Traffic-Driving Strategy of Acquiring Expired Domain Names
By: Derek Vaughan, October 22, 2003
There has been a recent rise in the popularity of pay-per-click advertising campaigns that coincides with the success of Google's AdWords Select product. For those of you that don't know, Overture had formerly ruled the pay-per-click universe, until Google launched its AdWords product in late February of 2002. Fast forward to today, and the success of AdWords is one driving force behind Google's anticipated $15-$20 billion pending IPO.
So if you want to drive tons of qualified traffic to your site, you should just come up with some targeted keywords and create an AdWords campaign, right? WRONG!
The most cost-effective way to drive traffic to a web site today is by recycling traffic from expired domains. Every day an average of 20,000 domains expire and become available for re-purchase. A small fraction of these domains have been previously developed and are valuable traffic driving engines with targeted streams of qualified potential customers for your web site.
Why would someone take the time, trouble, and energy to develop a stream of web site traffic only to let the domain expire?
* Careless webmasters that simply don't renew a domain that they meant to keep
* Webmasters that are managing multiple sites and they have no time for the domain
* Companies that have gone out of business
* Webmasters that have lost interest in their web site
This list is probably much longer - filled with many reasons why webmasters relinquish potentially valuable domains with established traffic streams.
However, as the saying goes, "One man's trash is another man's treasure". A vigilant webmaster can snap up these expiring domains acquire the legacy web links and continuing traffic stream for only the one-tine cost of the domain.
The key to implementing this traffic growth strategy is in identifying the few valuable domains that are expiring each day - from the thousands of "junk" domains that are expiring.
You could go through the 20,000 or so domains each day and identify which domains have legacy links pointing to them. Then you could use a traffic tool like Alexa (www.alexa.com) to rate the amount of incoming visits. Then you would want to know if the domain is Yahoo! or dmoz listed (remember is costs for $300-$600 annually to be Yahoo! listed in business categories). You might also want to know of the domain has any Google page rank value - a good indication of the importance placed on the domain by Google. Clearly this could take quite a bit of time each day - if you had the tools and resources to accomplish the task.
Or you could go to a pre-screened list of expiring domains with traffic that already included the above listed items. Luckily, such a list of soon-to-expire domains exists at the following URL:
Expiring domains
Simply check this comprehensive list each week and identify the domains that are relevant to your business. You can do this by checking the back links in Alexa and reading the site description - or by entering the URL into a great tool called the Internet archive at:
http://www.archive.org
In most cases you will be able to see the site's previous content and determine if the traffic is worth your time.
Once you have identified and registered your valuable expired domain, you will enjoy all of the traffic going to it every day without ever paying another cent! No more paying for each click! Good luck in implementing this traffic driving strategy and remember - you shouldn't pay per click!
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