Should you develop that great domain or just park it and start earning the revenue now. What software have you used for development or where can you source good contractors? This is the place for all of these questions.

I can see very little point in developing a site as that's part of developing a business in itself. The business I'm in is in monetising traffic across multiple (ie 1000s) domains and I don't have time to worry about "developing" as site to sell stuff.

Any developing that I would consider would be purely to increase CTR and/or EPC and this as simply as possible. At the last LV Traffic "Fabulous" Dan even mentioned that the leanest, meanest simple to find a link page has the best CTR so any development would be counter productive. So as far as development goes, setting keywords and seeding semantic engines is as far as I'll go at the moment, and even that takes too much time (but it's necessary).

Post edited by: Whizzbang, at: 2007/07/29 11:26

Parking is the easiest option, particularly if you own hundreds of domains.
However, bearing in mind Google's hatred of parking companies/websites and their continuously improving technology, I don't see parking as a good long term strategy for good domain names.
I would concentrate rather in the quality of the name. INstead of having thousands of mediocre domains, I'd concentrate in a few hundred superior domains.
Then I would pay for good development, and particularly good SEO. If the names are so good to start with, it shouldn't be too difficult to build a brand upon them, and the investment would be worth it.
However, this wouldn't be advisable if your names are mediocre-sounding, difficult to remember, etc.
IMHO The key is in the balance between the quality of the name and the cost of good SEO with minimum development.
In any case, the option many domainers follow of having an unmanageable number of poor domains parked is the worst, since you'll be blacklisted before you can to develop the name for having it parked, and if the name is poor, it won't have enough type-in traffic I assume, not be worth the development/seo...lose-lose situation. It all comes down to the quality of the name, not to parking companies or Google.

I couldn't agree with you more.
I think that parking domains is an easy solution but the long-term play would be to do some development of higher quality brandable domains. The challenge that you then face is that you are developing a business and not just a website. A business has real people, real issues, real products....not just affiliates.

...and real overheads! Most domainers I know -not all of course- are opportunists, not businessmen.
IMHO, most domainers are idea men, creative people. They can be great initiators, but are poor exetuting strategies and minding the details.
Also, if you want to manage an internet company, you need to have at least an idea of what your staff is doing. You need to know about business in general, and things particular to this business, like SEO, which is changing all the time. And that takes work. And work is a word that scares a lot of people.
However, I have said it in other places: the domain business is becoming more technical and professional. There is no place for the "park it-forget about it" name anymore...if you are serious and ambitious.

Post edited by: javier marti, at: 2007/11/23 19:28

Javier,
Once again I couldn't agree with you more.
Managing a company is very different from simply parking a domains and parking a domain is very different from optimising that domain across time to generate the maximum amount of revenue.
I think that over the next 12 months you will see more and more specialists who enter the market offering their skills. Once proven, these skills will be invaluable for the domainer that sees losing a little margin to grow the whole pie is a good thing!