by Clare Feren
Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet. Websites need traffic to survive. Sites that can attract visitors who are interested in their offerings thrive and grow. Those that don't fade into obscurity in the space of a few weeks.
Wise webmasters know that they need to take action to draw in visitors. They might try a number of different approaches, for example:
Advertise in the media
Implement search engine optimisation techniques
Acquire links from third-party sites
Pay affiliates to find visitors for them
These are just a few possibilities, all of which are more or less effective, depending on the site or product in question. However, they all have one thing in common: they come at a significant cost, in terms of money, effort, or both.
But isn't that exactly what you would expect in order to acquire a highly-sought-after commodity in a competitive market? Worthwhile results need hard work or hard cash, don't they? Well, that's an option. The truth is that there's another way. A way that is much cheaper, easy to put in place, and by its very nature guarantees not only traffic, but traffic of a very high quality.
Learn About the Power of Type-in Domains
As you might guess from the name, a type-in domain is a domain name that people simply type in. They haven't followed a link, they haven't performed a search, they haven't just seen the domain in an advert on the TV. They have simply thought, "I want x", enter whatever "x" is directly into the address field of their browsers and add an extension such as .com or .co.uk to the end. So if, for example, someone wants to spread-bet on rugby, they might type in rugbyspreadbetting.com. On hitting enter, they are of course taken straight to that site, if it exists.
I'm not talking about a few visitors here and there. This happens frequently. Estimates are in the range of 10 - 20% of total internet traffic.
Think about it for a second. Imagine that you're a spread-betting company. You know it's not easy getting high-quality, targeted traffic. Gambling is a very competitive market. In fact, whichever market you're in, there are a lot of websites out there competing for the same pool of internet users. Yet here's an amazing source of traffic that you could capture and funnel to your site simply by owning a type-in domain. The traffic would be exclusively yours -- no-one else would have access to it. You don't even need a separate site: you could redirect the domain to your current rugby page. The costs are minimal -- a one-off payment to acquire the domain and then annual renewal payments, typically around $10. The effort required is practically zero.
Buy a type-in domain and you get free traffic, that actually wants to be there! But is it good quality traffic? Advertisers consider type-in traffic to be amongst the very best quality traffic there is. Visitors who arrive at your site via a type-in domain have had an original thought or desire regarding your offering -- they haven't been influenced or incentivised in any way. They have taken action on that thought by choosing to source what they want from the internet and keying their thought directly into a browser. There's no happier combination: they are motivated to pursue their idea and you know exactly what they are looking for. When they think of your product, they think of you automatically!
With the right type-in domain, you can have visitors like this. Perhaps it's time you used type-in domains to bring visitors to your website.
Clare Ferens is a domain investor who specialises in generic domain names in English and Spanish. Her portfolio, which includes examples of type-in domains, can be seen at http://www.truffler.com.
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