Mis-spelt domains

Most people park their typo domains at a parking service like sedo.com or parked.com.  The parking company optimizes the landing page (with some help from you) so it contains relevent links.

A typo of a high traffic domain can make decent money (depending on what "decent money" means to you).  Even better money comes by selling the typo domain for 10-20 x monthly earnings.

Some examples
http://www.namepros.com/domain-names-with-traffic-stats/477080-wedkinz-com-makes-least-800-per.html
http://www.namepros.com/domain-names-with-traffic-stats/452256-nickalodion-com-118-per-month.html
http://www.namepros.com/domain-names-with-traffic-stats/456323-banking-typo-7-000-uniques-per.html

Actually just browse this
http://www.namepros.com/search.php?searchid=2268484

I own misspelllings of a few of my competitors domains. I see a few unique users a day visit my sites from each one. Is it worth paying for the domains, absolutely.  

For example: my competitor is www.ussearch.com - I own www.ussaerch.com and have it redirect to my site.  I also set up catch all email address for them and often get email from their customers who I can help direct to the proper place. And I let them know they contacted me in error but I often hear back from them as my competitors are big companies with less hands on service.

So, in summary to answer your question, yes, misspellings can be used in many ways. If you already own web sites, I have found owning misspellings of your competitors domains valuable.

If you don't already own domains generating revenue then you would have to develop sites for the misspellings and either run ads, or have RSS feeds with relavant content to get indexed in order to effectively direct traffic and make any money.

Just owning the misspellings in itself is not going to help you unless you actively put them to work for you.

I understand now, that has certainly cleared up some elements of what I thought.

So the building of the back links, and SEO in general is the same as any website?  Is it a case of getting the ranking/traffic then going to actual company and saying we are driving x number of visitors your way, how about a percentage?    Then I replace links with referal links so the actual company and I can view visitor/referal hits etc?  Or would one go to a ad agent for niche links?

Some of the pages I have viewed are simple pages some have the actual companies logo on presumably these are company owned mis-spelts?

Now on second cup of coffee so brain will spend up soon :)

SEO is SEO, and it will be the same for any site.  There is nothing new, SEO wise, under the sun, but rather there are new ideas and ways to get at those tried and true methods of performing SEO.  In regard to tracking your visitors, Google Analytics is about as good as it gets for free.  And you can use Google Adsense to monetize these sites pretty effectively.  

Regarding whether or not other mis-spells are company owned or not, I would not be sure.  I would think that any company owned mis-spelled domain would redirect you to the regular domain, not a separate version.  So, if the site on the mis-spelled domain does not reflect the site on the correctly spelled domain, I would say it is not company owned.  

Did that address your questions?

Never approach a company to monetize a misspelling of their own trademark.  By doing so you are admitting to using the domain in "bad faith" and can be sued.
---
http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp-policy-24oct99.htm
b. Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith. For the purposes of Paragraph 4(a)(iii), the following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be present, shall be evidence of the registration and use of a domain name in bad faith:

(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or

(ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that you have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or

(iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or

(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.
---

Cybersquatting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting
Typosquatting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting

So how do people make money out of it then? I am now very confused... :)

I should have said, so if you cannot have referal links on your misspelt domain webpage....ie you get $0.01 for everyone that clicks through to the actual website they were looking for in the first place.  How do people make money?

clicks range anywhere from 0.01 to $10 or more depending on the niche.  Clicks in the asbestos lawyer niche are upwards of $50.

The most I've gotten for a click from parked.com is $1.53, but an average is about .10 to .20.  Parked only pays about half of what they collect, so if you used AdSense the numbers are bigger.

1,000 clicks @ 0.25 = $250

You can see the kind of traffic domains you probably never heard of are getting from the links I posted. If Nickalodion.com gets 100 clicks a day, imagine what utube.com gets.  (Notice utube was smart enough not to put one video related ad on the page.)

So who pays for these clicks?  If the actual website (company) is not going to paying for the clicks to their site from the mis-spelt domain, who/how do you charge for the clicks?

I understand if you have adsense on the pages, that google pays a percentage, from the advertisers of the links in the adsense.

oopppss pressed enter too soon.  

So thats it is it?  Have a mis-spelt domain, for example www.abestolawyer.com  which is mis-spelt of www.asbestoslawyer.com  so when people looking for the that URL they may get my one...on my page there are adsense full of lawyers?

Yes, that is how it works.  Each parking company has its own feed.. parked.com uses Yahoo.

Parking companies

parked.com
parkingpanel.com
sedo.com
bodis.com

You point your nameservers to those companies and they populate the page with ads for you.

Oh right...better go an find some mis-spelt domains to buy then...lol

Or is it possible to do myself?  I certainly have the HTML skills...I can place adsense on there...?

Yes, you can do it yourself and add adsense.  People use parking companies because they have 100s or 1000s of domains.

Look on forums.digitalpoint.com or namepros.com if you want to find misspells that already have traffic stats.

Actually I've done well out of a misspelt domain, well it wasn't exactly misspelt as such...

Backstory: English Comediene Catherine Tate has a character that goes on about protesting for charities, one week she mentioned a certain website and I checked for availability - it was available so bought it for £10.

I then contacted a local business that sells ringtones and merchandise and within a few hours we had a small site selling Catherine tate ringtones (legitimately) and from that I made quite a bit of cash and at the end of it the popularity of the domain meant I could resell it on or turn it into a pop culture site like break.com or b3ta.com and get more cash from adverts.

Shows you that marketing people dont do their jobs when researching - their loss, my gain!

Exactly what I was referring to.  There are lots of lapsed sites out there that can be bought for a reasonable price and monetized through various means in straight forward ways.  So, if you can get 'em, then go for it and don't look back!

Still sounds confusing as apart from bluefezteam: little finacial bonus....wouldn't having typo domains just fall under the Cybersquatting/Typosquatting gwkg mentions?

As I preume having koka-kola.com would fall into that category? or would I place a link to the correct domain, but also have adsense on there for other sparkling drinks?

Or have I comepletly lost the plot?

so you can buy typos, and just fill the webpage with adsense links to matching niche websites.  I would rather do that than go through a 3rd party like the ones mentioned above...keep all the money or lack off it myself...lol  and if there is mud...well as the saying goes wheres theres muck theres brass...:)

If you are just buying one domain, I would agree about not parking it.

When you buy them in quantity (I own over 700), it is more cost efficient to park them and get an idea of the type of traffic they are pulling.  Then you can develop your own adsense page for the domains that get the most traffic.

Another advantage of parking is the parking company will add your page to their search engine.  So you will get some extra traffic that you normally wouldn't get.  The extra page views isn't enough to justify parking a single page.

Also, if you are trying to sell your domain, you will get more exposure and a built in 3rd party mediator with you page parked at a company like Sedo.

If all you have is one page, or even 10 pages, parking may not even be an option because most companies do not accept small portfolios.  Sedo is an exception.

But yes, you will make more money per click with your own adsense ads.