If you’re thinking about getting into the domain parking industry then I’ll let you in on a little secret: The odds are stacked against you. This business has been dominated by a few big players for a while. If you’re starting from scratch, then you have as much chance to succeed in this game as a Tibetan monk with violent garlic allergies has at establishing himself as a dominant player in the Italian Mafia.

The domain parking industry is fundamentally flawed because it is passive. Any business plan that involves a lot of sitting around must eventually fail. It’s similar to any get-rich-quick scam that uses the phrase, “Just sit back and watch the money roll in!” I’ve heard countless eCommerce, Adsense and affiliate schemes that make this claim. They will tell you to have faith in their system, they will warn against doubters who want to steal your get-rich-quick dreams away from you. But I tell you: Don’t buy into anything that says, “Pay me $99.95 and I’ll tell you the secret to making money without having to work.”

Obviously some people make a living in the domain parking industry. I will tell you how they do it. First of all they have tons of awesome domains such as gardens.com or love.com. They do not depend on domains such as “ilikegardensalot.com” or “ireallylikelovealot.com.” Any domain with two or more words will probably never make back the money you spent to register it.

Be wary of buying domains that seem clever right now because they probably suck. You will discover this after it’s too late to cancel your domain choices and get a refund. It doesn’t even matter if you and all your friends think your domain names are clever. What matters is what the general masses think is clever.

Keep in mind that you need people to type your domain names manually. Search engines won’t help you because they hesitate to even acknowledge your parked pages. So you have to ask yourself honestly, “What are the chances of someone typing in www.ireallyreallylikegardensalot.com?” In order for your domain, ireallyreallylikegardensalot.com to pay for itself an average of one hundred separate people will have to type that entire domain every day.

Beware though; some people that are less than ethical and will do things in the domain biz such as redirect people’s homepage to their parked domain so that people are more likely to click. Be cautious of hidden fees and black hat tactics and be sure to read the fine print because there are some known scams out there that benefit the domain parking company much more than they benefit you. Some people call some domain parking practices domain squatting or cyber squatting and some companies have been known to press charges if they suspect that someone is cybersquatting on a brand name that it their intellectual property. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) handles complaints of this nature and looks for motives of bad faith when investigating domain parking scams.