Whether you are a domain owner or a web developer, the best advertising deals are usually direct deals with advertisers. In many cases affiliate relationships pay more, but for the sake of this post, I will focus on direct advertising deals since that is guaranteed revenue.

The first thing you need to do is obviously build a website on your great domain name. Once you have your site with unique content, add some Adsense blocks on your site. I generally recommend waiting until you are receiving search engine traffic before doing this to make certain that Google and Bing will see that you don’t have a “spammy” site with the sole objective of monetizing the traffic. I don’t have quantifiable evidence, but I’ve been told they may rank these sites lower.

Once your Adsense blocks are showing relevant advertising, you should make note of all of the advertisers whose ads are showing on your site. Make sure you have both text and graphic banners, as some advertisers might choose one over the other. You should also contact friends and colleagues in different areas of the country and ask them to email you those advertisers as well, in the event that there is some geo targeted advertising.

I would then do some research on the advertisers, and contact the companies who most likely have the smaller marketing department, allowing you to get directly in touch with the decision maker. Let them know they are currently advertising on your site via Google, and you would be willing to give them great space on your site. You might even offer exclusivity if you can make it worth your while financially.

Do some research to estimate what they are paying (using Adwords) and offer them a compelling deal. You might also want to keep at least one Adsense text block so you can keep an eye on new advertisers.

If you can make a good argument about why an advertiser should be advertising on your website, you just might score a great deal.

As an FYI, you don’t necessarily need to install Adsense on your site, as you can do the same thing simply by searching Google, although you won’t see banner advertisers.

I believe other parking companies may allow you to use your own photographs on your landing pages, but I had never tried it out until a couple of days ago when I used a photo of my dog with a parked domain name.

I decided to park one of my dog-related domain names with Parked.com. I didn’t think the Dachshund they had on the “dog” template was cute, and I wanted to replace it with my a picture of my Puggle, Lucy. I took a photo my wife had taken and cut it down to the required dimensions. Because the file size was too large, I used a free jpg editor (found at a domain name I previously sold) to cut down the file size.

I then edited my domain name’s theme details, including the landing page image and the theme color. I uploaded the photo of my dog, and within seconds, she was the star of the landing page. It was simple to add Lucy’s photo to this domain name, and it would be simple to change images in any domain name you have parked with Parked.com.

The US government’s Federal Trade Commission has changed the guidelines for bloggers (and celebrities) who write paid reviews or offer endorsements, and I think this is a very good thing for people who read blogs. Bloggers now must reveal whether they were compensated for a product or service review found on their website, which is similar to disclosures companies need to make in advertisements. If they fail to do so, they could receive significant fines.

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s revised Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers.

I can’t recall a time when I wrote a paid review on behalf of a company, although I have turned down several requests. On occasion, a company will offer services (development services for example) in exchange for a mention on my blog, but I generally refrain from providing any opinion in those posts.

When I do provide an opinion, it is based on my actual experience rather than simply writing a glowing report in exchange for a fee. My blogging goal has always been to be helpful to others, and if there’s ever a time when something is written and I am compensated, I will certainly disclose it to you. I also want to add that when a person or company does exceptional work or goes above and beyond on a project for me, I want to let people know about it.