You can even generate affiliate revenue from your parked domains

This is a trick most domainers aren’t aware of

Parked.com allows its parking customers to place custom content at the bottom of their parked pages. Custom content, meaning, you can put whatever you want there. At the very least, I recommend adding some relevant text content to the bottoms of your high traffic and/or high value names parked at Parked.com – this will help with SEO, will make your site more useful, and will garner more trust from your visitors. In addition to content, you can also use this space to put links to affiliate programs. This is an excellent way to earn even more money from your parked domains. I am only aware of this being possible at Parked.com.

Here are the top two Affiliate Programs you should start with:

ClickBank
ClickBank offers eBooks, systems, videos, and other electronic products for online purchase. Promoting ClickBank products is a good way to make money online. There are thousands of products in most every category of interest. Find products that are in line with the interests of your users and then promote those products.

If you are a domainer, here is a great way to get started with affiliate marketing

If you own a Domain Name industry blog, newsletter, domain, or web site, you can easily earn more money by writing a blog post, web review, or email newsletter promoting the Beyond Domaining system. After signing up at ClickBank, you’ll get a special URL to use in your promotions. Do a quick search for Beyond Domaining and then promote it on your web properties and/or newsletters.

You can also use your ClickBank affiliate links to promote the Beyond Domaining system in your signature panel, and in your posts, in forums such as DNForum and NamePros. My system is highly relevant to other domainers and the conversion rates are excellent because we have good word of mouth from delivering a high quality product. If you have a domain industry blog or web site, you can make some good money promoting the Beyond Domaining system through affiliate links from ClickBank to other domainers.

If you don’t like ClickBank, or if you want the ability to promote two different branded Domain Development products, we also have an affiliate program available through PayDotCom (many non-U.S.A. based publishers prefer PayDotCom over ClickBank).

If Domain Development is not of interest to your users, you can still find thousands of other interesting electronic products that will appeal to your users. There are electronic products at ClickBank covering everything from weight loss, to online gambling, to the stock market, to search engine marketing, to affiliate programs, to stress reduction, to getting out of debt, to relationship problems, to seduction techniques, and more. Every Domainer and/or online marketer should consider a ClickBank promotion component.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is another place to look for affiliate programs. Commission Junction’s product list is vaster and is not limited to electronic products like ClickBank’s. They have all sorts of things from electronics, to travel deals, to pet food, and more.

When dealing directly with another person for buying and selling, I recommend using Escrow.com for all transactions. Especially when the transaction is over $500. It’s not worth the risk. When you open escrow, make sure the domain’s administrative email is the same as the escrow seller email. This way you know you’re dealing with a real seller. Don’t do the final release of funds in escrow.com until the seller provides the name’s authcode, and you have used the authcode to successfully transfer the name to your registrar of choice.

When selling, I always ask the buyer to create an account at escrow.com and for them to open the escrow. Often scammers / timewasters won’t bother doing that. If you’re having the buyer open the escrow, it’s important to be specific as to what email address they should open the escrow to (it should be the same email you used to create your escrow.com account) and the fee arrangements. You should pre-arrange the fee split, i.e. 100% buyer, 100% seller, or 50/50 buyer/seller split.

PayPal is a dangerous way to sell because once you transfer a name to a buyer, the buyer can claim a fraudulent transaction with PayPal and have PayPal reverse the transaction and take the money back from you.

Always proceed with caution when dealing with buyers / sellers you don’t know.

Keyword Value

Short memorable domains, devoid of numbers or hyphens, and consisting of high volume keywords that drive sales are the most valuable domain names. I like to think of this as ‘keyword value’. Keyword value is the single most important thing I think about when buying domains. Backlinks erode over time, Google PageRank gets recalculated, Alexa rankings fall, and DMOZ gets updated, but Keyword weight never goes away. Examples of domains with the best keyword value are laptops.com, shoes.com, rentals.com, hotels.com. These are keywords that consumers frequently type directly into their browser or search engine with high purchase intent. They drive sales. Unfortunately all the best domains have already been registered, but hundreds of them expire every month that are sill worth bidding on at the drop catchers. And hundreds of them are available for sale on forums and at auctions in the aftermarket. The best way to identify domains with high keyword value is to use the following tools. You want to find keywords that are searched frequently and that have high CPCs.

I use the following tools when scouting for and deciding whether to buy domain names.

Premium Drops
Excellent dictionary terms filter to identify names that match dictionary terms.

NicheBot Classic
To get access to predicted daily searches on the major search engines.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Predicted search volume from Google search engine.

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Sandbox
To get estimated average Cost per Click and Clicks per day.

Legacy Value

Every day thousands of domains expire. Many of those domains represent the culmination of thousands of hours of hard work and effort by a dedicated web site owner. Fortunately for us, lots of web site owners don’t know any better – and they drop their names when they give up on their web sites – and they forfeit all that web site value to drop catchers like ourselves.

We understand the value though, so we pounce when we find good names with stats such as Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, DMOZ listings, backlinks, and/or aged domains. And so, domainers like us, pick up those domains for cents on the dollar, only to repurpose them with parked pages, 301 redirects, or as small developed web sites, often recouping the purchase price in a matter of days or weeks.

Legacy Value refers to domains that have Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, DMOZ inclusion, backlinks, an aged domain status, etc. Each of these things is important for SEO and raw traffic. Most of the list filtering software mentioned above will have tools that enable you to sort drop lists by these criteria. Or you can visit the Google, Alexa, DMOZ, or your favorite Whois tool to manually check prospective domain purchases yourself.

If you’re confused, or want to learn more about any of these terms, Premium Drops has an excellent Domain Terms Explained Dictionary that I recommend visiting.