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When I was at university I roomed with a couple of mates in a run down apartment near the university campus for convenience sake. The place was almost right on campus, with quick access to all the facilities the university offered so we were willing to overlook the deficiencies of the establishment.

We each had a room to ourselves and there was a shared kitchen and bathroom – you know, the usual setup. My room was furnished with a bed, a desk which housed my laptop and some papers, and a flimsy bookshelf burdened with my textbooks.

My room was special because it also came with another live-in… a gray house mouse nested somewhere within the back wall. I could hear it moving around at night as I tried to get some shut eye after a long day.

The noise was subtle at first but as the days turned into weeks I couldn’t stand it any more, I had to do something. I set up a mouse trap with some cheese – like in the Disney cartoons – and hoped for the best. But, the best never happened, every night I’d set the trap and every morning I’d wake up to find the cheese gone with the trap still set.

Eventually, the noise stopped. Either the mouse “moved away” or it died from overeating thanks to my plentiful servings of cheese. One thing was for sure, the mouse was too smart for my mousetrap and managed to survive it, perhaps as a result of previous tenant conditioning?

Is there a point to my story? Definitely, read on.

If you were involved in domaining some 5 to 6 years ago you would have to agree that parking revenue was astronomical when compared to nowadays. Even average names with decent traffic would bring in solid money in an impressive visitor to click ratio – folks were still new to parked pages and were not conditioned to ignore them. If your parked template was optimized for the right key words you made a killing. I certainly did.

Things have changed though. People are recognizing parked pages and avoiding them. The other day I was talking to a friend who is looking to buy a domain name for their startup – a guy who is facing the prospect of buying a domain name for the first time – and he recognized that a domain name was unused and had an “ad template” when he accessed it – that’s what he called it.

The mice are getting smarter and in the near future parking simply won’t work.

WhyPark, Minisites etc recognized this a while back – hence the turn towards development – at least on the micro scale.

Developing names is hard and takes time. Monetizing names is even harder.

By tradition, domainers are good with domain names, but only a select few are also internet marketers. A lot of us tend to shy away from internet marketing – quick to label it as the make-money-full-of-scammers niche we don’t want to be associated with.

However, we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Aren’t domainers unfairly prejudiced against by many people who label the domain industry as a scam industry based on a few isolated incidents?

If you haven’t already, you should definitely do some reading up on internet marketing techniques to look at how you can use them to try and look at your domain name assets from a different perspective.

Aron of Symbolics.com wrote an interesting post yesterday – a post that described his theoretical loss of $1,000,000. Now, we all make mistakes, but he was definitely doing what a domainer would. He wasn’t doing what an internet marketer would do. Following the incident, an internet marketer would have converted all those daily visitors into newsletter subscribers – newsletter subscribers that would be eating out of his hand after some productive and useful newsletter issues – newsletter subscribers that would turn the domain name into a lucrative business.

One of my favourite guides to internet marketing as a monetization technique for domain names is commission ritual. It is a training course with some 90 videos that teach you everything from SEO configuration and search engine placement to affiliate product selection and promotion. Everything you need to know to dominate any niche in terms of commission earnings is described in these videos step-by-step.

Obviously, this information is not for everyone, but if you are serious about monetizing your domain names and have noticed a drop in your parked earnings or even if your domain names are not getting enough traffic, you should definitely give commission ritual a try.

Click here to learn more.

About Eranet
Todaynic.com International Limited(Eranet.com) was incorporated in Hong Kong in 2005, directly under Todaynic.com, Inc. which was established in 2000. As one of the first ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), Verisign, HKDNR, and CNNIC (The China Internet Network Information Center) accredited registrars, Eranet is also a leading provider of services in domain name registration and web hosting.

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