Among the biggest dif­fi­cul­ties in being a new web­mas­ter is attempt­ing to gain traf­fic.  This is because try­ing to build valid traf­fic calls for both time and mon­ey.  How is this so?  Well, when­ev­er a web­mas­ter is try­ing to get traf­fic through search engines, they will need to spend a good deal of time with link-build­ing and con­tent cre­ation.  If they are seek­ing to get traf­fic by a pay-per-click pro­gram, they will have to invest hun­dreds to thou­sands of dol­lars if they would like to make the best of a high-per­for­mance key­word.  Nev­er­the­less, there is a dif­fer­ent option that can allow for a web­mas­ter to obtain tons of hits with­out being forced to invest  a great deal in time or mon­ey.  It involves buy­ing expired domain names.

What is an expired domain name?  An expired domain name is a domain name that nev­er got renewed by its own­er.  This could be for a vari­ety of grounds such as dis­in­ter­est in the orig­i­nal inter­net site, lack of funds or some­thing graver, such as an own­er’s death.  What­so­ev­er the rea­son, when the renew­al fees are not paid, the expired domain name sit­ting out online is still oper­at­ing as any oth­er domain name.  There is just one dif­fer­ence: an expired domain name does not have a web­site tied to it, so it alter­na­tive­ly points to a 404 error page.

So, it is a waste of traf­fic when an expired domain name points to a 404 web page.  A lot of domain name com­pa­nies have realised this, which is why quite a few sell expired domain names either through a reg­u­lar, direct sale or through an expired domain name auc­tion.   The costs for these domain names can range from less than $100 to over $1 mil­lion.  Many of these sales may even include a web­site.

Thus, how does a web­mas­ter know if an expired domain name is wor­thy of a pur­chase?  First of all, they need to check to see the Google PageR­ank of an expired domain name.  To do this, they need to down­load Google’s tool­bar, then type in the URL of the expired domain name.  The tool­bar will then let them recog­nise what the PageR­ank is.  If the PageR­ank indi­ca­tor is gray, the expired domain name must be avert­ed since this sig­ni­fies that the site has been black­balled by Google.  Oth­er­wise, it ought be okay, though web­mas­ters had bet­ter also take into con­sid­er­a­tion the actu­al num­ber asso­ci­at­ed with the PageR­ank.  If the num­ber is between 6 and 10, they should strong­ly con­sid­er buy­ing the expired domain name.

Sec­ond­ly, web­mas­ters need to deter­mine the Alexa rat­ing of an expired domain name.  The Alexa rat­ing deter­mines how much traf­fic has real­ly gone to a domain name.  If a web­site has not obtained a sub­stan­tial amount of traf­fic, it will not get an Alexa rat­ing.  To check the Alexa rat­ing for an expired domain name, web­mas­ters need to vis­it Alexa.com.

Final­ly, web­mas­ters need to see how many web­sites are link­ing up to the expired domain name.  To do this, they need to put the com­mand link: fol­lowed by the URL of the expired domain name into a search engine.  If many links are gen­er­at­ed, this is a sign that the traf­fic con­cern­ing the expired domain name start­ed from legit­i­mate sources.

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  1. While we are tak­ing on the top­ic of Get­ting traf­fic with expired domains, by using search engines and Direc­to­ries find a web site that has a two-tier affil­i­ate pro­gram for the prod­uct you are look­ing to bro­ker. A two-tier affil­i­ate pro­gramme has the first tier of com­mis­sion the same as in a reg­u­lar affil­i­ate pro­gram. The dif­fer­ence is the addi­tion­al tier(s), where­by mar­keters also earn a com­mis­sion on sales gen­er­at­ed by peo­ple they referred to the pro­gram.

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