Two Great Reasons Why You Should Be Buying Expired Domains

Expired domains can be found very easily using the DomainTools.com domain finder service. Those who are serious about traffic acquisition will already know their way around the various tools, but you may have overlooked this one.

It's called Dropping Names, and contains domain names that people don't want any more, or have no use for. A simple search yields a list of related names in a series of columns. The two that we're most interested in are:

• the domain name itself;
• the domain age.

Here's a quick reminder - the domain name must relate to your site, otherwise (a) these techniques won't work, and (b) you'll end up with irritated visitors.

So, pick a domain name that is relevant.

Someone Had It First

The first reason to buy an expired (or expiring) domain name is that someone had it, there are likely bookmarks pointing to it, and at the very least, it has some recognition. Plus, if you didn't have it, that's probably because you wanted it, but it wasn't available.

This could produce a trickle, or a flood of traffic, and is similar to the Revisitors.com philosophy.

Once the domain name has been purchased (probably in an auction, if it's any good), you will need to remember to update the 404 Page Not Found redirects to point to your own site. Otherwise, the bookmarks will fail, and you really want them to go to a page that contains quality links to your main site.

Authority Comes with Age

The second reason to purchase an expired domain name is age. A domain that has been around a while, and is relevant, can be linked to sites that haven't. Those sites can benefit from the Domain Age and rank more highly in search engine results pages.

This can also help to drive traffic towards your site, provided that all the other on- and off-page SEO principles have also been respected.

There are other reasons for buying up expired names, and other tools for finding them, but the process remains the same, and web real estate remains one of the more valuable components of a traffic acquisition strategy.

Website Traffic Flipping : The Traffic Acquisition Cookbook

This is one of the more expensive, but potentially one of the highest return, methods for increase quality traffic flow to a web site. It's lifted from the forthcoming Keyword Cracker Traffic Acquisition Cookbook, which contains (at the present count) eleven separate strategies for generating high volume, high quality traffic.

There are three steps to website traffic flipping:

• acquire the website;
• convert the traffic;
• integrate the site.

It's important to note that this is much like a company takeover in which a rival is purchased for the customer list, and other assets, and the two are eventually amalgamated. I don't personally like the term asset stripper, but if you're familiar with it, try to think of this as something of the same.

Acquiring the Website

This requires research, and verification. Low priced sites, such as Squidoo lenses can be found on the open marketplace, and I daresay that there are Wordpress blogs for sale as well.

They need to have a high volume of traffic, be turning a profit, and have high conversion rates. The high conversion rates are important, especially when measured for pages that rank highly for the keywords that your traffic acquisition plan is targeting, as you're paying for engagement rather than raw traffic and conversion.

Other assets include mailing lists and backlogs (pipelines) of un-published, quality blog posts. Be prepared to offer a bit more for these, as they are very valuable in the right hands.

Converting the Traffic

Sounds easy - all you need to do is put a link to your website in their list, right?

If that's all there was to it, then a simple Joint Venture would suffice. However, the reason that we're buying the site rather than just doing a JV is to have the control to be able to convert the traffic in a consistent and controlled manner.

It's a gradual process of re-education (of existing customers) and gently diverting them to the new site, where they are promised better quality resources and content, and better deals on purchases.

Integrating the Site

At a given point, all the existing affiliate links will be converted to yours, and the various back-links will have been upgraded to point to your own site; and the customers will be educated.

The final stage is to ensure a consistent look and feel by redirecting the URLs so that they point to content on your site, and gradually phase out, or move across, the acquired content.

This final stage is, in fact, optional, as you could choose simply to dispose of the acquired site, having converted the customers and re-deployed the key assets. This is the online equivalent of the asset stripping I spoke of earlier, and as I said, I'm not 100% keen on it.

But it does work, probably better online than in the real world.

Traffic Acquisition Strategies for Lifestyle Businesses

A lifestyle business is one that let's you lead the kind of lifestyle that you want - be it as a kind of nomadic business owner working four hours per week (as in Timothy Ferris' "Four Hour Work Week"), or a stay-at-home parent - without any pretense that you're trying to build an empire or legacy.

On the face of it, it's a fairly easy proposition. After all, there are any number of bloggers out there who make a reasonably healthy living, as well as freelance SEOs, article writers, and various affiliates.

However, as Sean Ogle points out on his blog:

"The single most difficult roadblock you’ll encounter when starting a business like this is traffic. You know there are thousands if not millions of people out there who have the same interests as you, but finding them during your first year can seem like nothing short of an impossibility."

(As an aside, it's well worth checking out his Location Rebel product - it's free, and I get nothing for pointing you in that direction - it's just a great read!)

So, lifestyle businesses will live or die on the amount of traffic that they will receive. I don't care if you're a bricks and mortar business, or an affiliate marketer, or some kind of online-offline amalgamation mash-up of the two, business is your lifeblood.

On Sean's blog post, he gives his approach, but it can be easily generalized, although your mileage will vary.

He embraces the Facebook route : set up a Facebook page, get traffic to it by using Facebook adverts, point the visitors to a domain that captures their email address by dangling a carrot in front of them, and then give them a great freebie to say 'thanks'.

That's one way, but it works equally well with any high-traffic content-centric well-curated publishing platform. Squidoo, Hub Pages, article repositories, even Blogger can all be used to generate traffic as long as you provide high quality on-topic content.

On the advertising side, Google AdWords are a great way to get some targeted traffic. You'll need to test various campaigns (and Google's made that really easy), but it will work for the correct set of keywords.

Paid inclusion to search engines can also help, but again, you need to be sure that the keywords that you choose are conducive to bringing in traffic that is actually going to convert into actions. Check out my Future of Organic SEO article for more information in that direction.

Bricks and mortar lifestyle businesses can also benefit from using traffic acquisition strategies - but you'll need to go local. Local search, local web site traffic (i.e. local Facebook pages and Blogger blogs) and locally facing keywords.

For example, in my own niche, model rail, there often seem to be different keywords for different locales - in the UK it's model railway, in the US it's model railroad, for example - and it's worth taking a moment to segregate the search terms by country just to make sure that you're still bang on target.

Not forgetting, of course, to test, test, test!