guesstimating income from expired domains

Hi guys,

I'm new to monetizing websites or websites in general. I was looking at buying some expired domains for virtual stores. With this in mind I was curious about a worse-case scenario. Suppose I just put adsense and amazon (or whatever you suggest) on the page with its existing links and recent traffic, what is an easy way to get a ROUGH estimate of how much $ I can make off the domain? The idea here is to set the max price I'm willing to pay realtive to this value. I know it depends a lot on the nature of the domain. Something with 1000 views a day thats about rolex watches is probably worth a lot more than 1000 views a day about paper towels.

But, on the average can anyone suggest a formula to give me a ballpark idea?
Something like: 10000 views a day = $0.05 to $0.20 /day or whatever you would use.

Why do you ask about expired domains? What's the difference, whether you build this shop on new domain or expired domain? I mean, really.

It's hard to estimate, because just because a domain was ranked in the past does not mean it will rank well after it has expired and also you'll probably need to put some effort into generating content and link building to get the site back in a decent position. You also need to try and evaluate whether the domain was previously banned as that may effect your ability to rank it.

Yeah you won't really get much money at all from ads if you have no content on the site and without the content your rankings will fairly quickly tail off to nothing. Build the site back up before putting ads on it or simply redirect it to a site that is already made.

Redirecting a domain will likely give you an instant boost to your traffic as well as a bump to your rankings.

I guess everyone would be looking for this data. Usually this is what experienced SEOs do best: by investigating an expired domain, they're able to tell the bad from the good and estimate traffic. Other than that, I don't think there's a formula for it.

I agree with bignose, what's the point in using an expired domain rather than a new one?

EnfinDebout said:

I agree with bignose, what's the point in using an expired domain rather than a new one?

Click to expand...

Oddly enough bignose actually sells aged domains (previously expired) so he should know exactly why someone would want to use one rather than use a new domain. His post actually really confuses me.

If you buy a new domain you get 0 history, 0 backlinks, 0 authority, 0 traffic. If you buy a half decent expired domain you will get some history, backlinks and authority and it may even already be ranking in the search engines and receiving traffic.

Starting with a decent expired domain is like buying a running business, you could start your own but you have no name recognition compared to an existing business that may already have customers coming to the premises to buy from you.

Expired domains also have a lot of other benefits for different uses but the above would explain why in this instance someone would want to use an expired domain.