Parking vs for-sale landing page vs ?

[EdwinEdwin is verified member.]

What's the current state of play for parking vs using a landing page (e.g. a "This domain is for sale" microsite or something more sophisticated)?

I keep watching parking rates drop and drop, and at some point it's probably more valuable to point the traffic at a portfolio page than at ads! All I'd lose is the parking revenue, but the tradeoff might be more sales. I guess I need to get off my proverbial and make an effort to redirect all the domains to somewhere more productive...

Anyway, I'd love to hear any experience you'd care to share about the type of landing pages you use, and what (if anything) you found improved the likelihood of a sales conversion.

For example (not an exhaustive list, just meant to help spark the discussion)

- Do you mention that the domain is for sale on the landing page (either via a link on the parking page, or because it's pointed at a portfolio/domain listing site or similar)?

- If yes, do you specify a price?

- Do you provide general "blurb" about domains and the merits of generics, or is it short and sweet (a paragraph plus email address or contact form)?

- Do you list other names in your portfolio, or is it one page per name (or indeed, one page for ALL names)?

 

[SFSF is verified member.]

Hi Edwin

I have been parking names at name drive since the day they started and looking at my rev its the worst this month then its ever been, infact so little I am also thinking about moving my names away and just having landing pages.

 

[pendragonpendragon is verified member.]

I'm starting to put up a this domain for sale page with an aweber enquiry form on them.

I'm considering a bit of blurb relevant to the domain name etc explaining the merits of having such a domain name. I might stand a chance of getting it indexed too then.

 

[PaullasPaullas is verified member.]

I'm starting to put up a this domain for sale page with an aweber enquiry form on them.

I'm considering a bit of blurb relevant to the domain name etc explaining the merits of having such a domain name. I might stand a chance of getting it indexed too then.

thats ok for 1 - 50 ish domains but if you have more than 500 + this is a pain staking task.

 

[ratboy]

Guys, had landing pages working for a month now so I can tell you how it's working for me.

Welcome to gardenmate.co.uk

Use a reseller package with UK Reseller Hosting & Multiple Domain Hosting - BPWEB for £30 a month. All i do is add the domain name and point it at the base directory (htdocs in this case) and the php index page picks up the domain name for each one...

Welcome to 2037.co.uk
Welcome to think-tank.co.uk

etc.

Had lots more enquiries and the pages are being indexed by G well. Traffic is up too. Obviously it costs me money each month rather than making money but I think it looks better and as I've said before might avoid DRS issues.

 

[grantwgrantw is verified member.]

I now have one lander page that all my domains point to, it then generates the info I want to show with a link to the relevant for sale page on my main sales site.

The initial reason for doing this was because I was sick of being sued/drs'd, the complainants main offensive being their competitors adverts on the parked page. Since making the change I've seen a massive increase in offers and sales.

Ditching parking was the best thing I ever did.

Grant

 

[ratboy]

thats ok for 1 - 50 ish domains but if you have more than 500 + this is a pain staking task.

Less so than moving parking host though. :grin:

 

[PaullasPaullas is verified member.]

ive not parked my domains for over a year now be interesting if anyone has <PHP> code that i can put on my page that catches the domain name and puts it on the page like mentioned above.

 

[ratboy]

Email on way.

 

[PaullasPaullas is verified member.]

thanks, rep added

 

[bensdbensd is verified member.]

Email on way.

Any chance you could post script or send me an email as well?

 

[ratboy]

No worries, if anyone else wants it let me know.

Just remove tracking and anything to do with me. You can style it quite easily for your own brand.

 

[PredPred is verified member.]

pm sent ratty

 

[FC Domains]

All my domains are on a spreadsheet.

This is read by a program that writes all of the pages on my web site and sends them to the server by FTP.
It also generates indexes, loads prices and sold flags.
It also updates the DNS hosts.

The server with the site has a ReWrite that takes all domain names that it doesn't recognise and redirects them to the sales page for that domain.

Simple :grin:

 

[EdwinEdwin is verified member.]

Interesting, looks like there's a very strong consensus so far towards putting the names on a site and directing the domains there, versus parking them...

 

[FC Domains]

Interesting, looks like there's a very strong consensus so far towards putting the names on a site and directing the domains there, versus parking them...

It depends on the name.
Some have obvious end users, others attract traffic.

 

[SkinnerSkinner is verified member.]

I may knock up a script now that uses a mysql database to do something like this, as my mind whirrring away and I havent picked up my benzo script to make me sleep. I suffer a form of insomnia that was brought on by a consistant piss poor sleep pattern

I'll post when I have more

 

[SkinnerSkinner is verified member.]

I have knocked up the script for the page to pull from SQL, I havent added a default for sites not added to the database not an Admin script to make adding them easy as I have an mysqld prompt open perm.

I'm going to play with logging stats for each domain

It don't look pretty but includes uses of each thing and should be easy to customise, I'd appreciate a link back if anyone uses and I'll post some updates as I get to them

index.php

<?
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//////////////Contents of mysql_connect.php////////////////////
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//define ('DB_USER', 'modsanc_seldom');
//define ('DB_PASSWORD', 's3ld0m');
//define ('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
//define ('DB_NAME', 'modsanc_seldom');

//$con = mysql_connect (DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD) or die ('I cannot connect to the database because: ' . mysql_error());
//mysql_select_db (DB_NAME) or die ('I cannot select the database because: ' . mysql_error());

//	$query = "SELECT id, domain, title, description, price,  date_format(added, '%d/%m/%Y \@ %h:%i %p') AS adds FROM seldoms ORDER BY adds";
//incase wanna pull them all.

// $query = "SELECT id, domain, title, description, price,  date_format(added, '%d/%m/%Y \@ %h:%i %p') AS adds FROM seldoms WHERE domain = '$domainz' LIMIT 1";   //pull just one record by domain name.

//INSERT INTO seldoms` (`id`, `domain`, `title`, `description`, `price`, `added`) 
//	VALUES ( NULL , '24i.co.uk', '24i - 24 Hour Information', 'sjsoan', '£XXX', NOW( ) //update example.

//$extension = end(explode('.', $filename));
//CREATE TABLE `seldoms` (
//`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
//`domain` VARCHAR( 70 ) NOT NULL ,
//`title` VARCHAR( 512 ) NOT NULL ,
//`desc` TEXT NOT NULL ,
//`price` VARCHAR( 32 ) NOT NULL ,
//`added` TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP NOT NULL ,
//PRIMARY KEY ( `id` ) ,
//UNIQUE (
//`domain` 
//)
//) ENGINE = MYISAM 


include ('./mysql_connect.php');
$domainz = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], '.')+1);
$query = "SELECT id, domain, title, description, price,  date_format(added, '%d/%m/%Y \@ %h:%i %p') AS adds FROM seldoms WHERE domain = '$domainz' LIMIT 1";   
$doms =  mysql_query($query) or die("Select Failed!");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($doms)) {
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<meta name="Author" content="Skinner - Skindustrial" />
<meta name="Robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW" />
<meta name="Generator" content="Skindustrial" />
<meta name="Description" content="<?php echo $row['title']; ?>" />
<meta name="Keywords" content="<?php echo $row['domain']; ?> - <?php echo $row['title']; ?> - Skindustrial Developments" />
<title><?php echo $row['domain']; ?> - <?php echo $row['title']; ?> - Skindustrial Developments</title>
</head>
<body>
<table width="728px" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
<tr>
	<td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
	<td align="center" colspan="2">
		<h1>Skindustrial Developments</h1>
		<p>This domain (<?php echo $row['domain']; ?>) has been registered for future use or it maybe for sale if details are below, you can also contact us here for more information.</p>
	    <p>&nbsp;</p></td>	
</tr>

<tr>
	<td align="center" colspan="2">
		<h2><?php echo $row['title']; ?></h2>	</td>
</tr>

<tr>
	<td style="text-align:left; vertical-align:top; font-weight:bold;" width="80%">
		Description:</td>
	
	<td style="text-align:center; vertical-align:top; font-weight:bold;">
		Price Range:</td>
</tr>

<tr>
	<td style="text-align:left; vertical-align:top;" width="80%">
		<p><?php echo $row['description']; ?></p>	</td>
	
	<td style="text-align:center; vertical-align:top; font-style:italic;">
		<p><?php echo $row['price']; ?></p>	</td>
</tr>

<tr>
	<td colspan="2">
		<p>&nbsp;</p>	</td>
</tr>

<tr>
	<td colspan="2" align="right">
		<p>This holding page was created on <?php echo $row['adds']; ?></p>	</td>
</tr>
<?php } //close while
	mysql_close();
?>
<tr>
	<td colspan="2">
		<p align="center"><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer"><img src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10-blue"
    	    	alt="Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional" border="0" height="31" width="88" />			</a> <br />
		&copy; Seldom created by <a href="http://www.skindustrial.com" target="_blank">Skindustrial Developments</a> 2006-2009 </p>
	</td>
</tr>

<tr>
	<td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>

</table>
</body>
</html>

I have a strange sense of program names, so called this Seldom

 

[SkinnerSkinner is verified member.]

If you wanna add some stats on there, throw this in after the mysql connection.

Again aint pretty but not much work gone into it.

	/////////////// STATS BLOCK START ////////////////
	//CREATE TABLE `modsanc_seldom`.`stats` (
	//`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT ,
	//`url` VARCHAR( 70 ) NOT NULL ,
	//`referer` VARCHAR( 256 ) NOT NULL ,
	//`client` VARCHAR( 512 ) NOT NULL ,
	//`added` TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ,
	//PRIMARY KEY ( `id` ) ,
	//INDEX ( `id` ) 
	//) ENGINE = MYISAM CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci 
	$debugstat = 0;
	$domz = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], '.')+1);
	$ref = mysql_real_escape_string($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
	$cli = mysql_real_escape_string($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
	$ips = mysql_real_escape_string($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
	$query2 = "INSERT INTO `stats` (`id`, `ip`, `url`, `referer`, `client`, `added`) VALUES (NULL, '$ips', '$domz', '$ref', '$cli', NOW());";
	$result = mysql_query($query2); 
 	if ($debugstat==1) { //debug
		 echo "Query Result: <pre>$result</pre><br />
		 Query Sumitted: <pre>$query2</pre>";
	if($result != "1")	{
		$error = mysql_errno().": ".mysql_error();
		echo "Error Code: ID:10T<br />
		Error Description: <pre>$error</pre>\n";
	} else {
		echo "Stat Point has been added.<br>";
	}
	}//end debug
	/////////////// STATS BLOCK END ////////////////

 

[DaveBeasley]

Many thanks to both ratboy and skinner for sharing... rep added to both