Bill Myers April 26, 2008

Here's how to quickly reclaim potential revenue from all those domain names you have registered but are not using.

If you have unused domain names which are not being hosted, it is quite likely that the company you registered those domain names with, is earning money from them.

It works this way.

If web surfer tries to go to the website of an inactive domain, instead of finding a '404 not found' error page, they will see a page of ads created by your domain name registrar.

And if a visitor clicks on any of those ads, the registrar earns a commission - and you get nothing.

There is no reason you should be giving up this potential revenue, since it is so easy to claim it for your own.

To do this, create a Google AdSense page, and place that page on any other site you have on the web - even your blog.

Then use domain name forwarding (a free service from most domain registrars), to forward your domain name to the Google AdSense page you created.

When you do that, people who type in your domain name will be forwarded to the ad page, and if they click on any ad, you earn a commission.

You can see an example of how I did this with one of my sites at http://www.6av.com

To quickly create a page of Google ads, use the free Google Adsense Page generator I have on my site at http://www.bmyers.com/members/1096.cfm

If you don't care about the ad revenue, you can use domain name forwarding to point to a 'domain names for sale' page, like I have at http://www.bmyers.com/public/department18.cfm

With either method, you regain control of what is shown when web surfers try to reach your unused domains, and you increase the chance of earning some revenue from inactive domain names you own.