The Nameify Blog

Business owners, entrepreneurs, and future thinking folks have all been known to park a domain or two.

Considered a controversial practice by some, it’s considered good business by others.

In short, “Domain Parking” is defined as purchasing the rights to a specific web (or domain) for a specific period of time, generally anywhere from one to ten years, with the intention of monetizing those rights in some way.

Introduction to Domain Parking

It’s really pretty simple to do. First, do a search to find out if the website address you want to “park” already has an owner. You can do a search using online resources like Network Solutions or Go Daddy.

You may find that your desired domain is already registered to someone else, in which case you can either try coming up with another suitable domain name, or you could use the WHOIS internet database to get more information on the name you’re interested in. You’ll be able to see when ownership of the domain name expires, and find the contact information for the current owner. You can contact the site owner yourself to find out if they are interested in selling the domain, or you can use a domain buying service.

TIP: A wise alternative to buying an unregistered domain would be to purchase an undervalued domain from us. Our domain offerings have been hand-picked according to well-researched domain valuation criteria. We take the guess work out of the equation, we have done the appraisal and research, so you can be sure that your domain will rank well and drive targeted traffic to your brand-new site.

The domain buying service acts as an intermediary between you and the current site owner. Often the service will provide you with an appraisal of what the domain name is worth. This can be costly, so unless you are absolutely enamored with the domain name, you might want to go back to the creative drawing board.

If your domain is available, buy it or you can bet someone else just might. You don’t actually have to create a live website, but you’ll have the domain name for when you are ready to launch.

Why Park Your Domain?

Well, if you have a great idea for a website and your domain name is an important part of your marketing strategy, you’d be smart to buy the domain, no matter if your website is ready to go or not. You’ll also want to be clear on how long you own the domain once you purchase it.

Business sometimes park domains so they can protect the integrity of their own business name. For example, ZXY Company may park the domain zxy.com, zxy.net, and zxy.org so that no one else will register those domains and benefit from the popularity of ZXY’s name.

Another reason that people domain park is the opportunity to make money. The law of supply and demand is at work here. Anything that finds popularity in today’s pop-culture will likely spawn a website. So if you’re on the cutting edge of what’s becoming trendy, perhaps you decide to buy up variations of a domain name that has to do with this emerging trend. If you own the rights to the domain name that is highly desired by marketers, promoters, and other business people, your investment may end up being worth some money because you can set your own price when you hold the rights to the hottest domain name in town.

This type of investing is called “domaining” and has become a popular with many affiliate marketers, eBay shop owners and even some Wall Street type investors as an added revenue stream.

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