Hate Christmas, Love Xmas

XMAS.com that is.

What a great 4 letter domain name. I don't know who owns it but they are one lucky son of a bitch.

Think about it, 550,000 searches a year for the word xmas, with 2/3rd's of that all occuring in December, almost the rest of 1/3rd in November.

But do a search and the domain name isn't there, whoever owns it is using it as a pure parking play and hasn't sought out any kind of development.

I think thats crazy. Sure the Per CLick Income level is only slightly above $1 at best but I think you could easily dominate the entire XMAS Market.

Search for XMAS and you'll find 102 million competing pages on Google, with xmasfun.com @ #3, also @ #3 on Yahoo with 295 million competing pages.

You telling me XMAS.com couldn't take them on? XMAS Ornaments, XMAS Greeting Cards, XMAS Trees, you name it the traffic is there.

Then there is XMAS.net owned by a guy in Tokyo, that name was first registered in Oct 1996.

Just Parked.

So for Christmas this year I would like a sizable chunk of money to make an offer for either domain name with enough left over for development throughout the year.

May 2009 be Christmas, or XMAS, everyday.

Domain Parking - What it REALLY means

As a low budget Domainer I am entering the industry by purchasing new, never before owned (or rarely, dropped) domain names. I do not have the cash or credit on hand to buy the top level domains that I would really love to own such as single keyword domains like Candy.com, Nachos.com or the ultimate Mortgage.com.

When you have quality domain names like Fund.com going for $10 Million dollars or Invest.com for over $1 Million dollars there is no way I can compete at that level.

Actually the $9 a year registration fee seems excessive to me when my domain name portfolio is reaching the levels that it has in recent weeks.

In the begining I did what most people do, I turned to parking as a way to potentially monetize any traffic that that domain name saw.

The keyword is traffic. Parking a domain name is a way to monetize traffic that it ALREADY has. Once a domain name is parked it is a violation of the terms of service to continue building inbound links and traffic towards that domain name.

So unless a domain name has existing traffic the return on that domain name via parking with an aggregator is VERY limited.

Which is what became painfully obvious as I went on to develop my better domain names and watched my parking income dwindle.

I believe Jenny or I posted about the question as to what to do with domain names seeing no traffic. The best option seems to be creating even a single keyword dense page and some inbound links. From there you can gauge the traffic and the levels of development you want to get into.

And if all else fails you can go back to parking now that you have at least created some trickle of traffic and seem some slight increase in income.