So, you have a business, and want to expand your online exposure with expired domains. As there are millions of domains that expired every month, in time you should be able to find the great domains to help your business. These domains can contain valuable traffic, offering low hanging fruit, at very little expense. Of course, whenever you find a domain, be sure to do all the necessary due diligence, in this case you want to be checking for traffic and relevance. There are several strategies that could help your business grow. Let’s use an online shoe shop as an example for these scenarios.
If one of your direct competitor’s domains has expired then this is a great opportunity to take over everything they have achieved, over years of effort and expense. All of this can be yours for pennies on the dollar. Yes, it’s unlikely that it will be one of the largest shoe retailers, that let their domain expired, but even a smaller one is still something. Say if the site gets 30 visitors a day, then think how much you would have to pay for 30 visitors a day on Google Adwords, probably close to $1000/mo. Wow! That’s over $10k a year, of equivalent value.
So now you have this domain getting this great traffic, what’s the next step? What do you actually put on this site. You could do a simple redirect to your site and redirect all the traffic coming from this domain to your main site.
You could create a new online shoe shop, with a different brand, and market it to a different target market, with a different user experience. As you have little skin in the game with this site, you could afford to be more experimental, and take bigger risks, with things like user experience, pricing, or testing conversion rates.
Or you could just have a page saying that the store has closed down, and direct visitors to your main online store informing them you offer all the same items.
It’s likely you don’t offer just one product or service online, but probably an array of different products and brands. Therefore, you could target particular niches you offer. Look at all your biggest selling markets, and then try and work out some niches.
Sticking with our online shoe store example, Nike shoes is probably a major seller. You could search for domains relevant to Nike, or even better, Nike shoes.
Let’s say you are lucky enough to find the expired domain, nikerunningshoes.com, and you sell Nike running shoes. This is an excellent domain for you, and the traffic is likely very relevant.
So with a domain like this, you could create a niche site, that solely (no pun intended) has Nike running shoes. The entire site would be customized to Nike running shoes, with specific filters that would filter down more narrow than your main site. Thus, it would be more intuitive for the visitor (and potential purchaser) to buy the shoes they were looking for, as they are not so distracted with other brands and product types, as this niche site is far more targeted. The downside being you can’t upsell them with all your other related products, but you could always try and sell them some Nike running socks at checkout.
Making a whole new site, might not be feasible, depending on the level you want to take it to, but if it’s getting 100+ visitors a day, it’s likely well worth it. But if you wanted a much cheaper option, for about 10 mins work, you could simply re-direct these visitors to your site, and in this case to your specific Nike running shoes page.
You want to bring visitors to your site who are interested in shoes. These visitors may not be going to a shoe site, they might be going to a different site, that is related to your products, and may not even know about your business or products. You could introduce them from a site related to your industry. Let’s take socks, as an obvious example, most people who buy socks also buy shoes. You could buy an expired domain of an online sock retailer, and promote your shoes from there too.
But you could get really creative, perhaps thinking about particular uses, maybe a bicycle web site, to sell bicycle shoes. A beach holiday web site to sell sandals. A sports web site to promote football shoes. And the list goes on.
Ok our shoe shop doesn’t work so well in this scenario, but if it did, we could look at domains like californiashoes.com. Perhaps a nationwide car dealership might be more relevant here. If you could score a domain like seattlechevrolets.com, and one of your car dealerships is located in Seattle, and happens to sell Chevrolets, then that’s going to be some really targeted traffic. Again, up to you on what you wish to do with the domain, or web site, using the examples above, you should get a fairly good idea by now. So try to think of locations that might be relevant to your products.
The main thing is, that once you have already set up your business with all the stock, systems, location, employees, servers, hosting and everything else involved in running a business, adding the hosting for an extra web site, is pretty much a negligible cost, and if you search hard enough for domains, and can be patient, you just could strike gold.