A name can be worth a lot of money in the digital world of the internet, especially the right domain name or web address.

Simply buying a domain name and waiting for a big corporation to come along and pay you a fortune for it doesn’t work anymore. A really good website and a really good product will do a lot more for you than a catchy domain name. Indeed, some companies have made a lot of money with really lousy names like Google and Yahoo. Still there are reasons to buy the rights to domain names and park or keep them available for use.

If it hasn’t been taken already, you should buy the domain name for your company and for your personal name. Even if you don’t plan to use those names right away that way they’ll be available. The way to do this is to go to www.GoDaddy.com the GoDaddy search engine will show you if the domain name is available and you can buy the rights to it for a low price.

Remember, you don’t have to have a website to control the domain name. You can simply buy the rights to it and park it for future use. Parking means that you just buy the rights and hold onto them until you want to use them.

There are some ways that you can make money through parked domains. The easiest is with Google AdSense. AdSense for domains actually puts advertising on your parked domains and lets you collect pay per click money from those ads. Google AdSense is found at Google under advertising programs.

Another suggestion is to create a basic informational website say one with a brief description and a few pictures. If you use GoDaddy to buy the rights to the domain name of your personal name you could post some pictures of yourself and your family and your resume or a description of your business and its services with some contact information. You could also post some links to your business and other websites that you maintain or websites related to something that you’re interested in. That way if somebody does a search on you they’ll get the information you want them to see about you.

You should do the same thing for your business if you do business under a name or have a company. See if you can buy the domain name for the company and create a basic informational website for it. Just a basic description of your services and some contact information will do.

Getting control of the domain names associate with you and your business is a great way of protecting yourself. This will stop somebody such as your competitor from creating an e-commerce site to cash in on you. It will also keep nefarious individuals from creating a site that will bash you or make you look bad.