ParkQuick has continued to grow over the past few months. Our first video was released in October, which includes a basic tour of the site. Watch it
here, at YouTube and vote for it on
Digg and
DNHour. In October we also outgrew our shared hosting account. The site became sluggish mid-month, and we were briefly offline completely on October 25th. Our move to a speedy dedicated server resulted in a fast site by October 27th and we haven't looked back. If you had trouble getting to the site in October, check out the new speedier version of
Park Quick today.
News from the Parking Services
Some domainers on the Forums have complained of decreased revenue in October. It seems that both Google and Yahoo-based services are seeing some decrease in RPC numbers. Are Yahoo and Google changing their definitions of "traffic quality" and penalizing PPC parking pages? I did read an interesting tidbit on one of the boards. Donny Simonton of
Parked.com informed readers that Yahoo changes their "traffic quality" scores every week on Thursday. Your domains are assigned a multiplier that is used for your revenue for 7 days at a time. I'm pretty sure that people from Sedo read threads
like this, but Donny usually actually responds to similar threads
like this, and he is usually not defensive.
RevenueDirect has announced an image hosting service. According to
RevenueDirect you now have the ability to use your own images on your RevenueDirect landing pages. The new personal image hosting feature will allow you to host up to 250 of your own images for use on your landing pages. Accepted image formats include .jpg, .gif, .bmp, and .png. You can find the personal image hosting feature within your account on the ‘Manage’ tab.
Parked has upped the ante by announcing their promised system that allows you to add content, not just images, to your site.
Denmark.net is one example of a customized site. With this system you can add text, additional photos, and even videos to your domains. Adding content can help your parked domains rank in search engines, but it also competes with the paid links for viewers' attention. To add custome content to
Parked, just look for the “custom content” box in the lower left hand corner when you are editing a domain. Click the link, then begin adding content; or click the video or image links to insert multimedia content.
Domain Sponsor is sponsoring another
DOMAINfest Global at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel from January 21-23, 2008. Qualified DomainSponsor publishers are eligible for registration rebates.
Domain Sponsor also unveiled internationalized landers in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Korean. Their content optimization determines the best default language to display for maximum payout. Site visitors can also choose their preferred language using a drop down language menu on all landers.
TrafficZ experienced "a minor service interruption" on Monday, October 29th. They announced that all clients will be fully compensated for the interruption and will receive a credit to their accounts along with their October payments.
Google just completed the first PageRank update in six months. As usual, some sites gained and others lost PageRank. The biggest news had to do with sites selling paid links. Many of these sites
went down in PagRank - some dramatically so. SEORoundtable.com went from a PR7 to a PR4, for example. It looks like sites selling paid links were hit much harder than sites buying such links. As an example,
Text Link Ads was reportedy completely de-listed from Google some time back. They are showing up as a PR7 for me, but not listed in the organic listings on a search for text link ads. (Will I get in trouble linking to them?)
It's hard to keep up with all of the parking services every month, so it's nice when a reader writes in with their own experiences. Al Koehler wrote in this month with information about his experiences with
Fabulous. Do you have different experiences than we do with these services? Write in and let us know.
"I have been using the new Fabulous+ landers for over a month now and as a result have seen a significant increase in revenue across my entire portfolio. The best feature is the Dynamic Generator, which allows you to create custom landing pages for every domain in your portfolio by combining Layout, Color and Relevant Images. Another handy tool is their Auto Optimization engine which picks the best converting configuration (Layout + Color) based on CTR."
"Combine this with the ability to set Target Keywords and Related Searches and I can now customize and optimize pages more effectively than most of the other programs I have used. One of the biggest misconceptions I have found with Fabulous is that people believe they are only good for Gambling and Adult domains, however I have a diverse portfolio and they perform great across the board. However, typically English language domains with generic/commercial terms have the best results."
"The only frustrating thing with
Fabulous is that at times they will not accept certain domains for their program.For those not yet using the Fabulous+ landers, you can now use their Sandbox to preview exactly how your domains can look by parking them on the new program."
Sedo and
TrafficZ are both recommended domain parking companies. They have something else in common - they both own versions of the domain "trafficz."
TrafficZ owns the domain trafficz.com, of course. Sedo owns the domain trafficz.de - and directs the traffic to Sedo. Jay Westerdal pointed this out on his
DomainTools Blog. Lots of other people own domains that begin with trafficz, but the others generally point to ppc pages. I agree with Jay that these two companies should be able to work this out.
Recommended Services - There were no changes in our recommendations this month.
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Parked continues to send nice checks twice a month
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Sedo and Sedo Pro are the top Google-based services with one-click ads available for all domains
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TrafficZ is recommended for the absolute best landing pages and great stats
I will send this newsletter out monthly or when there have been significant changes in the domain name monetization industry. An extra issue may be sent when there is a major change
in a service that warrants your immediate attention. Back issues are available at NameMonetizer.com.
Leonard Holmes, Ph.D.
CEO, Healing Sites Network, LLC
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the end of every issue.