DotDriven.com

My WhyPark Review…best domain parking service?

If you have domains you are not actively using for sites or developing, odds are you are parking them at one of the many parking services. If not then you could be leaving money on the table. Domain parking can be a good earner for some people, depending one the quality of the domains, if they are good “type in” domains or already have traffic or just have a ton of domains and just don’t have time to develop them all yet, which is my problem. In some cases, with domains that aren’t prone to type in traffic or don’t have current traffic, you might not make a ton but even for the most offbeat domains, you can usually earn some and hopefully enough to at least cover the renewal fee every year. Make those domains earn their keep.

A problem with most regular parking services is they don’t allow you to promote, link to or build traffic in any other way. Most are cracking down and the only type of traffic they allow is type in traffic and search engine traffic, which isn’t all that likely considering most parking pages aren’t all that well indexed by the search engines. Sometimes your domains can gain a little search traffic and even PR but for the most part parking a domain doesn’t help “develop” that domain much at all.

When it comes to revenue from parking, most of the parking services take a nice hefty cut right off the top so whatever clicks you do get you have to share a large percentage of the earnings. On top of that, most services don’t offer much in the way of optimizing ads and most don’t offer very many options for different monetization methods. You are usually limited to being able to edit the templates, to a degree, and able to optimize for keywords but not a whole lot more.

So what is WhyPark and why is it different? Well really, WhyPark is closer to a host than a parking service. First off, they charge you an upfront fee of $100 which gives you 100 “credits” meaning you can park up to 100 domains. You can buy more credits for more domains as well. While this may seem like a huge turnoff to most, and is a bit expensive, you need to consider what it actually involves before writing it off. What it really becomes is a hosting service for your domains and in the end you pay just $1 per domain, forever. So if your parked page/site ends up being thousands of pages long and gets a ton of traffic you never have to pay for more space or bandwidth. $1 for that, for life, is actually and awesome deal if you can get over the $100 minimum package order.

Ok, but why more like a host? Well even though WhyPark provides many of the same tools you will find at traditional parking services to customize and optimize your page they go quite a bit further and allow you to even use your own CSS and such to build your “templates” if you choose. The ones included are pretty decent and optimized well but if you like a lot of control you have that option.

Another cool feature is the “auto article population system”. When you are setting up a domain you can add in a list of targeted keywords and what that will do is add a bunch of pre-written articles to your “site” which will also auto rotates giving you constant new targeted content automatically. This is great for search engine indexing and ranking. You can also add in your own custom/unique articles which will help even more. What this means is rather than just another obvious parking page your page looks more like a real site with real content that is targeted to your domain and the traffic. Not only should this help with keeping visitors there and clicking ads but it could be HUGE if/when you get picked up and indexed by the search engines. Odds of getting and staying indexed on traditional parking services are very low but with WhyPark you can get your site indexed and ranked well and get free targeted traffic from the search engines.

Another great feature is you can add your own ads and use what you want. Most traditional parking just use feeds from Yahoo or google and you don’t have many options. With WhyPark you can use any ad network or type of ad you can fit on the pages and include affiliate products and all that good stuff. You are also able to add in your own tracking software so you can keep an eye on sales/leads and hits. And the best part…YOU KEEP 100% of the revenue earned. Rather than giving away a huge cut of your click revenue to a traditional parking service you keep anything your site earns. Sure, you have to pay $1 to add that domain to WhyPark but it wouldn’t take too long to recover that cost and then after that it is basically free forever!

What I like just as much as the 100% revenue is that I am actually allowed to promote my domain/site. I can do all the normal site promotion and link building and work on getting better search rankings to get even more with free traffic. I can even run PPC campaigns and send traffic. And somewhat related to getting your “parked” page ranked in search engines, your domain also has a much higher chance of earning PR. Even if you end up developing a domain you had parked at WhyPark, what better way to start off with than an established domain with traffic and PR? Or if you just have a bunch of domains you plan to resell eventually, you can bet that you will get higher offers if the domains have traffic and PR!

So, if you have some domains that you have just sitting around, or parked somewhere already, and just don’t have time to develop “real” sites you might like all the benefits of using something like WhyPark.

Here are a handful of random domains I set up last night (only took about 30 minutes total). They are all pretty much the same as I am still testing the templates to see what I like, and performs, best. But it will give you and idea of the basic layout. AND of course I am linking to help my indexing lol…something you are usually not allowed to do with traditional parking services.

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Fresh Maine Lobster is giving away a cool $100 gift cert for lobstergram with a super easy drawing. All you have to do is write a post why you love lobster. I guess you could write why you may not like lobster but then the gift card may be a bit useless if you happen to win ;). And how could you hate lobster anyway!?

Well I love lobster and I love freebies so I’m definitely hoping to win a free lobstergram. I don’t know how much a $100 gift card will be able to get but I’m sure I can get at least one dinner out of it :).

So head on over to Fresh Maine Lobster if you want to get your chance to win…or just to get your lobster fix in general.

Thanks to Dan at FreshMaineLobster for the cool contest and good luck on the site!

Gyutae Park of WinningTheWeb.com is the man to go to to see how contest should be done. He’s only really had two contest so far but the scope and scale of them are amazing. The first was much smaller but very well planned out and came along with tons of great info for bloggers to learn something and get ideas for their own contest. The second, correctly titled “Craziest internet marketing contest you’ve ever seen” is in fact a HUGE contest with a massive prize list. Not only is the cash value (well over $10k now) huge but all the single prizes are great and well valued. Meaning that $10k isnt just made up of 10 dumb ebooks “valued” at $1000 each but rather a lot of really great products and services well worth the money.

I’m not even going to post the prize list to make you more curious and go check it out but I’ll just say that it is definitely worth taking part.

It’s hard to believe that WinningTheWeb.com hasn’t been around very long or that Gyutae hasn’t been blogging on his site for long but don’t be fooled to think his “new” blog is lacking content or real advice. If anything, it’s more like he saved up his best ideas and content for years and it releasing it all now at an incredible rate. Sure, I get credits for the contest by blogging about the contest but I honestly believe WinningTheWeb.com is a great resource and have been linking to them for a long time now (even though that is now also a contest entry lol).

Be sure to go visit the contest and regardless if you win or not (which you have great odds right now) be sure to also stay around and check out his “real” post which can be harder to find while he is trying to manage this huge contest.

Check out the contest information here: Internet Marketing Blog

Another two part post??!…get over it and stop whining! It’s now company policy here to combine posts.

WaMu Stole from me and Paypal
Why do big corporations take away the power from their employees? Why do they push their policies so hard that employees can’t even act on their natural human tendencies to actually “take care” of the customers as people when they know it is the right thing to do. And why do some employees hide behind the “sorry, it’s company policy” excuse when dishing out crappy service?

Yeah, big life changing contemplations for you there lol. Ok, maybe not but all it takes is a small act of crappy service to make you wonder why you give a company any business at all. I try to be a good and courteous customer and it would be nice if more businesses let their employees do the same.

So why am I pissed at Washington Mutual today? Because they stole my Paypal debit card and inadvertently teased me about it afterward then used the “sorry, it’s company policy” excuse to justify it.

Ok, I admit it was my fault I got in this situation but I don’t think it should make a difference in the way you treat a customer. Being a broke bum, I have to do a lot “revenue juggling” and often find myself having to rush money one place to another to keep from being his with overdraft charges. It’s not that I am always broke but it’s hard to get ahead in this industry when the majority of your income has to be used to pay actual bills before you can reinvest and try to make more. I’m not at the point where I can reinvest everything I make so it makes it much harder to get ahead. So when one check comes in odds are I need to get it deposited to cover other outgoing bills or payments I have made.

That’s where today started. I had a pending charge from Google for my Adwords campaigns coming in that would post today but also got my payments from Azoogle and Neverblueads which were just enough to cover my pending charge. If I didn’t deposit those checks I would have been overdrafted. So once I got one of the checks in the mail I needed to get to the bank before closing to deposit it so it would credit today. I also needed to withdraw the “check” from the other one which is automatically sent to my paypal so I could then deposit that into my bank checking account. So running late because I had to wait for the mail to come I was in a rush to get it all gathered to get in before it closed.

In my rush, I left my Paypal debit card in the ATM machine that is on the outside of the Washington Mutual I was depositing to inside. I went in, made my deposit and walked to my car when I realized what I had done. Not more than 10 minutes had passed before I knew I left my card. So I went back inside and told the receptionist at the customer service counter and she asked for my ID and said she would have her manager check it when he got a second since he was the only one with the key.

After waiting for about 5 minutes I saw he had gone in the ATM room and walked over to her and I was happy thinking I could be on my way. Instead, she tells me “sorry, but since it isn’t a WaMu card we can’t give it to you”. What?! You can’t give me my card back? The card that has the same name as the ID I just handed you, the same one that is on my WaMu card and the one I just left less than 10 minutes ago?!! Baffled, I asked why and she just said, “Sorry, it’s company policy”. I asked why it was company policy and she just said, “We don’t give cards back if they are not WaMu cards. Bank Of America would do the same thing”.

I couldn’t understand the reasoning behind this policy considering the circumstances but assumed that maybe they just had to make sure, for legal reasons or something, and would just mail me the card. So I asked, “well what do you do with it now” and she replied, “Oh, he destroyed it”. WTF?

I could understand, maybe, if it was a week later or maybe if the card didn’t have my name on it or maybe if I just wasn’t one of their customers. But I WAS one of their customers, had just left it 10 minutes ago, it had the same name as my WaMu account and the ID I showed her and I even still had the “receipt” I got from the withdraw. But I can’t for the life of me think of a real reason why they feel they can’t hand the card to me and would rather shred the card while I was waiting in their lobby.

I know that, in reality, the card is actually Paypals “property” and not my card but I consider it my property as I am the only one authorized to use it to get my money. To me, the situation isn’t too much different than if I had left my wallet on the counter and someone turned it into lost-and-found and rather than hand it back to me when I went to get it they told me they threw it in the furnace out back because it was company policy. I mean, what kind of crappy service is that?

I assume there is some logical reason why they have such a policy but I can’t think of it. And I can’t think of why they would hide behind that policy rather than do the right thing and hand it back to me since I was there asking for it. Anyone work in the banking industry and know why there would be this policy?

WaMu.fingsucks.com ?
This crappy service reminded me of a domain I registered a while back. It was an expired domain that I thought was kind of funny and would make a great “complaint” or consumer advocate type blog. But later I figured it could also be a cool setup where people could make their own subdomains to make their own complaint blogs about specific companies/services. I’ve been too busy to do anything like that and haven’t really thought it through but wondered what others thought of the idea or if anyone could recommend a good platform for something like that.

Maybe I will just use it for my own whiner site to setup subdomains when I get shafted. I’ve had quite a few really crappy host, dealt with some scam companies and of course I could set up a widgetbucks.fingsucks.com site (lol @ affiliate link!). But it seems like it would work well for a community based complaint setup.

I get really pissed when big companies, or people that think they are important, feel they can rip people off just because they are big. Sadly though, in most cases it is actually true and nobody does anything about the crap. So it would be nice to help people share their stories of getting ripped off or screwed. It wouldn’t be all that hard to get the pages indexed well enough that it would show up when people search for the company and in essence give the “little guy” some power against the big corporate scammers (when they do scam of course).

I don’t know if WaMu would deserve a page for stealing my debit card but I was pissed enough to consider it lol.