This used to be a somewhat secret method for pulling in good amounts of traffic on the cheap. It can still be effective today, but there’re more "gotchas" to take into consideration before you buy that expired domain name. I’ll explain why this is so a little further on.

First let’s talk about the method itself…

Webmasters allow their domains to expire for a variety of different reasons - what’s important for you is just how much work that webmaster already did to get his site ranked in the search engines, build up incoming links, etc.

What happens is this:

Someone starts a site and begins getting traffic based on the keywords they’ve ranked on, the incoming link relationships they’ve built, any articles they’ve written with their domain in the byline, etc.

But if the domain is allowed to expire - and no one else snatches it up - there’s going to be a window of time where the site is still receiving traffic from those old links and listings.

The traffic that arrives via outdated links will click away unless someone takes over that domain and puts something there worthy of looking at.

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Banner advertising fell into disfavor in the past few years due to overuse and poor performance. Text links replaced them as the preferred ad-linking method in most cases, and this still holds true today.

However, banners aren’t totally dead…

In fact, they’re alive and well on quite a few high-traffic niche sites, sometimes at bargain basement prices.

Sites to target for banner advertising:

"    Online editions of local newspapers or your local news station’s website.
"    Websites of talk radio or other niche related radio programs.
"    Niche blogs or targeted, independent news sites
"    Any targeted website that makes use of banners while strictly limiting the amount of banners in place

Are Banners Making A Comeback?

In a sense: Yes, banners are making a comeback, but in a much more targeted fashion.

What killed the effectiveness of banners in the past:

1.    Overuse :  Webmasters went "banner crazy" during the early days of Internet advertising. Visitors began ignoring banners due to overexposure and poor targeting on the part of advertisers.

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Affiliate programs (also known as referral programs or partnership programs) provide a flood of traffic to your site for next to nothing. What we are going to talk about is about the affiliates that will bring you tons of traffic.

When you implement an affiliate program on your site, you establish a ‘pay for performance’ relationship with those who sign up as your affiliate. The affiliate runs his or her own separate marketing campaign in order to advertise his unique affiliate url which tracks the visitors he sends to your site.

If a visitor makes a purchase, the affiliate is credited for the sale and receives a commission (a percentage of the sale).

You can see the power of this method immediately when you recognize that your affiliates essentially provide you with free advertising. You only pay when a sale is made. True, you do pay out a portion of your profits - but what you make back is far more than what you’re spending.

Why? Because affiliates increase your site’s visibility.

Even long after you’ve moved on to another project, another site…all of those affiliate links pointing to your site are still ‘out there’, spread across the web in articles, emails, e-books and affiliate web pages.

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