Pros & Cons Site Development vs Parked Domain

Many domain name owners are now saying the smart money in 2010 is on website development.

It appears most everyone is saying development is best but the fact is it can be much tougher to get revenue vs a ppc parked page.

Several reasons for that including the fact Click-thru-rates (CTR) is often 4 or 5 times better on a parked page which means the developed site will need 4 or 5 time more traffic to earn the same revenue, assuming the Earnings-per-click (EPC) is about the same comparing say Adsense/YPN vs the major parking firms.

With that said, a nice advantage the developed site has is the ability for site traffic to increase (but that can easily take many months or even years), whereas the parked domain is unlikely to ever get more traffic.

I have more developed sites vs parked domains so I also believe strongly in development but the strength of the keyword name is a big factor, imo. In addition, development involves vast amounts of time and work, including the site/domain server setup, content, hosting, seo work, site maintenance and monitoring, not to mention the hosting cost and time involved and many months or years of waiting for traffic to slowly build-up over time.

Keep the following example in mind if you are developing a good keyword name which gets say 100 typein visits/mo and earns say $2.80/mo at parking (based on 20% CTR and .14c EPC). Once you make it a developed site you will start-out with approx the same 100 typein visits but more often than not your CTR will drop to roughly 4% (or even lower) which means your revenue will decline to just .56c vs $2.80 on parking.

That typical example scenario in-effect means your traffic will need to skyrocket to 500 visits/mo to equal the same $2.80/mo revenue when parked. Can you imagine the time and work involved increasing your traffic from 100/mo to 500/mo!

Why Technical Support May Not Understand Issues

Have you ever called an internet-based company for technical support only to have the tech support person be unable to resolve the issue as a result of being unable to personally duplicate the probem you are encountering?

More often than you would think a reason the technical support dept has trouble personally duplicating the problem you are seeing is because they are either not actually using the program on the web like you are or else are using a different operating system, browser or even using a Mac computer instead of the PC compatible you are likely using.

For example, instead of the same program as used by most customers being installed or running on the technicians computer they often use a different setup. Such as an internal, proprietary or server-based setup, which is sometimes working from an admin control panel instead of how you use and run the program.

At other times, the technician may be using a less commonly used internet browser such as Firefox, instead of using the much more popular and much more commonly used Microsoft Internet Explorer Browser. Since the functionality, appearance, setups, screens, compatibility, memory use and potential browser bugs could be diverse the problems you are having may not be experienced by the technical support person you are talking to.

As an example, here is a saved live chat session I had today with the technical support department of a web development program I am using to semi-automatically generate multi-page websites. The company and persons name is not given in the chat log

Me: Hi, whenever I go to a 3rd party web site which has an RSS Feed my IE 7 or IE 8 RSS Feed icon turns orange color to let me know the web site has an RSS feed running on it but with all my sites with you that does not happen?

Technician: Hmm, can you clarify a bit? There is an Orange button? That sounds like RSS syndication. Such as in this example.com website, which has the RSS syndication actve…

Me: Right, exactly like your example, my IE bar has an RSS Icon which is always grayed out even though my sites are using your platform and do in-fact have my RSS Feedburner code installed (which by the way is working well). Why does the RSS icon not turn orange color as it does with 3rd party sites which have RSS activated?

Technician: What version of Internet Explorer are you running?

Me: With both IE7 and IE8 the icon does not turn orange color as it should.

Technician: So for the example site I just showed you, it’s grey?

Me: Right, the IE bar icon (found next to home page button) stays grey with or without RSS running on the site. However, it’s always orange colored icon on 3rd party sites with RSS activated.

Technician: I am not sure why, I would need to look further into the situation, but it may be because the sites are using the platform, and there are some limitations.

Me: OK but look at your own Internet Explore Toolbar which RSS icon is located next to your IE home-page icon (at least there on my screen) to see what I mean.

Technician: I don’t use Internet Explorer. I’m on a Mac, so IE doesn’t work.

Me: You using a Mac is indeed an issue alright. Since the overwhelming majority of the public uses Internet Explorer and most do not have or even heard of Firefox, and is exactly why I only use Internet Explorer. In my opinion anyone in tech supt should also be using IE since that is what the vast majority of the the public is using so by using the same typical setup you can give better client support that way. Sorry if you do not like me saying this but you really should use what most of your customers are using, IMO.

Technician: Most of our team is using a PC platform.

Me: Not sure what that means?

Technician: I don’t do any developing so it is a non-issue for me. I can look further into your situation with our development team. Would you like me to email you an update?

Me: Was not referring to developing as this issue is about surfing the web and looking at the IE Toolbar which most people have installed having absolutely nothing to do with development so I have no idea why you are talking about development but thanks anyway for your time.

Technician: OK, I do like Firefox, you should try it. Thanks for your notification on this issue. Bye for now.

Me: No thanks. Bye.

P.S. After all that discussion and time spent on it the issue was not resolved, in large part because tech support did not see or able to duplicate the same problem on their screen. Isn’t that ridiculous!