Here's some case studies to absorb regarding recycled traffic expired domain names.

Case study #1

Tara-reid.org
This domain sat in the database for weeks before we decided to pick it up. As we don't cherry-pick the domains that come through our database, if a good one sits long enough... we HAD to snatch this one up.

Before buying this domain for a whopping $9.95 at our favorite registrar, we did some research. Overture suggestion tool stated "tara-reid" gets over 270,000 searches a month. This made it a prime site for developing. So, our designer spent a couple hours throwing together a basic site with some pictures of Tara Reid on it. When the domain finally propagated to one of our servers, we could check traffic statistics. Nothing special, at first it was receiving between 30-50 uniques a day. So, we let it sit and put up some AFF PPC ads (adult friend finder pay-per-click). A few months later we checked stats again, no big difference though. Obviously, the domain was still being sandboxed . Surely a keyword domain like this should show up in the SERPS (search engine result pages). So we waited... and finally Google decided to update its PR. Here's the interesting part... The site dropped from a PR5 to a PR0, but the traffic was steadily improving and growing with absolutely no promotion or marketing whatsoever. Then, like a blast from nowhere it busted through, all the way up to 1000 uniques a day!! No one here had ever seen anything like this before. It was time to dig in and find out what was going on. Awstats was showing most of this traffic was coming from google image search. Then it dawned on us, without even realizing it, we had optimized the .jpeg file names to include the keywords in it. Well, time to flip this property. A few posts were made in some forums and a day later it sold for $400. Not much you might say, but it's still a 4000% ROI!!

Case study #2

Reliameds.com
Though we missed the train on this incredibly profitable industry because of US government legality issues; It's still a noteworthy expedition in expired domain monetization.

I should first note that this site took many hours to build. When it was said and done there was over 100 optimized pages selling pharmaceuticals, but in the end we had ourselves one of the best online pharmacy templates anyone had ever seen, plus we could replicate it over and over in about an hour. We had so much hope for this site that we even decided to pay a link exchange company a whole C-note for new links! :) Then, we let it sit. Within a month it started receiving orders, albeit only a couple of sales a month, but it was producing. Steadily, traffic and orders were increasing. By summer of 2004, between June and September it produced $16,000 in gross sales! Now, the problem was, collecting our commission as an affiliate to an existing online pharmacy. It was like pulling teeth, but finally we managed to get a couple thousand from them via Western Union before they relocated operations to South America. Once that happened, we knew there was no chance in getting paid for any future sales. Coincidentally, a week later an offer came through from a Sedo member for $2000. I quickly accepted the offer and was paid when the transfer was verified. You should always list your domains and web properties for sale at Sedo because you just never know who might want it. For the right price, everything is for sale. Reliameds taught us a lot about conversions, traffic, and SEO. Though it never made anyone rich, we still saw an extra $4000 from this site alone, not to mention the 5 other clones that came from it, which were all sold off for nice profits. If you're outside the US there's still money to be made in this industry, you just have to find a reputable affiliate program that pays. Here's a good place to start . I think most of the US affiliate players and controlled meds suppliers have moved to Canada and Central/South America due to their laid-back stance on internet pharmacies. If you're interested in purchasing the template send an email to domainsbroker @ gmail.com

Case study #3

1stamericanhomeloans.org
This one was picked up primarily to test domain parking pay-per-click revenue with respect to the mortgage industry.

Not a whole lot of juicy details to report on right now, but I will tell you that most domain parking programs pay very well for "home loans" and "mortgage" related keywords to the tune of $1.00+ PER CLICK! This domain only receives about 75 uniques a month but generates around $5.00 from click-throughs, which is about $60 a year from a zero maintenance $9.95 domain. Our next test will involve putting together a lead generation page on this domain, collecting user data on a "short form", which sell for about $15 per lead. We might even take it one step further by trying to "close" these leads through our mortgage broker relationships. We'll report our findings on the next follow up.

Case study #4

We can't reveal this one just yet. It's just too valuable and not completely developed. I will tell you this much though, this keyword domain was purchased and within 2 months was sitting atop ALL major search engines for a $2.65 per click overture keyword. So, needless to say, a new company was formed based on this domain. A major ecommerce site is in production and will have over 1000 search engine optimized pages. A full report will be made in the upcoming months, probably in the form of an ebook for members only.

Happy Hunting!