5 With… Craig Rowe, President, WhyPark

WhyPark is a unique company whose platform can allow you to customize dozens, hundreds or thousands of domain names into websites with fresh daily content and multiple monetization options for just $.99/each (or less in bulk). Instead of solely relying on type-in traffic to produce revenue via parking, your site has a much better chance at being indexed in Google, which is especially valuable for long tail keywords, as the search engine rankings tend to drive a majority of the traffic.

One of the things I like best about WhyPark is the ability to integrate a custom design, logo and content, while getting the added value of their platform.   Initially, I had commissioned a custom design and logo for Oenophiles.com (oenophiles means “wine lovers” in Latin), and had about 25 articles custom written for the site.   With WhyPark’s help, I now have a regularly updating website that looks great and is easy to manage. I also chose to use the WhyPark feed to monetize the site, but you could choose to use Adsense instead if you would prefer.

I had a chance to talk about WhyPark with company President Craig Rowe as well as VP of Business Development, Stephen Douglas.   Both of these guys are knowledgeable about the domain industry and the company is thinking like domainers to solve domainer problems.   I am happy with how Oenophiles.com looks, and maybe WhyPark can help you, too.

EJS: What are the advantages of using WhyPark over domain parking, and in your experience, what revenue impact are you seeing on WhyPark names that were previously parked?

CR: WhyPark’s market isn’t competing with traditional parking services such as Parked.com, Domainsponsor.com, or Trafficz. We are looking for domains that would be better suited in gaining organic search traffic from content development as opposed to the ever popular, more elusive “naturals” (typein traffic). Most domainers have a large portion of their portfolios that contain longtails and domains that have “brandability” but aren’t getting that direct navigation.

Using WhyPark, the first benefit for domainers is that for only $0.99 per domain, they can get relevant content on domains they are selling to end-users. My own experience is that end-users get a better “feel” for a domain they want to buy if the content on the domain’s website matches their products or services, so getting a simple content website (which the customer can enhance by adding more content and graphics) helps a domainer get better interest in their domain, and possibly enhancing the overall value of the domain.

On the other side, if a domain is getting no traffic at a parking service from typeins or backlinks, then the only other solution is to try to get organic search traffic from search engine results. This is a hard game to play, because every website that is built with the intent on making money is trying to get into the top ten search results on every search engine. However, the game can be played many different ways. If you have a longtail domain, you can vary your keyword placements to bypass the ‘common’ search words, and submit more esoteric and niche oriented phrasings. This will give your domain a better chance at coming up in the first page results of a search. This is the secret to monetizing non-performing domains, but you need to think about your keywords, or hire WhyPark’s professional team to do the keyword research for you.

WhyPark’s advantages over traditional parking services really kicks in when you are dealing with domains that aren’t performing. Not only does our content give you the chance to get relevant traffic in your domain’s niche, but it also puts your domain in the position of getting indexed by search engines, which again adds value to your domain.

EJS) What types of names are ideal for WhyPark’s platform?

CR: Longtails, brand names (non TM’s), niche generics, and especially ccTLD’s and Secondary Level Domains, such as .Pro, .name, .me, .mobi, .biz, .info, etc. These domains don’t normally get typein traffic, and depend on content to gain visitors from organic searches. Many of WhyPark’s customers are putting their non-TLD’s, even one word generics, at WhyPark and seeing traffic for the first time.

EJS: Since inception, what improvements to WhyPark’s platform are you most proud of, and how are they benefiting domain owners who use WhyPark?

CR: It is extremely simple for anyone to add their domains, get content on them, add your own original content, select templates, change templates on the fly, add their own adfeeds and revenue generating links, add graphics, and generally have a good time playing around with creating a website they want with their domain, and at a starting cost of only $0.99 or less (depending on the amount of domains you bring over at the start of your account). We think our user interface is one of the best-designed systems in the domain industry. Simple to use!

EJS: For someone with 500 domain names, how easy is it to set up an account, load the domain names, and set them up?

CR: First of all, if someone wants to bring over 500 domains, they can request a discount pricing instead of $0.99 each domain. Secondly, adding their domains is simple. The longer involvement is in the setup of the keywords, because we give you the opportunity to add 20 different keywords or phrases to each domain to pull in the relevant articles that will help get your domain indexed on the search engines and provide a good user experience for the visitor. However, in bulk amounts, we can give customers affordable pricing per domain and our team will set these keywords up for them… with 500 domains, the cost for “managed setup” per domain could be as low as $2.00 per domain. Surprisingly, 500 domains that don’t perform or get indexed by parking them elsewhere will get relevant content and setup for less than $1500 at WhyPark.

EJS: Other than Oenophiles.com, what are some of the best sample WhyPark sites?

CR: AirlineRewards.com, DigitalMammogram.com, SkiTrips.travel, FullTextFeeds.net, SportsmansWeb.net, PregnancySafe.com, ClevelandOhio.travel, Cgi-Java.com. These are examples of sites that wouldn’t otherwise have seen any type-in traffic, but now do.

EJS: With WhyPark’s platform, what types of revenue generation strategies can be used (Adsense, affiliates, WhyPark feed…etc)?

CR: WhyPark is unique in that it allows users to add all types of their own third party ads, affiliate offers, download links, storefronts, third-party ads, and more, as long as they are legal, of course. We also offer our integrated ad feed that work similar to that of a two-click landing page. Each page on a WhyPark site that uses our feed has related search terms and a search box. Clicking on one of those terms or searching for a term generates a page of sponsored links that are monetized through PPC. Also, on each content page, we have related terms that are associated with that page’s content. So, it provides a highly relevant experience for the visitor and ultimately funnels the visitor through to a revenue event for the domain owner.

EJS: What features scheduled to be rolled out in the near future are you most excited about?

CR: While we can’t talk about the specifics until they’re done, we are excited about a lot of the new features in the works and just completed. We rolled out a suite of new managed and promotion services in the new platform. So, for those customers who want unique content, design customizations, link building, etc. while still having complete control over their domains, we offer low-cost solutions to do it for them.

We’re always working to improve the monetization, performance and overall relevancy of sites as well. So, we continue to source and license new content and make changes to create better sites. We launched ContentPromote.com a few months back to connect with bloggers and authors to distribute their content through WhyPark sites and we’ve added about 500 new sources of quality, screened content through that program alone, with more being approved daily. We’re also developing some new monetization methods to allow domainers to earn revenue in ways that aren’t available with traditional parking. As this industry continues to evolve, we’re looking forward to being a part of it and offering solutions to help domainers develop their names inexpensively and efficiently.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

17 COMMENTS

  1. I think that WhyPark is in slow growth at the moment, but comparing there service to mini site builders. They seem more attractive.
    It would be nice to hear some feedback from WhyPark customers. WhyPark has been around for a while but you don’t hear to much about them from other domainers.

  2. I started using Whypark.com on domains that really don’t get type-in traffic. My goal was to not make money off the ads which is not much but to get spidered into the search engines.
    So far, after about 3 months, about 50% my names have gotten spidered and traffic has increased between 100-200% off that. The problem, is the CTR on Google Adsense for me anyways is only about 2-3% whereas in parking companies I do about 20-25%.

    Thanks, Jim

  3. The problem is that while they may indeed help you get indexed and crawled more often and maybe even drive some SEO traffic in the first month or two if you get lucky… Long term they will not.

    Any duplicate / scrapped content isn’t going to do you any good. Never has and never will. It is not going to take your places.

    From looking at the few examples provided, the whole system and setup is quiet old actually and it is mainly for opportunists and link spammers who do this x100’s of web sites in order to build up and pass on link juice from websites setup with various random articles to boost up link farms rankings and authority with either Yahoo or MSN.

    With Google, those sites get banned almost instantly — not so easy to abuse them.

    If you have unique content and decent SEO — you are OK.

    If you do not have neither, you are in trouble.

    Mike

  4. When G finds duplicate content, it tries to pick the best version, usually the original creator’s site. Everything else gets buried or banned. According to Matt Cutts:

    “However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.”

    My biggest concern would be what happened with BANS (Build a Niche Store) users happening to WhyPark users. Google de-indexed thousands of users because it decided BANS was creating thin, spammy, useless sites.

    I’m also not 100% clear on the purpose of the ContentPromote.com site from a WhyPark perspective. You have writers creating unique content, but then you are syndicating it across hundreds of WhyPark domains, making it no more unique than the feeds you scrape.

    Sure, it is a tiny bit better than parking… but it can’t touch truly unique content.

  5. Hey Elliot:

    I have to say, I am a bit surprised you would sacrifice the 25 unique articles you had written to this type of platform.

    With all respect, your custom sites look better, friendlier, are more readable, interesting and expandable than any automated version.

    Just my opinion,
    Best,
    Mark

  6. @Wannadevelop

    Mike, why don’t you be fair and add a caveat to your posts that your company is a competitor of Whypark’s and several other site development companies you’ve recently made serious adverse comments about? I won’t address this issue again publicly with you, so I’m hoping you take my advice “to heart”.

    Elliot, thanks for a great article on WhyPark. We appreciate your own testing of our service, and giving us an opportunity to have your opinion heard here regarding your results.

  7. @Duane – Thanks for the nice comments. Our customers tend to be private, and we don’t normally ask them for “public comments” to prove what their getting from WhyPark. As far as WhyPark being in “slow growth”, quite the contrary, we’ve grown over 300% in size in just the last several months.

    @ Domain Name Media – We understand all the ups and downs and pitfalls of content development and how G handles it. However, what doesn’t seem to be coming across about our system to people is that you can UPDATE daily your website with your own quick content, add a page, a photo, graphic, new rss, new links, to remove the stigma or this impression that Whypark is only “scraping” content originating from somewhere else. That is NOT what WhyPark’s site development platform uses, and we don’t sell a fake bill of goods to domainers… we expect every domainer to care about their domain site at WhyPark, and to come in at least one every two weeks or more to add a few changes.

    @ Mark – First of all, Elliot has spent significant $$$ to reach the upper level class of websites he presents. WhyPark can give you “workable” content and a website for a few dollars, with original content monthly. You need to test WhyPark yourself, and understand that our platform VERY EASILY allows original content to be added to your website, add new pages with this content/graphics, and we recommend that our users do that. Combined with the original content sources we use and are continually adding to daily, this gives your website an original feel that doesn’t look to SE’s like it’s “automated”, because with customer interaction and just a little weekly care, it’s your creation.

    Bottom line, if anyone still thinks that Google searches the internet, sees duplicate content on the millions of sites it indexes, and then “deletes” any site, they are not thinking logically. Tens of thousands of websites copy news/info articles DAILY all over the world, and Google doesn’t blacklist the domains. The key is giving your site a little extra each week or so to change up your content and design.

    WhyPark is always looking for new suggestions and input from domainers so we can help them get the most out of their non performing domains, especially those domainers with non-TLD domains. WhyPark is perfect for this market.

  8. Stephen,

    Thanks for your response. I’m well aware of how easy it is to add my own custom-written content. You have a very powerful product, but I have to respectfully disagree with your statement. Going through the WhyPark tour there are a dozen places that mention you can build a full site in “minutes”. I don’t see anywhere on the site that really stresses the fact that scraped content won’t really get you ranked all that well, and that users need to update the site regularly with custom content.

    I’m not suggesting every site that has duplicate content immediately gets slapped with the ban stick, but sites that ONLY have duplicate content often do. It is important to keep a strong balance of custom content to scraped content… which obviously can’t be done in “minutes”. Your product is a good jumping off point, but just as with everything in life, you have to put in a significant amount of work to see good results. I don’t think that is made clear on your “tour” at all.

    I’d be interested to know of the 150k+ domains “developed” with WhyPark, how many have custom content on them verses just scraped content. I’m not talking about images, different RSS feeds, or ad code. I’m talking about articles. I bet the number is well below 30%.

  9. I definitely think Stephen’s got a great point about duplicate content paranoia. Sure we all know that duplicate content isn’t google’s favorite thing. But how bad could it be since we all know the internet is full of it, and all these sites with RSS feeds on them and so on seem to still get indexed just fine.

    If you were to guess, what percentage of the content on the “Internet” is unique and original? I’ll bet its a relatively small number. There are 2 Billion search results for the keyword “music”. I don’t think they are all original.

    Realistically, just adding a little bit of your own content to WhyPark’s automatic content is all you should need to do to keep Big G happy. How is that different from a site full of RSS feeds with some of its own original content that is updated monthly? Are there really that many unique ideas out there that we could all come up with something nobody else has ever thought of?

    I’ve always liked the quote “Always remember you’re unique, just like everyone else”.

    What do you think is worse to big G? Dupliate content or being a parked page? Who knows, but I’m finally going to give WhyPark a shot. Only 1 way to find out.

  10. jp, who cares about how much duplicate content there is out there on the web or there isn’t… point is, if you have it on your web site —> you aren’t getting ranked. period.

    what’s so hard to understand about that?

    you dont follow google’s rules, you dont get anywhere in a hurry… i mean, why should you, with crappy sites with random and scrapped content? what good is it for users?!

    this is old newz…. back few years ago people were making millions from doing this, nowadays, it just doesnt work anymore… trust me 😉

    been there, done that.

    scrappers have become link spammers

  11. JP, there is a big difference between a unique idea and unique content. Just because there are 2B results for music doesn’t mean there are hundreds of thousands of pages that have identical content, copied word for word. Most of it, even if covering the same topic, consists of unique content. Besides, of those 2B results, only a very small handful show up near the top of the organic search results. How many do you see near the top that are scraper sites? I see none.

    The issue is that at best Google will see your content as irrelevant and bury it far down in the search results, and at worst it will de-index your site for being spammy and pointless.

    It is not paranoia… it is fear, and it is well founded. It happened to BANS users who created sites with thin content and a lot of affiliate links, and it could happen with WhyPark pages if you don’t supply a lot of your own unique content.

    If you have to spend so much time on your sites, why not just install WordPress and not scrape at all, or use a plugin like FeedWordPress that populates your site with RSS content? You’ll have the exact same end result for free.

  12. @ Domain Name Media – Good points, but skipping the rocks across the pond is the fun, not how many times the rock bounces. So even five minutes a day, writing a “Twitter” update of 250 characters will add new content and change the face of any website.

    WhyPark isn’t meant to be the end-all solution for building out your “best domain” for total consumer or B2B consumption. WhyPark is a domainer’s service, constantly growing and working hard to help domainers to get their “do-nothing” domains “do something”. It’s that simple. To ask for stats of significant, breakout jump-off revenue from a domain parked at WhyPark is like asking how the six foot powder at Snowmass got you down to Molly Gibson’s Lodge. You don’t know, you just did what you needed to do to go in the direction you needed to go…

    I have many domains I know will be worth over $25,000 in three years, like radiotagsystems.com, but for now, makes nothing with my fav PS’s. Do I want to let this domain sit not getting indexed by SE’s for the next three years? No. I want content on the site, and I want to review that content at least once a month, add a page of a few new tidbits of info.

    If you don’t love your domains, regardless of what their revenue suckin is, then dump them. But if you love your domains that aren’t making PPC typein rev, then your best option is to park them at WhyPark and get some content on them until they mature, or you find an enduser buyer.

    WhyPark is only meant to be a viable strategy for serious domainers who have domains they BELIEVE in, beyond the fact that the domains get no typein traffic or PPC rev. WhyPark’s power is in the fact that you are setting up your non-performing but powerful domains to get indexed and possible organic traffic.

    For $.99 a domain one time fee, and a few minutes a month for adding some feedback, you can make your domain name at least become a sprout, instead of leaving it as a dead seed in a drybones desert, which is what a domain name is that doesn’t get the naturals that is parked at a PS.

    It’s either leave your nice generics to rot at a PS that never gets your domain indexed, or send it over to WhyPark and play with it and watch what happens. (This isn’t a diss to PS’s, I use many of them, but I’m moving my domains that show “Zero” traffic over to Whypark so i can at least get some value added to it for an end user sale and potential SE indexing, and for little cost.)

    This is where WhyPark sings strong for domainers…

  13. @JP – Thanks for your comments, dude. You show that in order to know, you have to first experience…

    For a surfing analogy —
    Teahupoo is a great example of extreme goals for a pro surfer. It’s a big break. You put a lot on the line to get the ultimate ride you will never forget (or may not survive, lol).

    But just down the beach is a nice point break with four foot lines 100 yards long…mmmmm…offshore winds, your beautiful girl watching you, basking in the sun and waiting to put her arm through yours when you attend a Tahitian dinner party after dusk.

    Both surfspots have a different purpose, but do you say “either Teahupoo or nothing?” Nope, you appreciate what you can enjoy and you are glad you have the choice.
    (for those of you who don’t know that surfing is the fastest most natural deadly sport there is… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu39AvDtIXw
    JP, I was lucky enough to surf for a summer with Laird when he was 16 at Salt Creek back in early 80’s. Nice, humble guy, even with sand betties dripping all over him. I hear he is still “Clark-Gable-Cool.” His dad, Bill Hamilton is a good bro too)

    Folks, the point from JP’s surfer logic is, I believe, like sitting on the beach watching the waves doesn’t get you into the bowl. JP, who is a proficient and experienced surfer, knows that some surfspots play big, and other’s just play, period. This is the connection of WhyPark for domainers — WhyPark can help you “play” with domains you previously let grow mold on at a PS for years (while you sat on the beach, not even putting wax on your board).

    \µµ/_ (<<<< secret surfer emoticon to JP) heh

    *Hey JP, I bet Elliot could shred aerials on a 5′ tri-fin swallowtail in 2 foot rollers at Rincon. Elliot has that certain determination in his face and a physique that fits perfectly for small wave domination, which leads to big wave greenroom payoffs. yes? Get Elliot to buy a beachfront home in Encinitas, give him two years of practice… and he’ll be hosting domainer surf safaris every year!

    I see it now! ELLIOT’S ANNUAL DOMAINER SURF SAFARI! Elliot puts together a 10 break, three week surf safari for domainers who will gladly get sand in their ears while surfing the best breaks (beginner to pro), talking about the future of domain monetization, and what the weirdest item eaten during the safari trip. Of course, all of it is filmed by Dana Brown. lol

    What say you Elliot? Are you goofy or reggie? 😉
    Okay, I had fun with this comment, Elliot. Thanks again.

  14. I have stared using WhyPark and I have to say that for what you pay it really is cheap. I think with time they will develop even further and offer a real quality service. I noticed that their PPC payings are not that bad either.

  15. Is WhyPark good for domaineering which is the web-based marketing business of acquiring and monetizing Internet domain names focusing on their use specifically as an advertising medium. Does paying extra for WP premium RSS feed worth the cost?

  16. I have been using Whypark for more than five years. I have over 500 domains with WP. It is time saver.it very easy to use or modify and add huge content.it’s HTML code is nice to play around with colors and templates. But hard to add your own pictures. Your domains will settle some dust while with Whypark.o always do kw research before registering domains. Never I could earn good PPC income here from sharing as I don’t know what pc sharing they do with us. Sites are indexed very quickly getting backlinks. We wish mr Craig do something radical to improving the site with the present trends in net or social networks.
    Wish whypark all the best.

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