I haven’t written anything on this blog for a very long time since I’m always working late every night on developing my domains into mini-sites or coding my domain parking and mini-site platform. Now, since my internet connection is down, I thought that I could write a few lines on this blog, sharing what I’ve learnt the last months.

Q: is it to late to get into the domaining business?
A: No. I started november last year (not including my honeymoon in the business, a year where I taught myself the basic stuff) during a sale of ccTLD’s here in Sweden. Today I make $35-$45 USD a day using approximately 600 domains. 50% of these are probably not pulling in any money.

Q: what skills do I need?
A: patience and an average IQ as well as an interest in making money and developing websites. It’s gonna take time, both working time and calendar time and you need to do it for fun partly.

I have more Q&A’s in my head somewhere but I’m gonna save them, just wanted to tell you (and take notes for myself) about how to build a domaining platform, similar to those you pay money for. I find it more fun to make my own. That way I can include all the features I want, when I ant them and keep all the revenue myself.

The basic idea
I started thinking about developing my own domain parking platform some time after purchasing all my domains. After having them parked for a while i realized that the income was low as well as the fact that most domains were not for type-in traffic. I needed a quick way to both get my sites indexed in Google (and other search-engines)in order to be able to

1) increase traffic
2) publish affiliate ads
3) display a “contact me” page in order to get a hold of potential byers and advertisers
4) gradually develop my parked pages into mini-sites displaying Adsense

In order for this to work I would require:

1) all domains point to the same folder of PHP files
2) detect which domain is executing the current PHP file
3) extract the HTML and text etc to display for this particular domain
4) assemble a webpage to present to the visitor

Pretty straighforward right? But how do we accomplish this? Must I become a PHP and SQL whiz first? Nah, easy, I’ll show you every step. When we are done you will have a basic domain parking application up and running. Yes, promise. From there you may develop and add any modules and features you’d like.

Step 1: sign up with a webhosting provider which lets you point unlimited domains to the same account as well as setting the directory that every virtual host is to execute in. Myself, I’m using Servage right now and the examples will be taken from there. Ask your provider how to do it with them.

Step 2: purchase some domains if you don’t already have any. Look for 2-3 keyword domains, there are still some breadcrubs left out there.

Step 3: database design and implementation. Yes, it’s best to keep all the information (except images and templates) in a database from day 1. That way you may create a very powerful application after a while. What do we need for the very least….hmmm….a table about domains maybe? Right, create a new database, name it [yourname]park for example. Mine would be called johanpark. Next, create a new table…what to name it? Well, domain of course. We are going to store information about domains in it. Create it with the following columns:

domain_id (INT)
domain_name (TEXT)
welcome_text (TEXT)

Make the domain_id column primary key and set it to autoincrement. That’s all you need to get started.

Step 4: set nameservers to your selected webhosting company. Using FTP or the online filemanager, create a folder in which to store your PHP files for your domaining platform. Point at least one of your domains to this directory.

Step 5: add one row to the database with the domain_name corresponding to a domain pointing to the directory. Domain_name should have the format ‘www.domain.tld’ in order to work in this basic approach. Welcome_text should contain the HTML or just plain text to display. Later we might talk about templates, SEO etc. Remeber: keep it simple and iterate instead of making it complicated and never to work.

Step 6: in this directory, create your first PHP file: index.php and open it in a decent editor, like Notepad++ for example.

Step 7: code the first version of your domaining platform

<?
# setup database connection
$connection = mysql_connect([insert your db host here],
[insert db user here],
[insert password here]);
mysql_select_db([insert database here], $connection);

# lookup domain welcome text to be displayed
$domain_welcome_text = getDomainInfo($column);

# display welcome text for this domain
echo $domain_welcome_text;

# this function retrieves domain related information from the database
function getDomainInfo($column)
{
$sql = “SELECT * FROM domain WHERE domain_name = ‘” . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . “‘”;
$result = mysql_query($sql);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$text = $row["$column"];
return $text;
}

?>

Step 8: add another domain in database and point it to your domaining platform and you have parked another website at your own domain parking solution.

Well, thats the minimum solution, if any of you find it useful, let me know and I might show you more stuff later on. Good luck. Darn, my internet connection is still down…..grrr…