What is an expired domain and how can it help you in your internet marketing endeavors?

It’s easy to explain, an expired domain is a domain name that has come to the end of the time it’s been registered for and hasn’t been renewed.

As with anything in life, there are all sorts of possible reasons this may have occurred - possibly the owner forgot to renew the domain, maybe their domain registrar didn’t remind them (or the contact email address had changed in the year or more since the domain was registered), it’s quite likely the domain seemed like “a good idea at the time” but the owner never actually put any content on the site and just let it sit in cyberspace. There are lots of different reasons that a domain has been allowed to expire.

So how can you make money from expired domains?

First off, Google are said to give more importance to domains the older they are. By its very nature, an expired domain has been around for a minimum of a year, so it’s older than buying a new domain.

Next, if the domain was used, there are likely to be links pointing to the website. It is likely to be indexed in the search engines as well.

The icing on the cake is if it actually has a Google Page Rank.

Yeah, you read that right. Some expired domains have a Page Rank and traffic.

The trouble is, you won’t be the only person on the planet who is hunting for expired domains. The best expired domains are purchased the very second that they are put on the market.

Which means that if you are thinking about buying one or more expired domains either for a site of your own or to “fix up” and sell on to others, you’ll need to be quick off the mark.

The best way to do this is to use one of the online services that will show you a targeted list of domains that are due to expire soon. This will give you an advantage and allows you to snap up the domains you want as soon as they’re released back into the pool of available domains.

Check out this excellent affordable service to hunt down expired domains here.