UNDEAD! Passive Traffic Method from Dead Domains

Over 250,000 domains die each day.

Death - for a domain - comes in two general forms.

1. The domain can expire. The owner of the domain fails to pay the renewal fee.

2. The domain can be deleted. The owner deletes the domain from his account.

A mere handful of weeks later?

The domain can become available for anyone to register.

Thing is?

Some of these domains are not . . .

Well . . .

Entirely dead.

They still crawl the earth.




Domains die.

Even famous domains can die.

If only for 1 minute in some cases.

And sometimes?

The same owners can make the mistake more than once.

What is a domain?

To many people, a domain is a business. Or, rather, the land on which the business resides.

Consider where you live.

One minute a business is alive and kicking. The next? Toes up.

Businesses die.

Domains die.

Two miles away from where I live, you have a Victorian town. On the main street is a Marks & Spencer.

The local rumour mill informs me that M&S, which has paid their current lease for well over two decades, will soon relocate to the nearby retail park.

Thousands of people a day walk past their current premises.

Question is, when M&S pick up sticks, will the people stop walking?

Exactly.

No, for most people walking the high street, nothing will change.

And the kicker?

The same situation can happen with a domain.

Consider Joe Marketer.

Ten years ago, Joe gets a bright idea.

Nine years ago, he gets another bright idea.

This is what Joe does.

Shall we break it down into - POW! POW! - bullet-form?

Why not, eh?

Over nine years, this is what Joe does:

1. Joe buys the domain BlahBlahWooGames.com.
2. Joe makes a blog for his domain.
3. Joe uploads 2,389 gaming videos to YouTube.
4. Joe uploads shorter versions to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
5. Joe uploads 11,392 images to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
6. Joe writes and syndicates 3,476 blog post articles.
7. Joe writes and syndicates 237 articles to EzineArticles.com
6. Joe makes 1,892 shares to Reddit.
7. Joe has 47,892 YouTube subscribers.
8. Joe has 78,131 Facebook followers.
9. Joe has 64,981 Instagram followers.
10. Joe has 79,413 Twitter Followers.

All of which?

All of which says nothing about the millions of media shares Joe has received.

(Spreading that media across all four corners of IM Land.)

Does the fun end here?

Almost.

We're not quite there yet.

We still have to talk . . . money.

This is where Joe's money comes from:

(More bullets?)

(I spoil you, but go on then.)

1. AdSense (YouTube.)
2. Free Affiliate Offers.
3. Paid Affiliate Offers.
4. Merchandise.
5. Patreon.

Joe? A simple marketer with simple monetization.

But saying that?

Well, our Joe does rather well.

1. He earns between $2 and $3 for each 1,000 YouTube video views.
2. He earns an average of $5 per commission on free-to-play games.
3. He earns an average of 4% per commission on game and hardware referrals.
4. He earns an average of $19.95 on merchandise sales.
5. He earns a regular $840 each month from Patreon.

See? Joe does pretty well.

(Still can't see the willy, but even so . . .)

Oh, did I mention that Joe plasters his domain over everything?

I didn't? No?

I'm sure I did.

According to my monkeyservant Dennis - who has made a statistical analysis of the BlahBlahWooGames domain over the past 12 months - we can learn a great deal about its traffic.

(Fine work, Dennis, thank you.)

Thing is?

Joe no longer owns his domain. Nor its traffic.

Two months ago, Joe got a knock on the front door of his home.

He opened the door.

(You impressed with the prose?)

Elvira stood on the front stoop.

Waving.

Joe did not remember Elvira, no.

Joe found himself unable to take his eyes away from her big [removed by WF Boobs Word Removal Bot].

The huge [removed by WF Boobs Word Removal Bot]?

Joe could not take his eyes off the massive [removed by WF Boobs Word Removal Bot].

Still with eyes firmly fixed on the [removed by WF Boobs Word Removal Bot]:

Joe opened the door wide - very wide - and-

Where was I?

Ah, that's right.

Joe and Elvira got married. They went to live on a tropical island together. Joe let his domain expire.

And then some clever, dashingly handsome git called Tom . . . bought it.

What gave it away?

But what did they really buy?

(Or register, if we're being precise.)

They bought . . .


They did this:

1. They registered a domain that had gaming traffic.
2. They made a landing page to promote gaming affiliate offers.
3. They plopped that lander on their newly registered domain.
4. They received passive gaming traffic.

The git in question spent $10 on a domain.

In return? Passive traffic.

Ah, but wait.

Passive traffic? I think not, good sir.

The git still has to renew his domain each year.

That's at least 47 seconds of active work. Yes?

Two words and a hyphen:

Auto-renew.


Let's first be clear about something.

Joe Marketer? Just an example to illustrate Dead Domains.

The chances of you finding a domain like Joe's is roughly the same chance I have of Dennis actually doing some real work instead of reading a Playboy and polishing off the vodka. Just to be clear? The chances are really quite low.

Buying expired and deleted domains for their traffic and SEO juice is big business, practised by everyone from work-at-home marketers to major corporations. Both people and software scour the lists of recently deceased domains.

Which begs the question, why bother looking?

Valuable domains (with traffic) can slip through the cracks.

So what are you and I going to do now?

Two things.

Thing One: You'll learn how to find and register Dead Domains.

Thing Two: You'll learn what to do with them.


Youtube.

People use domains on YouTube to brand their channels, to brand their videos, and to send type-in and click-traffic to their websites, where the latter will see us finding domains in the descriptions of their videos and on the About pages.

When people either let domains expire or decide to delete them, those domains are often still visible on YouTube. They still often reside on About Pages. They still often reside on and beneath videos. And some of those videos still get traffic.

The wonderful thing about YouTube? You can publish a video today and still be receiving views (and traffic) for years to come. I began publishing on YouTube when it arrived on the scene and I still get views on my old videos today.

As a Dead Domainer? You can profit from that.

The work is hard.

Digging up things in the dead of night?

Hard work.

But - when you find a good one - it can be rewarding.

1. Google Search.

site:youtube.com [niche keyword]+.com

2. Tab Open.

1. Tab open each result and look in the description.

2. If you see a domain? Give it a click.

3. Is the domain still active? Yes? Click-off the browser tab.

4. Does it appear dead? Add it to your list on notepad.

5. Rinse and repeat until you either get bored, fall asleep, or pass out from the vodka, or from the fumes of your farting capuchin monkeyservant.

3. Check One.

1. You have one or more potentially dead domains on your notepad list.

2. Head over to Godaddy and slap the domains into bulk search.

3. Once you receive the results, delete all but the dead domains.

4. Check Two.

You now wish to see if the domains have enough traffic to make any $10 registration fees a worthwhile investment. Will you find exact traffic figures? No. The best you can do is get an idea.

1. Slap the channel into Social Blade.

2. If the channel is listed on SB, you'll receive channel and video traffic data.

3. As an example, look at this popular channel: Pewdiepie.

4. If the domain is not listed on SB? Time to get down to some real work.

5. Examine the YouTube channel and take a look at their total views.

6. Make a note of the total.

7. Return 24 hours later and subtract the old figure from the new.

8. You'll now know how many views - on average - the channel gets each day.

If you wish to be more precise?

1. Extend the number of days and calculate the arithmetic mean,

2. Total extra views from Day 0 / number of days.

3. This gives you a more accurate daily average.

4. But it also gives more time for someone else to register it.

Any given niche will have thousands of associated keywords. The farting capuchin monkeyservant niche, for instance, has (so Dennis tells me) precisely "a lot of keywords." And what does this mean?

It means you can rinse and repeat any Dead Domain searching processes by simply using a different keyword. You start with "keyword one." You go through the mentioned procedure. If you're still sober enough?

You slap in "keyword two." And so on.

Furthermore? Not everyone uses a .com domain. We have all manner of domain extensions (.net, . org, .info, and my personal domain of choice, .capuchin). To further extend your search procedure? Different domain extensions.

5. Check Three.

1. Slap the domain into Google.

2. Take a look at where else it lives.

3. Well, shambles along with an undead gait.

4. Are the locations still getting traffic?

5. Good good.

Other Socials.

You can employ the same procedure for the other socials.

You can even employ Social Blade for Twitter and Instagram results.

site:instagram.com [niche keyword]+.com

site:twitter.com [niche keyword]+.com

site:facebook.com [niche keyword]+.com

Out of the 4 networks (Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), which is my favourite?

YouTube.

The trouble with the other networks?

The passive traffic received by dead domains on the other 3 is typically a fraction of the traffic from YouTube.

Ezine Articles.

There was a time - roughly 87 billion years and 14 Sundays ago - that EzineArticles.com was a fine way for a marketer to generate direct traffic to their properties and to benefit from SEO juice.

Nutshell? This is what you did.

1. You selected 1 rankable primary keyword.
2. You selected half a dozen rankable secondary keywords.
3. You wrote a 500 to 750 word article.
4. You SEOed the article for your keywords.
5. You employed a bio that looked like it was part of the article.
6. You linked to one of your properties in the bio.
7. You used keyword anchor text for the link.
8. You published the article on EZA.
9. You often ranked page 1, position 1 for keywords.
10. More juice needed? Anchor text the article on the right sites.
11. Result one? Passive direct traffic from the bio.
12. Result two? The growth of Google juice to related properties.
13. Result three? Marketers legitimately taking and syndicating your articles.
14. Result four? Lots of excited pelvic-thrusting.

Bum marketing, in a very boiled-down nutshell.

Question.

Does this mean EZA is useless for a Dead Domainer? No no. A farting and Playboy reading and vodka drinking capuchin monkeyservant is useless for a Dead Domainer. EZA? It's really quite useful, and there are two reasons for it.

1. Marketers still use EZA (syndication).
2. It has a lot of articles that still get traffic.
3. And . . . a lot of domains.

You use the same procedure as described throughout the YouTube section above. One difference boils down to how you assess for potential traffic.

Take a look at an example article: Capuchin Monkeys As Pets.

(Not my article, BTW.)

(I see no mention of feeding it vodka.)

(Or Playboy.)

If you scroll to the bottom of the article, you'll see how many times people have viewed the article. So, using a similar procedure as we used for YouTube, we make a note of the view total and check it again after 24 hours or longer. You can then make a fairly decent projection as to how many views the article will receive each month.

Estimates?

But what about better projections?

In the case of each source of Dead Domains, the question remains, how do we get a better idea of traffic volume?

There is really no solid answer.

In my own experience, I find that different niches and how the media is presented will lead to different rates of people clicking through.

It boils down to two things:

1. Use any experience you have in order to give you a rough idea of how many clicks a link should be getting from a property.

2. Lacking sufficient experience, assess how much traffic the property is getting and then make a decision based around that.

All of which leads us to another question.

This one:

Did Joe ever lose enough weight to see his willy?

Closely followed by this question:

How do I use the traffic?

Well . . .

I like to direct it to a video of me twerking.

But I can give you some other ideas:


So what do you do once you have a dead domain?

Choices, choices.

Oh, and choices and choices.

These choices:

1. Flip it (sell it).
2. Redirect it to an affiliate offer (if the network allows) or one of your properties.
3. Setup a landing page that promotes your products or affiliate offers.
4. Setup a squeeze page to capture email subscribers.

Those 4 choices top the charts.

(Though the twerking video still ranks #1 among them.)

You can, for instance, do a few other things.

5. Direct traffic to your socials.
6. Direct traffic to your videos.
7. Direct traffic to your other social media shares.
8. Direct traffic to your articles.

Whatever you decide to do?

You have traffic to do it.

Passive traffic.


I began to whack-out DD over breakfast. We're now approaching lunchtime and I have a date with a burger in town; the same Victorian town I mentioned earlier, as a matter of fact.

I'll most likely be adding more content to this thread when I have the time. In the meantime? Well, as before, choices:

1. Subscribe if your favourite colour is banana.
2. Hit the Thanks button if you like hitting things.
3. Chat, ask questions, post your twerking videos.

Oh, before I forget: two morals of the story.

First, valuable domains can slip through the cracks. Second, make sure your domains are not among them.


Cheers,

Tom