The Expired Traffic Equation

Expired Domain + Link Popularity = Expired Traffic

Homesteading - An Interesting Analogy

Back during the colonization boom in the late 1800's, an act called the Homestead Act of 1862 allowed one person to take claim over the land and property of another, if that person had abandoned it to colonize further westward. Talk about a free lunch. As it turns out, some settlers found fully built homes, with irrigated and cultivated land, all available for the taking. One man's loss, as it turns out, is always another's gain.

In a similar fashion, the Homestead Act of 1862 can be applied to domain names--the virtual real estate property you build your site around. Anyone has the right to lay claim to a domain if the previous owner has abandoned it. As with homesteading for land and property, homesteading for domains is essentially the same thing. Some owners spent years building up their virtual online property while others may have left it undeveloped. Being able to differentiate between the two means all the difference in the world.

Why Previously Developed Sites Expire

Every day, thousands of domains are expiring due to non-renewal. This is when a domain owner fails to fork over the small yearly renewal fee for it to his registrar. Sometimes names expire because the owners aren't using them; other times the owners forget to renew their registrations.

A portion of these domains are very valuable since they still receive visitors--from search engine listings, and links they still maintain on other sites across the Web. If you can re-register these domains when they become available, it's a great way to boost the traffic to an existing site, or make money off the traffic the domain is still getting.

The major selling point here is that a domain name costs under $9/year (on sites like Godaddy.com) to purchase. So for $9, you can purchase domains which are still receiving anywhere from a few hundred to over a million visitors over the course of the year. And up until now, only a few people were aware of this obscenely scandalous tactic for acquiring targeted traffic.

Now you might be thinking that re-registering expired domains with built-in search engine and link traffic is just the lowliest form of cyber-squatting.

Not at all. The fact is, a domain can expire for a number of legitimate reasons.

• The previous owner may have run out of money to promote the site.
• They may have lacked the time and motivation to manage the site.
• They may have gotten tied up in other activities or another job.
• They simply forgot to renew their domain.
• They may have regrettably succumbed to illness or even death.
• They failed to receive the notice from their registrar informing them that their domain was about to expire.

If it happens that the previous owner wants their name back, the ethical thing to do would be to give it back to them for a nominal fee, maybe $200 or less. In this way, you make a quick profit off the domain, and the previous owner walks away with their old site back.

So How Do You Go About Finding Domains With Expired Traffic?

Through link popularity, the second part of the expired traffic equation.

Link popularity is a wildly popular concept with site developers and is used by many top search engines, such as Google, in their site ranking algorithms. Link popularity measures the number of incoming links a Website has on other sites across the Web. If, for example, you run www.widgets.com, and participate in a link exchange with 100 other sites on the Web, your site should hypothetically have a link popularity of 100. You've enhanced your site visibility, gotten fresh leads from these other sites, and your search engine rankings are improved in the process. Chances are the higher a site's link popularity is, the more traffic it receives, since it is visible across more places on the Web.

But what happens when a previously developed domain expires and becomes available to re-register? Do the links to it on other sites and the search engines disappear?

For the most part, no. And that's the kink in the system you can exploit. Websites, search engines and directories hardly have the time and effort to manually check if each and every one of the links on their site are active. This is what Ultsearch ultimately recognized. He understood that he could check lists of expired domains to isolate those domains with high link popularity numbers. It was these domains that were most likely previously developed and still receiving traffic from the links and search engine rankings which the previous owner of the domain had established. And for $8.95, he purchased these domains which were still receiving daily visitors, and made the best possible of their daily stream of traffic.

The Value of Expired Traffic

Now here's where it starts to get really fun. Let's say you find and register an expired domain, XYZ.com, which still receives 50 visitors/day. This is how it breaks down.

Expired Name: XYZ.com receives 50 visitors/day
Visitors in 1 year: 50*365 = 18,250
Cost of domain: $8.95/yr
Cost per visitor: $8.95/18,250 = $0.00049/visitor
Yearly Income Potential w/Allclicks: 18,250*0.02 - $8.95 = $356.05
Income Potential w/ 250 similar sites: 250*356.05 = $89,017/year

Herein lies the key to why expired traffic is so powerful. In this scenario, you've found a site which is still getting 50 visitors a day. Over the course of a year, you receive over 18,250 real targeted visitors, for the cost of a domain name, $8.95. For webmasters, expired traffic is great since you can find like-minded sites which have expired but are still receiving traffic. You can redirect these visitors to your existing site, all for mere fractions of a penny.

If you don't currently run any sites, you can place targeted affiliate links for advertisers or redirect the site to something like Allclicks.com, which pays you $0.02 for every visitor to your site, irrespective of how you link to them. This way, with a domain receiving just 50 visitors a day, you make $356 off an investment of only $8.95. This is almost a 4000% return on your investment. It gets really interesting when you start to register a large number of sites receiving expired traffic. (Ultsearch, for example, is estimated to be making several millions dollars a month off expired traffic.)

So how do you get a piece of this market--a market where a select few individuals in the know have quietly gone on to make untold millions? Through the right tools, and sound advice. Understanding every aspect (locating expired traffic, registering it, and properly utilizing it) of this nascent game--which I estimate fewer than 2-3 thousand or so individuals are actively participating in--is the key to prospering in it. Very few legitimate opportunities exist on the net which offer entrepreneurs startup costs of less than $10, minimal, passive involvement, and a growing recurring revenue stream--expired traffic just happens to be one of them. While everyone continues to march to the drum of optimizing and developing existing sites to eek out small gains, I'll continue to find other people's abandoned property, and use it without fail to make a quick buck. But hey, you do what suits you best!

About The Author
Ken Johar is Founder of ExpiredTraffic.com and has experience working as a professional domain speculator and investment advisor. He has written numerous articles & tutorials on the topic of expired site traffic. ExpiredTraffic.com is the only source for finding, capturing and profiting from the burgeoning expired traffic industry. "Expired Traffic for Dummies" is a great resource for understanding the ins and outs of expired traffic and yours FREE just for visiting his web site.

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