS feeds from other sites. The scrapper blog is then loaded with Adsense and affiliate programs. I am toying with the idea of doing this on TheKnicks.com.

Advantages

• Ability to build audience and repeat visitors
• Potential for multiple revenue streams (ex: Adsense and affiliate)

Disadvantages

• Limited traffic from search engines because you will be penalized for duplicate content.
• Will take some time to set up site.

A domain name portfolio can be a great asset to an Internet marketer. I encourage you to build up that portfolio and continue to not be afraid experimenting with different monetization techniques on your domains. Even if your unused domains earn just enough to cover your annual renewal fee, you will be ahead of the game.

While browsing Valleywag tonight, I noticed a post about how social networking site TagWorld may be headed out of business. The scary thing is that they are still running an offer on ClickBooth that pays $.80 per signup. Over the weekend I was thinking about a few ways to promote this offer, but I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole now.

This is just another great example of how publishers should always do some preliminary research on a company before promoting offers. Myself and countless other publihsers have been burned by this in the past, and there is no shortage of  shady affiliate marketers. Be safe out there.

A while ago, I covered BlueHatSEO’s blog post about an idea to earn $100 per day from promoting screen savers bundled with adware.  Earnersblog just put up a great post about how the author earned $200 per day promoting Casino affiliate programs with an ebook. He basically wrote an ebook about a roulette strategy and encouraged readers to try out the strategy by signing up for an online casino via affiliate links embedded in the book. He distributed the ebook via p2p sharing and ebay promotion.
I think the idea is worth consideration. I really like that:

• It is a unique idea. This is a different angle from the people who are selling ebooks and people pushing affiliate programs via websites.
• Great Promotion Technique. I find promotion of a new idea to often be the most time consuming part of a new venture. Using ebay is an excellent idea and you can tap into a huge resource of other people re-distributing the ebooks.
• It keeps on giving. After the initial investment of time writing the ebook and planting it within other ebook distribution packages, the ebook will continue to float around the web and earn money.

I am not sure if I will be writing any ebooks in the near future (maybe I will have my assistant in India write a first draft of one) but I am intrigued by the idea. It is always helpful to feed your mind fresh ideas like this.

This week I began my first venture into purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines. I am monetizing the traffic via a variety of affiliate networks. This traffic has been the first large chunk of traffic that I have sent to Hydra Media, and I have to say that I have been quite impressed with the performance of their offers.
My first few learnings from my first week of PPC advertising are:

• Make sure you sign up for PPC advertising with special offers. Using coupons from the digitalpoint forums, I was able to get $50 free advertising on MSN and $75 free advertising on Yahoo. The free advertising has allowed me to bet with the house’s money while I am optimizing my campaigns and getting the hang of the systems.
• Typos are your friends. When I created my initial keyword lists, I entered a few typos keywords by hand. Then I started using typo generators to come up with all sorts of permutations for my keywords. In aggregate, typos can bring a good volume of traffic and very low keyword prices.
• Read, Read, Read. The wickedfire and digitalpoint forums provided some great background. I also found some interesting posts on the MindValley Labs blog related to techniques and statistics related to optimizing PPC ads.

From what I have been reading, it appears that many of the big search engines have or are starting to crack down on affiliate marketing via PPC. I will continue my experimenting in the area because it is an interesting space, and it is something that I do not know much about yet. As always, I will continue to post more of my learnings.

Over in the Azoogleads forum at DigitalPoint, an interesting exchange sprung up between Shoemony, a well known super affiliate and JP the owner of the MaxBounty affiliate program. The post starts out innocently enough when a user asks if Azoogleads would be a good place to find ringtone ads. Someone replied that MaxBounty has a ringtone offer paying $13.90 per lead. Then Shoemoney jumped into the thread and said that MaxBounty is a bad company to work with and one of his friends way not paid when he drove a large volume of traffic to MaxBounty via PPC search traffic.

The thread then took an interesting turn when JP from MaxBounty came in to defend his history of paying affiliates on time. Shoemoney later posted a recap of the thread on his blog and stated that he still thinks MaxBounty sucks.

I have only done a little bit of work with MaxBounty, and my experience has been positive. I also know that JP has been an active and upstanding member of the webmaster community for quite a while. I remember seeing him frequently post of the GeekTalk forums years ago when I was just getting started. I would be curious to hear about others’ experiences with MaxBounty.

A key learning for me was how JP mentioned that affiliate networks often broker their deals out to each other. I always suspected this, but I had not seen it written anywhere. He mentioned that MaxBounty currently brokers out a few offers from Azoogleads, but they do most of their ads directly with publishers. I wonder what portion of most affiliate programs’ offers are brokered from other networks.

Bluehat SEO has a great idea up on how to make $100 per day. He proposes creating some free screensavers and packaging them with the software from ZangoCash. Zango pays $0.45 per user download, so this could add up pretty quickly. The post very clearly lays out how you could get this up and running, and how to promote the site.

I probably will not be jumping on this anytime soon. Zango has a relatively shady past, including an large fine from the FTC. The idea is good for stimulating further thoughts. In the comments of the original post, people bring up some other good ideas such as putting URLs for sites with PPC ads on the screensaver.

Sleepyblogger has a post up where she advocates use of affiliate programs over Adsense. While I have had some success with very targeted affiliate programs, I think that Adsense and YPN can be the best solution for many sites.

Drawbacks to Affiliate Programs:

1. Your audience may not match up well for making purchases online. For example, my friends who run Kiwibox.com, a site for teens, would not make much running affiliate programs where you get paid when a user purchases something. Yes, there are some affiliate programs that pay upon registration or other non-purchase activities, but these have become increasingly rare.
2. You are dependent upon the merchant and the effectiveness of their site. Even if you drive lots of traffic to a site, if a merchant’s site is not intuitive or slow, you will be the one to pay for it.
3. A click can be more accurately measured than a purchase. Although most affiliate programs use cookies to track returning visitors, you may not receive proper credit from a sale if the user returns to the site to make a purchase after the cookie’s expiration date. Or the visitor could make a purchase offline, and you would not be compensated.

I look forward to reading the rest of SleepyBlogger’s affiliate program series, and learning more from her success with affiliate programs.

I have had some decent success with a handful of advertising and affiliate programs. Here are five programs from which I have made at least a $1,000.

Websponsors - One of the first affiliate networks that I had some good luck with. For a while, I was making a ton of money off their free poetry offer that paid out at $1.00 per lead. Lately, I have had some success with their free student pack offer that pays out $.60/lead.

AdSense – I have done well with AdSense since its inception. I would like to do some more testing to optimize AdSense on my sites, and I will chronicle the results of the testing on this blog.

Adteractive – Adteractive is another good affiliate network. I have had some success running their FastWeb scholarship and JackPot offers on a few sites that I helped with finding good affiliate offers.

EmarketMakers – Their free stuff and contest offers have produced for me. They have a large selection of offers.

CommissionJunction – I have not run any CJ programs in a long time, but I made some nice money on offers for internet accelerator software and romance books a while ago.

While compiling this list, the one thing that stuck out at me was that I have had a variety of different types of advertising programs earn me good money. The key was just taking the time to ferret out the good programs and offers that fit well with my audience.

In my post about a framework to make more money from your site, I wrote about Revenue Generation Methods as a key driver in site revenue. While I was checking del.icio.us today, I noticed a great blog post titled Beyond AdSense: A Business Model Checklist. It features a rather extensive list of revenue generation methods. Hopefully, some of these may strike some great ideas on how you can make more money from your blog or website. I especially like the concept of using a site to promote professional services. Someday, I could see using MonetizeTraffic to promote consulting services.

I am also a big fan of the idea to “Sell Intelligence.” For one company that I used to work for, I developed partnerships with two market research companies where we helped to field a panel for custom research reports. This alternate revenue stream was a great complement to our existing advertising and affiliate programs. As this blog grows, I will write in more detail about some of these revenue generation methods, and I look forward to hearing from visitors about creative methods they are using to drive revenue.