extra traffic
How to get valuable extra traffic?
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 | Webmaster Tips | No Comments
Well, this one will be short but I hope you will find this article very useful. As a matter of fact, I already know how useful it is, but so far I didn’t meet a lot of webmasters who recognized the way of getting traffic that I will tell you about in this article.
To be honest, I thought a lot about should I tell you this little „secret“ of mine or not. Traffic is very important these days and by letting you know what I’m using to get extra traffic with few extra „bonuses“ would mean that I’m giving „my“ traffic away. But no, I think that internet is big enough for lot of webmasters and there is no way that many webmasters will use this tactics to enter my niche, so by making this public I will only help some webmasters to get extra traffic to their website, while my traffic will be safe or I won’t lose too much.
Now, lets get straight to the topic… How to get extra traffic and what type of traffic I’m talking about?
First of all, I’m talking about getting (almost) free 404 traffic. Yeah, I know, many of you would say: F*ck it, 404 traffic is useless!
Well, OK if you think so, but I would rather take „lot of“ 404 traffic than no traffic at all. Possibilites of monetizing 404 traffic are endless, but it can be used to feed your main pages too, which gives you new boost of traffic that can be very producive.
Think about it… surfers that came to your website looking for some old page that you had there are really interested in the topic about your website. Of course, if we assume that the old page you had on your server was on the topic of your website. For example, if you have a website about cars, we will assume that you didn’t have some web page about birds that you deleted, so that people clicked for your page about birds ended on the main page about cars wouldn’t be interested on that subject.
So, we will assume that you will make your website around the topic that your domain name is about, and that all your pages will cover that main subject.
Now, how you can get extra traffic?
There is one possible way I want to tell you about, and it’s pretty easy – expired domain names!
I suppose most you will again said: That’s b*llshit!
Yeah, you may think that way, but let me explain this method.
Most of the expired domain names were used by previous owners, who let them expire because of various reasons. Either they don’t want to work on that domain name, or they changed niche they are working in, or they forgot about renewing thier domain names (happen to me a few times, so nothing strange or impossible), etc.
In most cases, those domain names are valuable as they have some existing traffic, or some of their pages are already indexed in search engines or have links on other websites pointing to those pages.
You can easily check that by going to Google and typing in „site:domain.com“ or „link:domain.com“. If you see some seach results and some pages exist in Google, you have a winner!
Other way to check if particular domain name was previously developed and actively used is to check WhoIs data, where you will see number of previous owners, DNS changes and similar (which proves that domain name was developed), while on some WhoIs services you can even get a preview about previous look of the website on that particular domain name.
If you can find information like that, it’s very likely that expired domain name will give you some extra 404 traffic.
Now, what you need to do to take a benefit from that 404 traffic?
You can either build a custom 404 page with your own ads, or you can point all error traffic (400 – 404 errors, 500 error, etc) to your main page, which will be on the topic of that particual domain name.
To be honest, I’m getting around 30,000 – 40,000 visitors monthly, only from error traffic from domain names that I bought as expired ones. Now, if that traffic converts on 1:10,000 ratio, it’s still 3 – 4 sales per month, which is great for „free“ traffic.
Right now I sending all the error traffic to my main page on each domain name, but in the start I was using custom error pages with ads and links to other pages on that particular domain name, and I can tell you that you can expect much better ratios than 1:10,000. I would say that you can easily get 1:1000 ratio with the right ads on error pages, or even better if you send them to your main pages where you have better sales text (I assume you have). Now, that would be 30 – 40 sales per month with „free“ traffic.
Would you call it a „bad and useless“ traffic? I certainly wouldn’t.
Why do I say „free“ traffic (with quotes)? Because it’s not really free traffic as you need to buy that expired domain name, which will cost you around $8 – 10 per year per domain name. But, since you are getting a domain name which is, apparently, worth of nine bucks if it has existing traffic and indexed pages, and it also gives you opportunity to get easier ranks for the new content and main pages, since it’s already in the search engines.
In the way I’m seeing this, domain name alone is worth of nine bucks for sure, as I guess you can always sell it for nine bucks. So, any error traffic that you get to that domain name from pages that were previously online is extra and free traffic.
I hope this helps, or at least give you some new ideas on getting some extra and cheap (if you don’t understand it as a free) traffic.
Oh, yes, almost forgot… where you can find expired domain names? There are hundreds of online services that give out daily lists of expired domain names, but I can suggest you Cyppo.com – Free daily expired domain names lists.
To your success,
Thomas McMills
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