Website Marketing Club

The Advantages Of Mini-Site Development Over Domain Name Parking

Nov 3, 2009 Domains

Before we discuss the advantages of mini-site development over domain name parking, let us first recap a few of the basic principles surrounding the issue.

Domain name parking simply refers to a scenario where you register a domain name without the intention of setting up a website for the domain. All you do is create a home page filled with ads of some sort. You hope to make money from people either clicking on the ads, or buying one or more of the products advertised on the page.

The main source of income in this case is therefore visitors who click on ads, or buy a product. The main type of visitor would come from someone going to the domain name directly, without doing a web search first. As you can imagine, this will work well if you are lucky enough to get your hands on a completely generic domain name like music.com. This name should work well for someone selling DVD s, musical instruments etc. Without having any other content. Since there is no significant content on the page, you are not likely to get much traffic from any of the search engines.

A second option is what is generally called an MFA – a mini-site created very specifically with Google Adsense in mind – “Made for Adsense” in other words. On this type of mini-site a visitor will actually find some sort of information when he visits the domain name. The information is often created by a computerized system, and makes no sense whatsoever except for containing a lot of keywords relevant to what the visitor was looking for. The purpose is not to give information, but to force the visitor to click on one of the ads and make money for the website owner.

It’s not hard to see why this way of doing things is eventually doomed not to succeed. The site visitor will feel he has been cheated. Whenever he encounters this domain name again in a web search, he will give it a wide berth. The advertiser who pays when people click on one of the ads on that website will not get any value for money either.

The final and best option is a high quality mini-website. Following this approach you will actually try to provide your visitor with information 100% relevant to what he was searching for when he went to the search engine. Your mini-site could be small, but it should pack a punch. The site visitor should leave feeling that he actually accomplished something. A satisfied visitor is also more likely to click on one or more of the ads on your website, creating a win-win situation for both of you.

Many website owners prefer to go for a parked domain page with ads, or a nonsensical MFA mini-website simply because the former two are much less work to create yourself, or much cheaper to have created by someone else. If you are not able to buy a totally generic domain name, like cars.com, you will however be much better off following the quality mini-site approach than either a parked domain page or a MFA mini-site.

The advantages of mini-site development over domain name parking should be clear by now. Unless you have a domain name that will draw a large number of visitors by itself without them even going to a search engine, you will be better off using a quality mini-site. An MFA mini-site is really not a good option in most cases.

Dhruv Patel is a customer of DreamHost. He has created site to help new DreamHost customers and to promote DreamHost by giving DreamHost coupon.

Tags: domain, domain parking, Domains, Internet Business, mini-sites, online business