Traffic From Expired Domain

This used to be a somewhat secret method for pulling in good amounts of traffic on the cheap. It can still be effective today, but there’re more "gotchas" to take into consideration before you buy that expired domain name. I’ll explain why this is so a little further on.

First let’s talk about the method itself…

Webmasters allow their domains to expire for a variety of different reasons – what’s important for you is just how much work that webmaster already did to get his site ranked in the search engines, build up incoming links, etc.

What happens is this:

Someone starts a site and begins getting traffic based on the keywords they’ve ranked on, the incoming link relationships they’ve built, any articles they’ve written with their domain in the byline, etc.

But if the domain is allowed to expire – and no one else snatches it up – there’s going to be a window of time where the site is still receiving traffic from those old links and listings.

The traffic that arrives via outdated links will click away unless someone takes over that domain and puts something there worthy of looking at.

But, if you take over that domain, that traffic is yours to direct as you wish.

I should mention now that this isn’t quite as easy to do as it used to be. A company based out of China called Ultsearch capitalized in a huge way on expired domain traffic by buying up literally thousands upon thousands of expired names, and replacing the home page with sponsor links that earned them a profit on every click (to the tune of about 80 million USD).

My point in bringing this up is twofold:

a) You need to be fast on the draw in order to snatch up really good expired domains, and…

b) You need to put some quality content on the site, rather than just redirecting or slapping up some irrelevant links.

You want to capitalize on the existing targeted traffic rather than send them clicking away again.

If you do intend to use this method for redirecting pages (to an affiliate program, for example), just make sure what you’re redirecting to is relevant and targeted.

Making the Most of Expired Domains:

If you manage to grab a domain with decent ranking in one of the search engines, particularly Google, you might want to see if there is a cached version of the page available.

You’ll be able to take that page and analyze it to determine some of the ranking factors and possibly expand or build on them in order to maintain or even boost your search engine ranking.

Mostly, you need to work as quickly as possible, and understand that the domain might lose some of its value as the search engines and other webmasters discover a brand new site has taken its place.

The ideal tactic here, in my experience, is to use the domain to feed traffic into your opt-in list, and then redirect those new subscribers to your primary site once you’ve captured their address.

No matter what you decide to put on one of these domains, it’s crucial that you have lead capture in place; otherwise, you won’t be making the most of your new traffic.

Finding and Buying Expired Domains:

There’s a time consuming way to do this, and there’s any easier way to do this. The time consuming method involves searching through search engine listings and clicking on links to see if you get any ‘page not found’ errors.

When you see this error, it might mean the domain is expired – or it might not. The site could just be down temporarily due to technical difficulties. What you have to do once you find one of these pages is run an additional search through a domain registrar to see if the domain is available.

As you can imagine, this is tedious and not the most efficient way to go about things.

Luckily, there are software programs out there to do this work for you, as well as live auction sites where webmasters put their expiring domains up for sale.

Did you know you can also backorder domains?

When you backorder a domain, you’re putting your hat into the ring for a domain that has a pending expiration date. There’s a window of time where, unless the webmaster renews quickly or has his domain ‘locked’, the domain will be released by Verisign and available for you to snatch up.

This can be hit or miss, but when it works, you can come away with some real gems in expired domain traffic.

[ad name=”postad3″]