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By
Derek Vaughan – Director, www.cpureview.com
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:
http://www.cpureview.com/domains/expireddomainswithtraffic.htm
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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