So what do you do once you’ve bought a domain name? Build a website around it and hopefully make some money by providing quality content and Adsense ads, right?
Well you can do it that way but you can also buy domains to use for an entirely different reason – and it generally involves a lot less work.
Parking expired domains is a way that you can earn a nice stream of income from doing absolutely nothing. Read on to find out more.
Tons of domain names are expiring every single day, and each one represents an opportunity for you to make money. Provided you know which types of domain to buy in the first place you can soon start generating a significant income from this type of activity.
It stands to reason that the more popular the domain name is, the more traffic it will get. A domain name which contains a hugely popular keyword or words, such as ‘credit cards’ for example, will get loads of traffic – and it is these domains you want to get hold of when they expire.
Get yourself registered with a domain provider who doesn’t charge a fortune for selling domains and which also provides a domain parking service. You’ll need to find a company that also lets you park a large number of domains, because when you get started you’ll want to carry on!
The whole premise of domain name parking is that you don’t build a website around your domain. Parking basically refers to putting a single page up, which is supposed to stay there and earn some money for you while you are building the website that will replace it.
But we’re not interested in building a site. All we need to do is monetize that page and profit from the traffic it will receive. If you’ve chosen your domain name properly – according to the most popular keywords that are searched for every minute of every day online – you will immediately get traffic to your page. You can in essence start profiting from the traffic that the domain name was already pulling in.
So how do you monetize your page?
Most domain providers that have a domain parking service will provide you with the tools you need to monetize your page. Just as you would with Google Adsense, it is important that you closely target the people who are going to find your page through the search engines. So for example if your domain contains the words ‘top credit cards’, you would make your page as attractive as possible to people who are looking for the best credit cards.
By using the best keyword combinations you can find (try using a free keyword tool online – there are plenty of them available) you will be able to choose the best performing keywords for that particular subject. It may take a bit of trial and error to reach the optimum performance but you will learn from that experience and it’s a great feeling watching your earnings from every ad your visitors click on go up and up!
Once you have got one domain parked and bringing in money, you can start searching for others to buy. It’s a good idea to start slowly and buy one or two domains at a time; once you have parked a few and you’ve got the gist of how it works you can start thinking about buying more. Some people end up with hundreds and are raking in cash every day without lifting a finger to do it.
That’s the beauty of making money with this method – it’s totally automated once you’ve done the initial setting up of the domain and the advertising.
Sounds good? Before you rush off to get started, post your comments in the form below. Maybe you can come back and post again to let us know how well you’re doing once you’ve got your first couple of domains parked and earning money for you!

How would you like to earn a little extra cash each month? Or even replace your income, working less to make more money… Think its a pipe dream? well, think again.
Most people know that there are millions of dollars being spent every single day purchasing products and services online. But did you know that you could be earning a % on every sale made by simply referring and recommending the products that you like to people.
It’s one of the best ways to get started making money online – you don’t need a website, you don’t need a blog, you don’t even need any cash to get started, although these things can help, you can certainly start without them. By helping consumers research and choose products they already want to buy, which could be as simple as writing a 500 word article (just like this one) you could be earning a nice little second income.
Or if you want to take it a little more seriously, you can earn a full income, even more than most “real world” jobs pay.
I personally make a full time living through affiliate marketing, and have been doing it now for about 5 years. Working from home, choosing the hours to suit my lifestyle, and making a lot more than I ever made working 60 hours a week in a job I hated.
But if you really want to achieve some success with affiliate marketing you need a plan that will get you the level of income you want. A lot of people I speak too love the “Idea” of making money online, they usually ask me a million questions, and tell me how serious they are, how they are going to go home and get stuck into it, read all the stuff I recommend and get started asap.
But then most of them never actually follow through on any of it. Then 6 months later I will see them again, some will avoid the topic completely, while others tell me again how serious they are, and they are really going to do it “this time”.
It’s pretty ammusing for me, watching people make up excuses as to why they havnt done anything.
Personally I don’t really care if they do it or not, it doesn’t effect me at all. Although it would be nice to have more friends who arent working all week to play golf with and take the boat out. But other than that, it makes no difference to me.
I don’t really understand it though, I believe its the perfect business, think about it, you can make as much money as you like, your income is a direct result of the amount of effort you put in. You can work whatever hours you like. (Which is very few when you have been doing it for a few years) Plus you can do it from anywhere you can plug in a laptop. So if you like to Holiday or travel around the world, its the perfect business.
But how do you get involved?
The best place to start is by going to a website that houses a wide range of affiliate products. This keeps everything together in one easy to access place and gives you plenty to explore. You can also get an idea of which particular areas you would like to concentrate on. The worst thing you can do in affiliate marketing is to use the scattergun approach.
This is when you try and promote a wide range of products that aren’t connected with each other, all from a single website. In essence it isn’t aimed at anyone – and you’ll make fewer sales as a result.
Instead, do some research and come up with a specific group of people that you can find a wide range of products for. Or find a particular problem that people are searching online for solutions too, and direct them to the solution. Not only do you stand a much better chance of making a sale, But people will actually thank you for helping them find a solution, and be more than happy that you got paid to help them.
But if you don’t have a website, how can you promote your products?
There are several ways of doing this. One of the best is to use article directories like EzineArticles.com or Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo.com, which allow you to build web pages for free on pretty much any subject you like. Once these get indexed by Google and you do a little promotion for them, then you’ll start getting a steady stream of traffic – if you’ve picked the right topics and search terms to target.
At the beginning I mentioned the need to have a plan to reach the level of income you want. Not many affiliates actually do this and it’s one of the main reasons why more people aren’t making a lot of money with affiliate marketing. It’s certainly not because the potential isn’t there – it’s because they don’t plan to take advantage of it in the right way.
You should always look at how much you will get by way of commission for each product. Obviously the less the commission, the more units you will need to sell to achieve your desired income. You’ll achieve this through a balance of products obviously, but it’s worth bearing in mind.
You also need to think about the type of people you are marketing to. What kind of income do they bring in? How much are they likely to want to spend on the products you’ll be offering? If you don’t match these two aspects up properly you will struggle to make any real sales.
It’s also helpful to set short, medium and long term goals to help keep things in perspective. A short term goal might be to sell five products a week continually, for example. A long term goal could be to make $100,000 a year from affiliate marketing. Goals will help you to decide where you want to go with your fledgling affiliate marketing business.
Another important point to be aware of is that it’s wise to protect your income wherever you can. What I mean by this is that affiliate links can be rather obvious at times, and some people will actually delete your link and go into the site and buy something while denying you the commission.
The easy way to prevent this is to simply buy a domain for each product you are going to promote, and redirect it to the affiliate offer.  There are plenty of free tools that do this for you online, and it’s really the safest way to protect your interests. It also changes a long ugly link into a nice short one – much nicer for the article directories!
Affiliate marketing is like any other business, once you start generating some income, then you can start to invest some of that money back into your business to ensure you enjoy ongoing growth.
In short, start slowly and keep those visions of a huge income in perspective to begin with. You’ll soon get to know your way around the business and with each new experience you can build your knowledge and earn even more in the months and years to come.
When I was first starting out, I learnt the basics by purchasing a few books and e-books on the topic, but mostly it was left to trial and error. I had to make a lot of mistakes in order to find a few good ideas that worked and made money.
Fortunately these days there are some really good resources available for people looking to learn this business. So if you’re serious about becoming an affiliate marketer, check out some of the resources on this page.
The most important thing to do though, is to just get started, do something right now, then follow it up tomorrow with something else… Try and do something every day towards your goal, don’t put it off for a single day, and before you know it, you will have a nice steady stream of profits coming in.
Too many of the people I talk to, put things off until they have more time, but then they forget, and never end up getting started at all. So commit to yourself, take some action and get started today.

More and more people are realising that blogging is one of the best ways to start your own online business. It requires minimal start up costs, you can build an impressive and loyal readership over time and once you know how to monetize your blog it can also bring in a decent income that will keep on coming even on the days when you don’t update your blog.
There are several ways to set up a blog online. You could use WordPress, Blogger, or another free site that hosts your blog for you; or alternatively you can set up your own blog under your own domain name.
If you want to make serious money from blogging, you must have complete control over your blog – and that’s something the free blogging accounts won’t give you. You’ll be bound by their terms and conditions and that usually includes not being able to actively promote anything. There are plenty of people who have established a blog only to have it removed without notice some weeks or months later.
It will cost you a few dollars to buy your domain name and set up a web server that will host your blog, but the benefits will far outweigh the cost involved. It can literally be as little as $20 a year we’re talking about here – and that buys you total freedom.
Once you’re ready to set your blog up you’ll need to choose a good theme and layout for it. You might find one that relates to your choice of subject (more on that in a moment) or else there might be one you just like the look of. But there are thousands of templates available for you to use – a simple search on Google will reveal the ones that will be best suited to your topic.
But perhaps the most important question is what you are going to blog about. The whole world is your oyster here – some people blog about their lives in general; some blog about their jobs; some blog about their hobbies; some tell the world about their kids and what it’s like to be a parent, and still others blog about the weird world of celebrities. But whatever you choose to blog about it needs to be something you are passionate about. Don’t forget, you are going to be writing about this topic several times a week, and if you don’t have the enthusiasm for it, that will show in your posts – and no one else will have the enthusiasm to read them.
Okay – so you’ve got your subject. Now you have to start writing your blog posts. If you take a look at just a few of the blogs already online, you’ll notice that the length of the posts varies a lot. Some people only write a paragraph or two each time, but you’ll get better results if you go for something a little longer than this. Around 400 to 500 words makes for a good post with a lot of information in it; some people write hugely long posts that are thousands of words long and could be called an e-book by another name.
But you can also take the format of this blog, by posting a short blog entry which leads into a longer article. This has the benefit of highlighting a lot of blog posts on the home page of the site, and people can then click through and read the ones they like the most.
You should remember however that there are no real rules when it comes to blogging. Over time you will naturally find what works for you, and your blog will settle down into a nice pattern that both you and your readers will enjoy. You’ll find your character and personality will start to come through in your writing too; don’t fight against this as it is one of the hallmarks of blogging. It is, after all, a personal account of an individual’s life and experiences, so show people what you’re made of! You’ll get a more loyal – and bigger – audience like this.
So you’ve got your blog up and running and you’re posting to it on a regular basis. The next step is to get it in front of as many interested eyeballs as possible.
One great way to do this is to submit it to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. You can also join social networking sites and build a profile which contains a link to your blog. Other no cost ways to generate traffic include writing free articles for article directories with a link to your blog at the end, and creating signatures at the end of any posts you make to internet forums, and also in all the emails you send out. When you really start thinking about it, you don’t actually need to spend anything to generate plenty of traffic.
All we need to do now is monetize the blog itself. You’ll want to generate some money from all the visitors you’ll start getting, and there are plenty of ways to do this easily. Google Adsense is probably the most well known method – you can join the program for free and display contextual ads that your visitors will be interested in to maximise your click through rate.
There are also a handful of websites which give you the opportunity to get paid for each blog post you make on a specific subject. Pay Per Post and Review Me are two such examples, and they will pay you a certain amount of money to review a product or website for the owner. In a similar vein you can also review and recommend other people’s products through affiliate links inserted into your blog posts, and earn money on commissions earned through any purchases people make.
And once you’re more established you can offer ad space on your blog too, and charge a fee for both classified and display ads if you wish. What could be better than setting your own price?
But there is one final step you can take with your blog if you enjoy a change of scene every now and again. You can sell your blog! Once it is established and has plenty of revenue and traffic, you can usually sell it for ten times its monthly revenue.
And then, you can start all over again with a whole new subject!
So that’s it – profitable blogging in a nutshell. If you have any questions feel free to leave your comments in the form below. And once you’ve done that, get out there and get started building your first blog today.