The Advantages Of Mini-Site Development Over Domain Name Parking – A Short Analysis

November 3rd, 2009 by Dhruv Patel | Filed under Domain Name.

The advantages of mini-site development over domain name parking are not instantly apparent. Let us take a look at a few of the principles involved.

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.

Your main source of traffic for this would be people actually typing the domain name in their browser’s address bar either intentionally or by accident. If you manage to obtain a totally generic name like for example diamonds.com or shoes.com, you might get a lot of traffic from these sources, and actually make significant amounts of money from the ads. Since there is not any meaningful content involved, you are unlikely to get any traffic from the search engines though.

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 third option is a quality mini-site. In developing this you would try to anticipate what a visitor to the site wanted, and try to provide that information with a razor-sharp approach. If you were the owner of the domain time-travel.com for instance, your website should contain information relevant to people who are interested in time travel, and perhaps some outward links. As opposed to MFA mini-sites, the visitor would therefore actually find pertinent information, and he will not leave feeling betrayed.

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 is not difficult to see for most people. A domain parking page will only work if you get a huge number of people going directly to that domain name. Many people still opt for a MFA site in error though, because they don’t realize the importance of quality content.

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

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