The best way to make money with a domain is to... sell it! But you won't sell all of them. Or you will keep some for years before being able to sell them. Periodically, most domainers also sell some names for which they just see no prospect (or have no money for renewal fees!), sometimes at a bargain price.
But let's assume you have domains you want to keep, although you have not yet been able to sell them. What are you going to do? Just to leave them as empty pages? No content, nothing?
There are better things to do. Supposing the domain name attracts so-called "natural traffic", i.e. people just searching for content under that name (usually a .com name), or if the domain used to have content before and has many backlinks which bring visitors to it, then a solution could be to park it with a parking company. A parking page will usually offer advertisement, and if people click on those ads and visit the advertisers, it will bring some money. Not much, unless you have many visitors.
Some parking companies only accept domain names which potentially generate high revenue: they will evaluate your portfolio, and accept you or turn you down. Some are more open. If you want to park your domain names, we recommend NameDrive - click on their name or on their banner at the bottom of this page, it is free and you can start parking domains there, while keeping full control of them (you just need to change the DNS in your registrar's interface for the domains you want to park with NameDrive, and you are free at any time to remove them, put them with another parking service, etc.).
The preference of Hvdy.com's editors currently goes to another solution: WhyPark. Currently, WhyPark costs US $ 100 for parking up to 100 domains. It is a one time fee, but probably won't remain so for long (those who buy it now will however keep for life the advantage of the one-time fee!). Whypark allows you not only to park your domains, but to fill them automatically with automatically generated content. Well-chosen, this can even be quite attractive to your visitors. Instead of having one-time visitors, there is a chance that some will return. Your content is also more likely to be indexed by search engines, especially if you choose a good meta-description. "Content is king:" in our eyes, WhyPark is an excellent investment. It is much better than just parking a page with advertisements. But you can also insert very easily ads in your WhyPark pages: either WhyPark's own ads (rather low revenue at this point) or ads coming from a network such as Google's Adsense, provided you get accepted by them.
Another (good) way is to create "minisites", in which you will put ads (e.g. ads provided by Google's Adsense, if they accept you). It can be great fun to create a small site, and you can include a "for sale" page in it. Moreover, especially with well-chosen keywords and backlinks on other websites and in forums (if you are allowed to include links in your singature), a minisite is likely to attract traffic, and thus to increase the value of a domain name. If you create several minisites, you will need a multisite hosting or reseller hosting (no need to be a reseller for having one, you can use it just for yourself!). If you choose this way, we strongly recommend The Prime Host, which has proved over the years to be a reliable web hosting service at reasonable prices, with excellent support for customers. This website is hosted with them!
