If you’ve registered a domain name for a future project and haven’t put it to use yet, you might be able to generate some income while waiting to develop the next killer website.

It’s called domain parking and it’s very easy to get started. Once you set up domain parking for your domain names you can start earning money whenever someone visits your domain.

Why Domains Get Traffic

You might wonder why a domain name you’ve never used gets visitors. Unused domains typically get visitors from two different sources.

One is direct navigation. This is when someone types your domain name into their browser. People do this as an alternative to using a search engine. If they’re looking for information about baseball, they might go directly to baseball.com rather than searching on Google.

The other source of visitors is inbound links from when the domain was used before. Even if you’ve never used your domain, there’s a chance that a previous owner of the domain developed a site on it. They let the domain expire and you registered it later. Other websites still link to the “old” site and search engines might index it, too. People clicking on these links end up on your domain.

Domain parking lets you make money from these visitors.

Parked Pages

A parked domain typically refers to a domain name with ads on it. Google and other advertising companies partner with domain parking companies to serve ads that are related to the domain name.

The parked page usually has a list of ad topics. Here’s an example for SoftwareOnline.com.

In this example, the ad system determined that keywords related to software are the most relevant for visitors to this domain name.

When someone clicks an ad topic, such as “Online Payroll Software” on this page, they will see a list of advertisers bidding on that keyword. These ads are usually served by Google and show Google Adsense ads. See how this looks below:

In this example, the advertiser pays Google whenever a visitor clicks on one of the ads. Google pays your parking company, which pays a portion of the revenue to you.

Setting Up Domain Parking

You need to sign up with a domain parking service in order to park your domains. These services work with advertising networks like Google to deliver ads.

Popular domain parking companies include Sedo, Bodis, and ParkingCrew.

Each parking company provides instructions on how to park your domains once they approve your account. In most cases, you just change the nameservers for your domains. The parking system will then automatically display relevant ads when someone visits your domain.

A word of warning: it might be tempting to click on ads on your domain names when they are parked. Don’t do this! It violates the parking company rules. They are sophisticated at finding “click fraud” and will close your account, forfeiting all earnings to date.

Fill Up the Piggy Bank

Many domain name investors stopped parking their domains because of a steep drop in ad revenue. Parked page revenue has dropped significantly in the past decade or so due to changes in visitor behavior and Google changing its advertising systems. Because of this, many domain investors point their domains to for-sale landers instead.

But the good news is that, if you’ve never parked your domains before, every penny you earn is more than what you made before! You might even find that some domains pay for themselves; their annual parking revenue is more than you pay to renew the domain name.

What are you waiting for? Sign up for a domain parking account and start earning additional revenue today.