Have you got a great converting domain and other related domains not converting as well? Have you gone the mini-website route or been tempted to? Perhaps then the funnel method is for you.
Simply put, you take related domains and redirect them (funnel them) to your highest converting parked page or mini-website. The advantage is that you only have to maintain a single page or mini-website. You can spend more time tweaking and developing the landing site to optimize your return. Yes, you can clone mini-websites and even centralize maintenance but this solution is much simpler.
You should have clusters of related domains already especially if you are doing predictive domaining. Why? Because you should become an expert in a niche or small number of niches and be building up domains related to these niches. It is this in-depth knowledge that will give you the advantage over the large domainers. You should then be able to spot the gaps and trends before others.
You can use a permanent redirect or 301 which is the simplest to forward people to your conversion page or site. In most cases this is fine. There are some cases where this may affect trust. For most this is not an issue. For instance, a person looking for a ring tone is not going to care if they are forwarded to another domain if they find what they are looking for on the terminal page.
When dealing with a computer savvy population, they may be aware of the redirect and it can appear spammy to them. A timed redirect with a message telling the person they are about to be redirected is one solution though people may quit the page before the redirect takes place. You can also put a message and a link to the final page you want them to reach but now it requires input from the person to direct to the final page. Another method is to cloak the redirect commonly done by using frame redirects. This preserves the original URL in the browser while showing the final page. This is not recommended as it has been associated with fraud and black hat techniques.
You should not use a temporary redirect or 302 unless the redirection is truly temporary. For these purposes it is a permanent redirect or 301. Personally I only use 301 redirects and they seem to perform well.
There are downsides to the funnel method. The redirect can lower the level of trust and therefore lower your conversion rate. Depending on the spectrum of domain names you redirect, you may not target as many of the people as you might have if you created and tweaked individual pages or sites. These are things you can measure and then decide if it an issue for you.
An example of funneling might be if you had the following domains: PhoneScotland.com, PhoningScotland.com, PhoningUK.com, CallingScotland.com etc. You may choose to redirect these domains to a common domain as these people are probably searching for similar things i.e. good international phone rates or the codes to call Scotland or both.
Funneling can save you time and money and you likely already have closely related domains in your portfolio.
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Yah good points. I do that with my ebook, and seem to work well. Much higher conversion then parking and sale is much bigger as well, i mean MUCH HIGHER.