Every day thousands of domains 'expire' and are put back into
the pool of available domains that anyone can register. They
can be very valuable if you are looking for a quality domain
for your online business, or if you want to re-sell them for
profit. But wait! There is another huge advantage to a domain
that was previously owned -- Instant Traffic!
As I said above, expired domains have all been owned by someone
in the past. Many of these previous owners built Websites for
these domains, advertised them, registered them with search
engines, and even exchanged links with other sites. All
translating into traffic to that domain name.
Now, why would someone who took the time to do all that work
let the domain expire? It could be one of several reasons:
* the author simply lost interest
* an online venture ran out of funding
* poor management of the domain
* they couldn't afford the fees
Whatever the reason, it happens. And you can reclaim some of
the wasted traffic and use it to your advantage. You can either
point it to your existing site or use it to jumpstart and add
value to a new site.
How do you know if an expired domain has traffic?
While there is no way to gauge the actual amount of traffic
going to an expired domain, you can find out its link
popularity in the major search engines. This will tell you the
number of Web pages listed in a particular search engine that
link to that domain. The more links, the higher link popularity
and the more traffic that domain is getting (in some search
engines, the higher ranking, too).
A free online tool to help you find the link popularity of an
individual domain at five top search engines can be found at Webofsuccess.com
Another way I recently discovered is to use this powerful
software program called Popular Domains. Among other
features, it allows you to import a list of expired domains
and automatically check the link popularity of each one.
To learn more about it, click here.
As you can see, this can be an affordable way to gain instant
traffic to your site. Be nice, though, and do not abuse this
technique, make sure the site you are sending traffic to
relates to the domain. For example don't register the expired
domain 'ehairplugs.com' just because it has a high link
popularity and then forward the domain to your site about
Internet marketing. Other than that you may use your new
domain with 'built-in' traffic however you wish!
