Chances are that you’re reading this post because you or someone you know has somehow lost their domain name, and trying to exhaust all options to reclaim it in an expeditious manner.

Not easy, huh?

Whether a premium domain name, exact match domain, or brandable domain, it goes without saying that domain names are a crucial and mission-critical asset to any business or person and must be valued as such.

That’s why it’s extremely important no business owner or person can ever afford to allow their domain names to be lost, stolen or expire under any circumstance.

It’s like losing oceanfront property or prime real estate in Times Square.

And once domains are lost, reclaiming lost domain names can be a very costly experience and nearly impossible.

But not to despair, you do have a few options and steps you can take to try to reclaim lost domain names.

I say try only because there is no guarantee that lost domain names can ever be reclaimed.

When it comes to driving more traffic and business to a small business website, most small business owner dread SEO much like the plague, especially when doing SEO yourself.

I mean really, where does a small business owner begin when doing SEO themselves?

Rather than determining the real pros and cons of do-it-yourself SEO, most small business owners opt for the traditional advertising methods of magazine ads, banner ads, newspaper ads, Craigslist, AngiesList, HomeAdvisor, etc.

But as the Internet and SEO progresses, your need and dependence on SEO to drive more business or even sustain business is a looming issue that will not go away and must be addressed in a cost effective and timely manner.

It’s true that time, money and labor seem to always find the small business owner holding the short end of the stick on one, if not all, of the previously mentioned.

For those of you that decide to never hire another SEO anything again in their lives, today’s blog is just for you.

And for every small business owner unable to hire in-house SEO, a SEO professional or agency, this blog will help you attack the low-hanging actions of doing SEO yourself.

Let’s get started.

As any good domainer would do, I inventory  my domains on a monthly basis.

I determine which domains are worth investing more renewal fees in based on a few metrics of my own.

Well preparing for this month, I had a handful of domains that were to renew on the 1st of the month.

I typically pay for all of my domains a month at a time, using various discount codes when applicable.

When times permit and when I’ve sold a few domains more than my monthly goal, I try to take care of all of my domain name renewals at an annual rate.

This way I don’t have to worry about large domain renewal bills from month to month.

Because I am a Discount Domain Club member of Godaddy’s, I get a handsome discount for owning thousands of domain names.  

This, in addition to GoDaddy discount codes, helps me to save a tremendous amount of money on an annual basis that an everyday person not in the club or using discount codes could not save.

But back to this month and domain renewals.  This month, I had 135 domains that were set to auto renew.

I tend to watch my domains and their renewals very much like a hawk watches its prey.

So imagine my surprise when I logged into my GoDaddy account and viewed domains that were set to auto-renew had not been renewed.

I had an interesting conversation with a potential customer about lowering website bounce rate and why their website was not garnering favorable search rankings.

As usual, we volley questions and answers back in forth in hopes to shed light on behaviors that might shout negative SEO, search engine penalties or exponential room for SEO improvement.

I must admit that this potential customer had performed their SEO due diligence and had much to show for their time and effort.

They had an search-safe optimized website, very active social profiles and signals and a content marketing plan that they reviewed every month using their web analytics and SEO reporting tools.

Just wait one minute before you hit the buy now button for buying traffic, or at least read this post in it’s entirety before completing your order.

Website owners and managers are quite familiar with the term or phrase “buying traffic for their website” in some way.

For most, buying traffic for websites is a way to get quick, targeted traffic at bulk or high volumes.

Buying traffic is becoming very common nowadays.

Now there are several ways to buy traffic such as PPC advertising networks (i.e., Facebook, Bing and Google to name a few) that offer internet traffic targeted by category, age, and country.

In addition, website owners are able to buy traffic from specialized SEO and non-SEO practices such as banner ads on a 3-party website, or buying media blasts.

There are a multitude of methods, both search-safe and non search-safe, to buy and receive instant website traffic.

However, before you choose to invest money in buying traffic from any source peddling such services as a method to increased website traffic, it is highly important to consider the pros and cons of buying traffic.

Let’s have a look at 9 tips I suggest web buyers to consider when buying traffic for their website.

If you own, operate or manage a website, I’m sure you’ve heard the latest craze and buzzword, content marketing, tossed around much like a game of horseshoes or washers.

For some, content marketing has become a science of keyword stuffing their content in an effort to increase search rankings.

Content marketing has become a full-fledge game of creating keyword salad.

A dab of this or that with a pinch of that or this, and this magic combination of subtle keywords is suppose to bring about favorable rankings from SEO gods.

For small businesses that believe this keyword salad business of keyword stuffing is the most effective SEO, Google and other search engines think otherwise.

I’ve had the opportunity in the last two weeks to review the SEO efforts of some small businesses that have a local focus when it comes to SEO.

I received an email from a regular blog reader of Kickstart Commerce.

This person totally stoked about how they read my latest blog about finding and buying domain names.

They found an expired domain name to just die for, let them tell it.

I was super excited, as I usually am to hear from our readers, to hear of this reader’s good fortune find.

I was elated until I did my own research of the readers good fortune domain name.

The reader did almost everything correct based on their email.

The one missing piece the reader did not note was performing a search on the domain itself for negative or scam reviews using Google or another search engine.

Had the reader performed this simple step, the reader would have figured out that their so called good fortune of an expired domain name had been used by another company to run a scam.

I was quite surprised and heartbroken for the reader when I performed a search.