I came across one of those ideas the other day that make you say–I wish I had come up with that. This is going to be of particular interest to investors in domain names. Whether you have bought a Top Level Domain (TLD) name as an investment or perhaps because you happened to buy something to develop, this is going to be an interesting service for you.FUSU as the company is known, allows you to take a TLD and issue shares to the public for investment much like companies do on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.The best thing about this whole thing is that it has the potential to add liquidity to an otherwise illiquid investment. I for one have been trying to sell a few domains through sedo.com and haven’t had any luck (of course the quality of a domain name counts but I think mine are fairly decent names). I might actually give FUSU a try to see if I have better luck.If you are interested in checking this service out you can visit their website to find out more information.

I purchased a number of domain names over the past year after reading a story about Kevin Ham, the domain investing guru who has made a fortune investing in this valuable internet real estate. So how does he make his money by buying these domain names?

The answer is simple, he usually parks them and earns an income through type in traffic.

So how do you park a domain name?

Step one is to forget about paying for hosting (although if you must get hosting for any web project I suggest bluehost for a number of reasons) because to park a domain name all you need to do is have DNS control over your domain name and have an account with a domain parking service (i’ll be suggesting some to begin with below).

At most domain registrars like godaddy.com you will have access to a control panel which allows you to change the server your domain points to. When you are trying to park your domains you will need to change the default server names to that of your parking service. The new server names should now be in a similar format to:

parkingservername1.parkingservicedomain.com

parkingservername2.parkingservicedomain.com

In order to find out what to replace the default servers with just contact your parking service or check their website as this is sometimes published in a FAQ area. Keep in mind that it usually takes a while to get your parked domain page to load instead of the default page under construction page that places like godaddy put up for you. Once it is set-up though, you can start monitoring your traffic and start seeing PPC revenues.

Suggested domain parking services

So I am sure some of you that are new to the world of domaining are wondering which companies provide solid parking services. The truth is that there are several that do. I would start by looking at the following:

1. Parked
2. Sedo
3. Godaddy

For amateur domain investors, it is common to find that the top level domains that you invest in don’t produce much income. This is caused by a number of things–no backlinks to the domain name, no real content to speak of so ranking high in search engines is near impossible, and possibly no type-in traffic.

So what do you do when you find yourself with an under performing domain name?

Believe it or not, you have a few options. The first option is to build the domain into a content site. This is pretty easy to do now with wordpress and other blogging platforms. You can get hosting for around $7 per month and can have a website up in minutes with a nice free template from one of the many free template sites out there (just do a google search for free wordpress template and you’re guaranteed to find something you like). So now that you have a website set-up all you have to do is write. You must keep in mind that developing a content site requires a lot of time, energy and careful thought.

Once you have your website up and have content updated regularly you can try to eek out an income with Adsense, advertising, affiliate programs or some other revenue strategy.

For those of you that don’t want to make the investment of time developing content and building links, there is always the sit and wait strategy. At some point the domain may become valuable to somebody at which time they may contact you to buy it from you at a premium. If that strategy seems too passive for you then you can try your luck on websites like sitepoint or godaddy.com’s domain aftermarket. Both are known to find domain buyers. The unknown here is for how much.

When these things don’t produce the desired results then it is time to look for another strategy. One of them is to package a portfolio of domains and then trying to sell them as one. Or you can always get creative and try to find another domain owner who might want to trade your portfolio of domains for one of their domains with some established traffic and revenue although this is highly unlikely.