As more and more people and companies are investing in domain names these days, it has become obvious that not all of those names will enjoy their full profit making potential. Being a domain reseller and investor with a sensibly sized portfolio, I have frequently been asked what is the best way to making money from those investment domains. What follows are the most general ways to make an income flow or make the most of their resale value.

1. Park the name at a parking service provider
These services pay you a percentage of the revenue they derive from ads placed on a dedicated page displayed when people visit your domain. Also the majority of those parking services also feature a sales listing service to facilitate easy resale marketing of your parked domain.

2. Make your own park page
Similar to the aforementioned, only you create a small Website yourself with ads and receive 100% of the profits. This though will not be as lucrative since the parking services get a much higher traffic flow.

3. Develop a content rich mini-site
These little mini-sites are typically filled with articles interspersed with contextual ads from Adsense. Also often referred to as Adsense Niche Sites

4. Develop a fully-fledged website
Selling products or services and also placing some ads and offering paid links. These can either be offering products of your own or as affiliate links for existing websites.

5. Factors that increase value
During any of the above mentioned steps of value adding and development, you can make profit by reselling the Domain or the Site for a bigger value above the purchase price.

6.  Keywords and brand potential of the name
For example, Make-money.org is a keyword rich domain and has a higher value than CrappyNames.com

7.  Volume of Traffic
In simple words More visitors = More Revenue = Higher Value

8. Return on Investment from the site
(Income for Ads, Sales or Paid Links) . Higher Income earned ,Higher value for the site

9. Present Demand for similar domain names
If a certain kind of domain name is hot property, then all similar names get boost in value due to the existing demand.

10. Present Search Engine Ranking
If the name of domain does not show up in the major search engines or is listed on page 400, than its value is low; on the contrary, if the name shows up at the first page of SERPs than its value will be greater.

11. Number of sites that link to your website
This is related to Traffic and search engine ranking: More quality (!) links = bigger traffic + higher rankings

12. How eager is the buyer for the name
A buyer may want the name for a specific purpose and will pay a premium to ensure they get it.

Things to be wary of in Domain Business

1.  Register domain with a trademarked name
Avoid buying names such as, e.g., “GoogleRanks.com” due to the risk of Legal issues. Most large companies can afford a costly legal fight, can you?

2. Paying too much for a Domain Name
Just because http://ReallyGreat.com sold for $Big-bucks , doesn’t mean paying $bigBucks for any old name will mean reselling it for an even higher price.

3.  Getting scammed by Email and other kinds of spam
Domain investors are usually targeted by a fair share of all sorts of scammers. A typical one is an email from somebody who claims they wish to buy your domain, and all you have to do is use their chosen assessment service to confirm the price they offered. In reality, however, this is merely a trick to get you to pay a high price for this appraisal service.