Parked.com Buys WhyPark.com

This will be my last post on the WhyPark Insider. Wow what a year!

I started this blog on May 15, 2008 shortly after I made an investment in WhyPark. Exactly one year later Parked.com bought Whypark. Incredibly ironic is I made this statement in my first post

"This blog will have a short life; once I’ve told my story, I’d rather get back to running my other businesses."

What a telling statement. 17 posts, 11 board meetings and 366 days later, I'm thrilled to see WhyPark enter it's next phase of growth and have no doubts that Craig and the team at WhyPark will prosper with the help of Parked.

The combined Parked and WhyPark will be a powerhouse in the monetization of domain names. Both are best in class companies. The most recent Domain Name Wire survey voted WhyPark the best domain parking alternative. The vote was a landslide with WhyPark receiving 49% of the vote, more votes than the top four competitors combined, with the closest holding 15% of the vote. In the same industry survey, 58% of the people who have used Parked rated it as the best domain parking company. Six percentage points higher than it's closest competitor.

I predict that Parked + WhyPark will dominate this industry. Both companies are led by superior, ethical and well respected leaders, Donny and Craig. Having worked closely with Craig for the past year I can say he is a brilliant down to earth businessman whom will be an incredible asset for Parked.

A year ago, I was a happy customer who saw an enormous amount of potential in WhyPark. A year later, I'm back to being a happy customer who still sees an enormous amount of potential in WhyPark. Thanks a million to Craig for all the hard work you put in this last year and I wish you all the success in the world. Donny you've created one heck of a company and I wish you all the best.

I guess I should get going and submit an application for a Parked account since they're not the competition any longer. Over and out, Alan aka the WhyPark Insider.

WhyPark in the News

WhyPark has been in the press a bit this week and I thought I'd pass on a couple of links. Thanks to the bloggers who reported about WhyPark. You may get a chuckle from the perp walk at the end of this post!

Namecake.com Interview About the New Platform

Domain Name Wire Announces ContentPromote.com

Domainer Income Talks About TRAFFIC Down Under

Can You Pick the Guilty Party Out
They all Look Guilty of Something - at least Mark Cuban is Missing.
This isn't a perp walk. It's just the TRAFFIC Down Under speaker list.

WhyPark's President Speaks At Traffic Down Under

Last week Craig Rowe, WhyPark's president, attended the T.R.A.F.F.I.C Down Under conference to deliver a speech titled, Web Development, Content is King. Presented below are the slides from his presentation.

The intent was to provide an unbiased view of different types of domain development projects and contrast the pros and cons of each. Without further commentary, here is the presentation.

Make Sure to Describe Your Website with Good Anchor Text Links

At WhyPark we provide content to populate your sites. However, by writing your own article and syndicating it among your sites or via article directories you can help tell search engines what your site is about. The effective use of anchor text that links back to your site, is a statement of what your site is about.

Here is an example of an article I wrote to promote my retail site kidscoats.com, but it could have been just as easily used to promote another of my sites at WhyPark like kidsdresses.com.

Girls Coats to Match Your Family Lifestyle

Fashion and function are two words that go great together when choosing girls coats. Gone are the days when your kids coat looks more like a cartoon billboard than a fashion forward piece of outerwear.

When we're asked what is a good choice for little girls coats we ask that you think about your daily lifestyle. During a typical day my girls go to school, are shuttled to dance, gymnastics and kids play dates, go back and forth from the car to our house as well as friends and relatives houses, occasionally walk or go ice skating with us outside, play with their friends in the school yard, come with us to events like hay rides, holiday parties and movie outings and occasion play in the snow. Yes, we do get our share of snow storms here in Massachusetts.

If your lifestyle is something like this a Corky coat is a perfect choice for your girls outerwear. Each year our girls pick a beautiful Corky hat and coat set that brings tons of compliments and a very inexpensive nylon winter coat (we get no compliments on these coats!) for those rare days when they want to play in snow or go sledding. The great thing about a Corky coat is that they are lined in super warm fleece, can be worn everyday and are dressy enough for a special occasion. Kids winter coats are probably most expensive piece of apparel that you will buy all year, but it's also the single piece of apparel that will get the most use.

Matching your outerwear choice to your lifestyle is very important. If on the other hand, your kids are skiers and not girly girls like mine you should probably choose to invest in a high tech ski parka. The ski parka can also serve as your girls everyday coat, but you'll probably need to buy another coat for those dress up occasions. Be careful when choosing a wool girls coat because they are not machine washable. We are obviously biased towards, Corky coats, but they are less expensive than a nice girls wool coat, are machine washable and look great on any special occasion.

KidsCoats.com has a large selection of toddler coats. If you're looking for unique baby coats we have great selection of brand names.

Note the Anchor Text Links - These are Important

girls coats, kids winter coats, toddler coats, baby coats

Here is the HTML code you I used to create the anchor text link for "Kids winter coats"

< href="http://www.kidscoats.com/">Kids winter coats< /a>
(Just remove the space after "<" and "<"to make this an active link)

You can place an article like this on a WhyPark site, syndicate to article directories or use a soon to be unveiled WhyPark content promotion service.


Note how I linked to contentpromote.com via the anchor text "content promotion." By using anchor text like this I'm making a statement that the website is about "content promotion."

I hope you don't find this post too remedial, but I wanted to show the importance of linking to your websites with anchor text as opposed to just using the domain name.

WhyPark Sitemaps for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo

Submitting a sitemap through your Google webmaster tools account and WhyPark is an easy way to increase the probability of having your domain crawled and indexed. But, did you know with WhyPark you can also easily submit your sitemap to Yahoo and Microsoft! Here's how.

Here is view of the WhyPark control panel for my domain ChildrensCoats.org. Notice that I have three Meta Name tags in the sitemap verification block. These are the verification codes provided by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.


Google Webmaster Tools


Microsoft Webmaster Center


Yahoo Site Explorer



You'll need to create a free webmaster account with each search company and that is about the hardest part of submitting your sitemaps to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The benefits of using the tools of all three are pretty substantial.

Widget Wonk Increases Your Sites Interactivity with Creative Use of Widgets

There are some awesome ideas for enhancing WhyPark built sites using widgets at the blog Widget Wonk. Suonim, a customer of WhyPark, started the blog to share some of the neat widgets he's used to spiff up his WhyPark sites. I've used some of his suggestions like the Google translate widget and they add an impressive level of interactivity to my sites with very little effort.

Here are some samples of his sites using some of the widgets highlighted in his blog.

Google translate widget on the Nijo Castle site (I also like the embed You Tube video!)

With One Click it's Now Translated to French

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Then if you click on a link to another site, that site is also translated to French. So cool!


Here's another interesting widget used at Memory Island, Making Memories with Photography. Suonim selected an appropriate popular public room from Google Lively and embed it in the WhyPark layout. As Lively users move around, chat, and change the objects in the room, they are making the site more interesting.


There are many more widgets he's shown how to use on Widget Wonk. It is well worth the time to browse through his blog because implementing the widgets on WhyPark sites add a lot of aesthetic appeal for very little effort.

WhyParker's are Site Builders, Not Domain Parkers

A few days ago we highlighted a customer's domain Go Telepresence as one example of how you could use WhyPark to quickly build sites. Since then he has made a few tweaks and put the site on a Name Pros Wed Site Design Review thread. The feedback consensus is "this isn't a parked domain."

WhyPark is not domain parking company, it's a content provider, web host and SEO service that gives you the tools to quickly build attractive and engaging sites for visitors. It's a way for you to monetize sites that get little type in navigation traffic while you wait to either sell the domain or develop a more robust site.

Yes, the parking companies are free and WhyPark costs a one time fee of $100 for 100 sites. Before you sign-up do your homework, but I feel you will not find a better service to build a site and monetize your domains.

This is a really great looking site. I've come across many other nice creative WhyPark sites and I'll share them with you after I get the photoshop work done!

I'll finish with a quote from a recent unpaid KillerStartups.com review of WhyPark: