If you are like most webmasters you have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get your share of online traffic. Chances are that you have probably invested money and time on search engines, classifieds, banner and text link advertisements and e-mail safe lists. Did these methods of promotion bring your website the flood of visitors you were looking for? Would you like to know about an easier more cost effective way to significantly increase your flow of traffic almost over night?

IMG_1113There is a very good alternative to these promotion techniques that is very effective in generating traffic for you. What if you could find a way to gather an already existing traffic base that is, for the most part, overlooked and direct those visitors to your own website? It is even very possible to have traffic coming to your website from such places as DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Not only can this be done legally and very quickly, but it can be achieved for a fraction of the cost of the other traffic generation methods previously discussed.

This truly powerful method of increasing your traffic deals with the use of expired domain names. Each day there are over 3 million website visits that are completely lost because of expired domains. Why does this occur and how can you benefit from it?

Domain name registrations must be renewed at periodic intervals, most often this is yearly, in order to remain active. If the registration renewal is not paid the domain name will expire. When this happens the domain name becomes available for others to purchase and use.

Profiting from expired domain names is about reaping the rewards from the time and effort that a previous webmaster put into a site before it expired. Expired domain will often have link popularity (backlinks from other websites), Page Rank, and be indexed in the major search engines. Often the URL will also be included in paid web directories.

You can make use of expired domain names by either maintaining the website with your own content and links or by simply redirecting the would be visitors to one of your other websites. If you choose to use redirection keep in mind that a domain name with a similar theme to your own will work best.

There is another way that you can profit from expired domain names. Many entrepreneurs will pick up popular domain names that have expired and resell them through forums, online domain name agents, or even sell them at auction on eBay.

Thousands of domain names are expiring every day. Finding the best domain names to register by yourself can be a time consuming task. The good news is that there are companies that offer services to help you locate the expired domains that you need. They provide categorized and searchable listings of available domains and can even provide alerts directly to your e-mail inbox keeping you informed about newly expired domains.

If you need a truly effective method of generating web traffic or you just want to speculate on domain names to resell at a profit expired domain names are your key.