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You've bought a stack of domains from a variety of sources and you've congratulated yourself on your investment. Now what? Now the hard work really begins.
 Most of us sensibly leap towards Excel and create a list of our domains and when we purchased them. For tax reasons, you will also have to create a column for the purchase price. Most domainers like to forget about the purchase price after the deal but without recording it down you'll cut yourself off from the capital gains tax provisions that could save you a lot of money. Better in my pocket than the governments is what I say!
Since you want to earn revenue from the traffic the domains are generating you will need to add them to a parking or optimization company. If you add your domains to a parking company then you'll typically need to spend a lot of time monitoring the domains, setting keywords, templates, menus, foreign language keywords, key phrases etc. Trust me, it's a LOT of work to do properly.
Assuming that you fit the strict criteria (yes, it is very strict and we don't accept everyone) I'd recommend applying for an account with ParkLogic (I'm a partner of ParkLogic) and let them handle the optimization problem while you buy more domains.
Once the names are added to your ParkLogic/Parking company account you will need to change the nameservers. Most good registrars allow you to do a bulk change which simplifies this problem. From experience, what I've found is that I've had to continuously monitor my domains and make sure that the nameservers keep on pointing to where they're supposed to be pointed. Yes I know that you shouldn't have to do this but once again, from experience, trust me, you'll have to. A good application to monitor your domains is "Watch My Domains" by Softnik Technologies (http://www.softnik.com).
So now you're earning money from the domain traffic. I'd recommend downloading the a daily and monthly Excel spreadsheet from the optimizing/parking company of your choice to help you monitor the payback on each of your domains.
Copy and paste the downloaded spreadsheet into the same spreadsheet as the list of your domains (create a new tab first). You can then use the "vlookup" function in Excel to reference the stats for each domain. If you don't know how to use vlookup then I would recommend checking out the Excel help.
Now you can have the domain, cost and statistics from inception all in one row in Excel. A daily revenue rate can easily be calculated using the purchase date and total revenue earned. From this figure we can then work out the number of days until an individual domain is one hundred percent paid back.
On a portfolio wide basis we can calculate the average total amount of revenue earned per day, your total acquisition cost and then work out a time to pay back the complete investment. What's interesting is that as you continue to invest in domains and some of the good domains are completely paid back your time to pay back the investment continually decreases. In fact, you will get to a stage where you have a negative payback time and the problem will likely become supply of acquisition targets and not funds to invest.
As you can see spending a little bit of time in Excel can provide valuable insights into your domain portfolio. I believe that the challenge for most small to medium sized domainers is to move out of the managing individual domain business and to start working on your business.
I would highly recommend that you give away a little bit of margin by working with partners and get back your time so that you can spend it working on your business. Don't get caught in the vicious "day-trading" mentality of checking your stats each day. Be a domain portfolio trader not a domain "day-trader".
Without highly sophisticated systems you can waste enormous amounts of time chasing your domain tale rather than spending the time looking at the whole business. Excel is a great tool but it's not going to provide the insights necessary to extract every bit of value from a domain.
In the next installment of the Domaining 101 series I'll explore a few of the other problems of managing domains across a lot of registrars.
Wiki: ParkLogic
Domaining Series: Free for registered users
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