When I first started domaining a year ago, I thought I would buy a bunch of domains and park all but a few (with a plan that I would actually build a few  into either a full ecommerce site and/or informational site that would generate revenue through Google Adsense and affiliate marketing).  However, I have found that parking the domains has produced little in the way of revenue.  I know the main reason things haven’t been so great for me personally: I have sucko domain names.  Some of my domains have good type-in-traffic but aren’t high quality domain names.  In any case, I have spent most of my time trying to figure out how to monetize these domain names.  The answer seems to be mini-sites.  That’s the “buzz” these days.  It really is a great idea. Now, if you consider WhyPark.com a mini-site builder, then you may realize they are worthy of your consideration and hard earned cash.  I thought they were so I gave them a shot.

I really like what I see so far.  In just two weeks, my traffic has increased by 300%.  The problem I’m finding (but I would have this with any other site with content) is I’m spending an awful lot of time trying to do SEO for all of them.  

Let’s start off with the basics with regard to WhyPark. You do have the option to add keywords so if you do your keyword research and add those awesome keywords, you’ve got one small part of the SEO done.  But obviously there’s so much more to do if you want traffic.  I’ve tried listing my first 20 sites in five popular blog directories and four major search engines manually and it took a few hours - painful!  And I have another 80 to do!  Oh, by the way, WhyPark will do any or all of your SEO for an added charge - I haven’t tried these extra services yet but may consider trying out these services on a couple of my websites to see if they can do a better job than I.  I’ll post back on this if I do try it out!

So, for my first 20 sites I also wanted to make sure I had visitor tracking so I initially used Google Analytics but found it has some problems with the WhyPark sites and Google Analytics, so I switched to StatCounter.com and I’m much happier.  Actually, it’s nice because it’s more user friendly than Google Analytics.  I also manually added sitemaps to each of the 20 websites to Google.  Between adding all my domains to the StatCounter for my website statistics and then adding my sitemaps to Google, it took another few hours.  

WhyPark has a section titled Site Settings where you can add your Statistic Code (from Google Analytics or StatCounter or your favorite tracker) and also a section for Sitemap Verification.  Doing the sitemaps was a pain though going back and forth between WhyPark and Google:  first, add the Domain Name to Google, click verify and then choose method (I chose META tag since it was simple to copy the one line of HTML code and paste it into WhyPark’s settings), then back to Google to click Verify and then adding the name of the sitemap to the just added Domain.  By default, all the generated sitemaps from WhyPark are http://www.DOMAINNAME.com/google-sitemap.cfm so that made things easy.

As I mentioned, I have found that in the two weeks my domains have been with WhyPark, I have seen a large growth in traffic compared to what I was receiving through Sedo.  But to be fair, I did get a lot of people coming in through organic traffic generated by the WhyPark content so I really can’t compare the two. Receiving organic traffic was surprising because I don’t think the WhyPark content is entirely engaging and actually some of it is out-of-date.  But it did work nonetheless so I can’t complain!

All in all, WhyPark may be the way to go if you find your PPC sites aren’t generating the revenue you’d like to see and you’re looking for an alternative.