The one thing that most domainers have in common is that at times they have way more domain names in their inventory than they can possibly sell, market, or develop. The first thing they do is park these unused domains, but as we all know parking a domain is only truly successful with domain names that get a good amount of type in traffic.
If a domain does not get that kind of traffic, then it doesn’t earn very much income because it is not being properly monetized. There are other ways of monetizing domain names that are not making much income through parking though.
Online Forum
Setting up an online forum, also commonly referred to as a message board, is a somewhat easy process to go through. There are many free or affordable software packages that can be installed so that a forum can be operated on a domain.
Once a forum is up and running, it can be rather easy to manage, and the best part is that it is the users that come to the forum that create the content for the website. Forums also routinely rank high in search engines, this allows more visitors to come to the site which makes selling advertising there more lucrative to the domain owner.
Photo Gallery
Photo galleries are rather easy and stress free to setup on an unused domain name. Establishing a niche of what type of photographs are to be added to the gallery is a great way to ensure that the gallery gains a reputation as the place to go for that particular type of photograph.
Setting up a photo gallery where users and visitors can submit photos of their own is a great way to gain recurring traffic. Photo galleries are the type of sites that people visit regularly and return to often to see what is new. Selling advertising on photo galleries is easy once they become established.
Blog
Setting up a blog on an unused domain is rather easy as well, but maintaining it can be rather labor intensive. Blogs require frequent updating, but if a subject is chosen that the owner of the blog knows a great deal about, this may not be a problem.
Once a blog gains a good amount of traffic, it can then turn into the type of a site that can make a decent amount of money selling advertising or see a good return on pay per click advertising networks like Google’s Adsense.
Link Directory
A nice quick development idea that is very low maintenance is a link directory. Setting up a link directory is not only easy, but it can be the type of site that people seek out as well. One of the best strategies to use is to set it up as a niche directory and only accept websites that fit within that niche. In this way, the directory becomes a place to go to find links to websites within that niche.
Once a link directory becomes established and gains traffic, it is rather easy to take the next step of selling advertising or installing pay per click streams of income, another way successful link directories can make money is by charging websites to be included in the directory.
While even using a quick development idea can be somewhat time consuming, it often is much more rewarding than leaving an unused domain name in a parking program that is not making any money to speak of.
Aside from the money that can be made through this development process, another benefit that can come from this is the increased value of the domain name itself.
There are a number of things that go into determining what the value of a domain name is, any domain name that has active users and traffic going to it is going to be worth more than if it was merely just parked somewhere not making any money at all. Even modest development of an unused domain name can make it more of an asset than it is when it is not being used at all.
