Monetizing a Domain Portfolio – Multiple Streams of Income

When monetizing your domain portfolio it is important to adopt the concept of multiple streams of income.  Many domain owners got lazy in the last few years as domain parking provided good income for domains that received traffic.  Google and Yahoo were the source of most of this income, and both of these companies have been cutting back on the percentage of their revenue that they pay to domain parking companies.  The domains you own, on average, need to earn at least enough to pay for their annual registration fees.  There are many routes to this goal.  You should consider all of the following:

• Domain Parking – The major domain parking companies still pay good money for many domains. By all means continue to park the majority of your portfolio while you also pursue these other streams of income.
• Quasi-development – Sites such as WhyPark and DevHub create semi-automated mini-sites that can sometimes draw more traffic than parked domains.  Experience to date suggests that even though the sites draw more traffic and look nice they do not always make more money.
• Mini-sites – Developed mini-sites are one step up the food chain.  Often these appear to be templated “made-for-AdSense” sites that usually include some content.  The best of these include unique content and may get listed in search engines for this reason.  (My plan to get some mini-sites developed was temporarily delayed, but this is still planned.)
• Affiliate Advertising – You can use your domains as landing pages for affiliate products, such as those found on ClickBank. 
• Domain Sales – This will be the focus of an upcoming post.  If you sell a few domains a year you can probably pay the registration fees on the remainder of your domains.