WOW! A “Thanks” from you means “good stuff coming!” I’m not joking…

Because of your nice response, I’m taking my wife to a five star restaurant this week, (and anyone in PDX who wants to contact me in the next 48 hours) and I sense that several big domains will be selling for me in the next 90 days (maybe at TNYC?). Yep, that’s what a simple nice word and recognition from you means in many people’s lives! When you look in the mirror all this week, feel great because I’m pushing “good karma, beyond money” to you. I’m thinking it!

Thanks Rick. Much Success!

Rick, I agree that if you can’t get the site to rank, and you’re set on using PPC, you’re definitely better off with a parked page than with a mini site because the CTR will almost always be lower. The idea is first, to offset the lower CTR by having much more traffic. If you can triple the number of visitors to your site by capturing organic search traffic and a little marketing, but your CTR is half, then even with PPC on a mini site you’re still better off than a parked page. This often happens.

The next idea is to make more money per visitor by breaking away from PPC. If you have 100 daily visitors to a parked page and 50% CTR, but you’re only making $0.02 per click, you’re earning $1 a day. If you have 300 daily visitors and converting them at a rate of 1% into affiliate sales that are paying even as low as $5 per sale… you’re making $15 a day. Huge difference ($365 a year vs. $5,475 a year).

Also, if you’re getting 300 visitors a day, depending on the niche and banner placement, you should be able to charge advertisers at least $60/mo per banner spot, and let’s say you are able to sell four spots. You’re making $240 a month instead of $30 a month from the parked page.

Let’s also not forget that you can’t build back links to, or market, a parked page. This means you’re stuck with whatever level of type-in traffic you’re currently getting if you park the domain, and for most domains that is a trickle at best. If you build a mini site, you can build back links which drive traffic, set up an Adwords campaign, do some article or social media marketing, whatever you can come up with all in addition to the search traffic benefit.

Of course these numbers are made up, but I’m just trying to show that CTR isn’t the end-all and be-all. Differences in numbers of visitors and how you monetize can offset that easily.

I agree with Michael here. When we say “PPC”, we really mean “landing page” with a PS (parking service).

You can have a developed content site (such as WhyPark or DevHub or AEIOU, and if accepted, Noparking.com), with just a few pages of original content. If correctly managed, you would also include CPA (affiliates), ebooks (big money here), Clickbank products, CPM’s, and even your own products to monetize the site.

Coming soon in a tidal wave, “rent the domain” – with 100% CTR, redirects paid per unique at a set rate. It’s already being done, and the face of monetizing a domain name is moving in these directions, quickly.

I appreciate your blog focus here, but I am backing up Rick Schwartz in confirming that he DOES POST EVERY COMMENT, as far as it isn’t spam or over-the-top… and even then, he may post the negative comments… cuz I see my “bad Rick! Bad!” comments on his site.

The problem is if you do a “preview” with his blogsite before posting your comment. For some reason, after you type in the anti-spam code, it returns a “Your comment cannot be accepted at this time” or something like that. There is an issue with “previewing” a comment first before you post it on Rick’s site. I use Mac’s, and Safari, so it might have something to do with that, if you’re using a Mac.

Other than that, I have experienced the same result after posting an opposing comment that you did – in other words, I thought it was rejected. That wasn’t the case, the post did appear several hours later, and I printed a retraction to Rick on my blog.

Hope this helps both you and Rick in this issue.

Anyway, you’re derailing this whole conversation with a petty argument. The point I am making is that if Adsense was really gunning for mini sites as Rick was suggesting/questioning, Google wouldn’t be giving them first page ranking for high-competition terms (or long tails for that matter). The point was also that, contrary to Rick’s experience, mini sites can improve traffic through higher ranking in the SERPs, and they can be sticky (multiple page views per visitor).

If you’d like to add anything to that conversation be my guest. If you’d like to discuss whether or not you think our clients should use PPC or a different form of monetization, please start your own blog post. It’s not really relevant to this conversation.

Adding a few paragraphs on a page or two or three doesn’t mean its now no longer a PPC parking page.

The point is that many of those who design mini sites are telling everyone PPC is dead and to start developing. So they charge them $300 or whatever bucks to make them a site doing what? If you guessed “using PPC” you’re right.

If you want to see what I mean just visit the forums.

You also have domainers talking about development and moving away from PPC themselves, not having to be talked into it…so what do they do? They have some content written up in order to create a Made for Adwords site…so they shout PPC is Dead then simply move to another method of using PPC.

It’s the same thing.

And just to show what I mean lets take Rick for example who is a victim of this mini site hysteria (not to pick on you Rick).

Ricks Blog talks about Google cutting him off killing his Adwords on his mini sites. Down a bit he says, “In EVERY case I made less money than PPC. ”

Rick, Google Adwords is PPC.

You didn’t make “less money than PPC” you made less money using another PPC option or method.

Rick then says “…as they are now back at PPC”

Rick, you never left PPC. Adwords is PPC.

This is the mini site hysteria I’m talking about. Many don’t even “see it”.

People actually think they are doing something different than PPC but they aren’t.

So what we have is people running away from PPC and jumping into the arms of, you got it, PPC.

Its kind of funny when I think about it.

What I would like to see is the people that are talking about the big D word and wanting to be less reliant on PPC actually do SOMETHING DIFFERENT than PPC.

The small Amazon box at the bottom of Wrenches.com that Neil so kindly pointed out is a start.