900 Extra Site Visitors For £8?
That is right! This week, I have been having a look at domain name auctions and chanced upon a surprise discovery.
As a business owner with a website, getting people to visit your site is one of your main concerns.
Anything that can bring extra visitors through the door, as it were, is a bonus.
Domain auctions aren’t something that I’ve been particularly interested with before as I’ve never really seen the need (I have always thought that you are far better off trying to think of a unique name yourself and therefore save yourself some money). However, surfing the web last week I stumbled upon SEDO.
I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, simply browsing the bargain domain category (under £300).
The first thing that might strike you when visiting this site is the sheer amount of rubbish/bizarre domain names that are being auctioned.
The first one I noticed was analpunk.com! The worrying thing is that this had bids for it. On a slightly gentler theme, I found yogurt4ever.com (does anybody feel that fanatical about yoghurt?)
I also came across a few surprise ones: get-a-freelancer.org (currently at 1000 $US), and the rather aptly named ill-fated.com (currently not selling)
Putting the auctions to one side, the most interesting part of the site for me was the domain catalogue.
As I’m sure most business owners have done at some point, I looked for domains similar to my own.
To my surprise I found one that, in all honesty, is better than the one I have now! I remember wanting to use this domain name when I started my business but it wasn’t available at the time.
The domain in question wasn’t in an auction, it had simply expired, so I headed off to my usual domain registrar and snapped it and redirected it to my main site.
The only reason for buying this domain name was in case somebody had heard about Elan Web Design but couldn’t remember the full website address and typed this one in instead.
Anyway, the upshot is that 4 days later, looking at my analytics stats, I have had on average 30 visits a day through this name!
OK, the bounce rate has gone up, (probably because some people aren’t expecting to arrive at my site) but it hasn’t gone up a lot.
For the princely sum of £10, I might have increased the number of visits to my site by about 900/month!
Why not take a look at Sedo for yourself? You never know what you might find.
If you want to know more about Google analytics, have a look at one of my earlier posts