Addicted to buying domain names but found a no-effort way to make them pay

I bought my first domain name in January 2008.  It was my last name . net, because someone already had the .com.   I blogged happily with it for six months, then I realized how that might not be too smart considering I plan to be in the workforce for many years to come and didn’t want the blog to become my resume!   So in July, I bought an all-purpose domain name for the blog.   That lasted a couple of months, then I decided I really wanted to have a pets blog, so I bought another domain name.   Every couple of months after that I’d get a “great idea” for a niche of some kind, each time costing me another $10.   Thank goodness I have a great hosting company, BlueHost, where I get to host unlimited domains for

the same monthly price. But by now I have almost 20 domain names, and I don’t especially want to pay GoDaddy or Sedo or anyone else for the privilege of parking so that I can perhaps get some money for advertising. So I had decided to just let domain names I don’t want anymore sit idle until they expire. Of course I’ve made double and triple sure that they are not set to renew automatically!

Anyway, I logged into Adsense last week for the first time in about six months. I was very surprised to see a section called “Adsense for Domains.” Turns out that now you can park your domains and have Adsense ads on it and make money – and it doesn’t cost you a cent. All that’s needed is to go into your DNS settings and make a couple of changes, including a CNAME that points to Google with your publisher ID. They give explicit instructions for major registrars like GoDaddy plus general instructions too. I did it with one domain just to test it out, and I’ve already had 25 hits on that page while I was setting up the colors and keywords – you’ll get a lot more if your site has been active and has lots of traffic, of course. I don’t know if I’ll make much, but this is worth a try because it is totally free. You can set up channels, add keyword hints, and control the colors on these pages just like with other Adsense ads.

If you have domains that you are just using for Google Apps, they can still continue to do that while in Adsense for Domains. According to the FAQs, you can still use other subdomains or prefixes like mail.yourdomain.com or blog.yourdomain.com for using Google apps. The ads will just appear on yourdomain.com. If you have some old domain names lying around the house, make them earn their keep – park them with Adsense!

UPDATE: Well I went and bought another domain name.   I love to start new sites, but the other day I started thinking back over how I’d miserably failed my college midterm yet had (quickly) learned to study and done great in school after that.    There are all sorts of tips to share, so I now have a new site which teaches study skills. Please stop by and let me know what you think!