Hey everyone! Today I have a special guest as I’m publishing an interview with Sumit Bansal.
Sumit is someone I’ve been following around for a couple of years as he is great at catching aged domains to build websites. I recently bought one of his domains and asked him personally if he would be interested in doing an interview for Stream SEO.
In this interview, Sumit is going to explain how he started his business a few years ago that now does over $20,000 per month, and how to leverage aged domains to grow your sites faster than ever with 3 different strategies.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Interview with Sumit from Serpnames
Hello Sumit, thanks for coming to this interview. I’ve been following you since the rebrand of SerpNames a couple of years ago.
1. Could you please introduce yourself to the audience? Where are you from, what do you do and what are your main hobbies?
Hello there, my name is Sumit Kumar Bansal, and I am the founder of SerpNames.com.
I was only 15 when I heard of event blogging from my friends, and from then, started my love affair with SEO and got a little obsessed with it.
Oops! Truth be told, I dropped out of school at 16 🙈
I have no regrets, though ^.^
Through event blogging, I ended up knowing this SEO strategy that turned out to be a very lucrative business to build on later.
And guess what!
SerpNames is now helping thousands of SEOs with this and making $20,000 in monthly revenue.
Surely there is a reason for such demand that you might be missing out. Simply put, SEOs love it because it works like a charm as it saves them so much time and so much money 😌
Just take a look at this…
I’ll go through the nitty-gritty later 😉
As a 20-year-old introvert from India, you will not be surprised to know my life’s daily routine.
While others think I have a boring life, well, just between you and me, I enjoy living my life just the way it is. I have already found my reason to wake up recharged every morning because I get to do what I love the most, and that is to make an impact on someone else’s life.
Without a doubt, SerpNames serves as my outlet. This is where I get to fill my love tank.
Those who read my story featured on CloudIncome already know I found my bliss in go-giving. It is my truest fulfillment to help one soul at a time. The more warmth I give to someone else, the more warmth I feel inside. A deeper sense of connectedness, this, for me is the essence of living.
While I have no concrete idea of my life’s purpose yet, I know deep down, I want to touch millions of lives.
What is it? When to do it? How to do it exactly? That I still don’t know, but in time, my path will become clearer. I am just beginning, and I have a long way to go, so let’s see.
Anyway, I also love going to the gym every morning, probably because I enjoy wearing medium-sized shirts now from an extra, extra-large shirt before. Apart from this, I love reading books and playing online games, too, in my spare time. Oh, and how could I forget, I just love eating hearty meals (food is my life!) 🤭
2. What is SerpNames and how was it born?
Here comes the nitty-gritty 😎
I started my journey with event blogging on a brand-new domain. And to be honest, my only goal back then was to rank my site on Google’s first page, whatever that takes. 🙊
Therefore, I never paid attention to my content quality and focused entirely on spammy link building to rank my event blogs for the short-term and earn dollars quickly.
It was 2016 when I came to know about expired domains by joining a few FB groups and getting in touch with other bloggers. Most of them use expired domains to boost their sites’ rankings a lot faster by building PBNs. I’ll share more about it later.
Coming back to the story, I tried building my own PBNs with the highest hopes that I could pull them through. But, building PBNs was an expensive affair that I didn’t know before I started. Sadly, for a penniless student, my dream collapsed sooner than I thought. 😅
And so I went for the next option.
Since I had already discovered the way to find expired domains myself through trial and testing, I thought of selling them instead to those who want to build their own PBNs. At that time, the competition was low as well.
Gradually, I completely moved from event blogging to selling expired domains as it was already making me good money. With that, Dominating PBNs came to life.
You can say I was one of the very few people who started selling expired domains in high-quality FB groups at that time. Compared to it now, most groups are spammed to death by almost everyone trying to sell expired domains, as we speak.
For someone who knows my story well, I decided to rebrand the business to SerpNames primarily to shift our focus. We didn’t want to sell our expired domains for PBNs alone. SEOs had started to realize the benefits of using expired domains directly as websites. Most of our clients too, so it just made sense to rebrand everything. Later, you’ll see why 😉
So that’s the quick story of how SerpNames was born ❤️
Just a little note, though.
You might find a lot of terminologies of expired domains like ‘aged domains,’ ‘auction domains,’ ‘dropped domains,’ ‘non-dropped domains,’ among others, but don’t be confused as they are all expired domains anyway. 😌
The domains we are talking about here are no ordinary domains. What I mean is, there are thousands of domains getting expired daily but only a handful of them are worth going after!
Good expired domains for SEO are scarce. Mainly because there are many factors to consider before using them. Things like, is it clean or has no spam record? Is it relevant? Does it have a powerful link profile? Is it brandable? And a lot more 🤓
Domains that pass these marks are what we like to call, aged authority domains.
3. Who is this service for?
We focus on helping SEO affiliate marketers.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or an experienced player in this field. Anyone can take advantage of a good aged domain using the ‘right’ practices.
4. What are the different ways we can take advantage of aged domains? And what’s your best recommendation?
There are three usual ways our clients use aged authority domains.
The Rebirth Technique
It’s like reviving a business that shut down already and taking all its advantages, hence the rebirth technique.
Most of our clients prefer building their affiliate sites using our aged authority domain to get ahead of the SEO game.
Aged authority domains have existing high authority links, trust signals, brand signals, and existing traffic compared to brand new domains. More on this later.
It might seem expensive upfront, but an aged domain’s existing SEO value is all worth your investment. Building backlinks alone demand a lot of effort. Eventually, you might end up spending too much on expensive links from scratch 😫
But with aged domains, you are already building your site on a solid foundation with high-authority links and age profile.
Take this, for example:
This is the kind of link profile aged authority domains hold which you won’t find in a young new site.
Next!
301 Acquisition Strategy
You can use this game plan to power up your existing website to boost its rankings. The process is much like a natural way of acquiring a business. We are merging two sites and so with the links too 😉
How?
You can make the redirection appear natural by creating a dedicated page of the expired domain on your money site and redirecting all the link juice to this page.
It will make it look like your affiliate site has acquired another business.
One great example that comes to mind is that of American Marijuana. They’ve acquired 3-4 expired domains and one of them is ocscannabisupdates.com.
Click on it and you’ll know what I mean. 😉
Though, you have to follow specific procedures when executing it for the best results.
Lastly!
Private Blog Network or PBN
Here, you are basically building a network of websites on aged domains for your affiliate site exclusively. This way, you have full control over all the quality of content, link placements, anchor texts, and everything in between.
However, it requires a hefty investment, time & effort in creating and managing a PBN 💪
Of all the three, I highly recommend using The Rebirth Technique by building your affiliate website on the aged domain itself. It will give you SEO head start because of its existing backlinks, age, and the domain’s overall authority. Thus, less link building required and better ROI than using a fresh domain 😇
5. What are the benefits of getting aged domains vs. a brand-new domain?
To be honest, it depends on your preferences.
Essentially, brand-new domains and aged domains have the same set of steps to rank on Google. Okay…but how come some are still using brand-new domains and not aged domains, given the massive potential of the latter? 🤨
Simple.
Many successful SEOs in this field don’t talk much of their success in public, so either they don’t hear much about aged domains, or they just prefer “brandable name” more than anything. But as discussed earlier, well aged domains are scarce. And it may take time to find your perfect brandable name or niche, or both. Time is money and in such cases, choosing a brand new domain may be the best option.
They can still use aged domains anyway. Remember the 301-acquisition strategy? Great!
But for SEO affiliate marketers, it’s just non-negotiable. Aged domain is the better option always because…
- It gives them a lesser dwell time on the ‘sandbox’ period
- Sometimes it helps them rank for commercial ‘money’ keywords even without tedious and expensive link building process done yet just like this case study
- It helps them get faster ROI in terms of money and time investment
See this site for example. It is a site built on an aged domain with an existing powerful link profile like this 👇
Say you plan to build an affiliate site on a brand-new domain and happen to compete with affiliate sites built on aged authority domains with existing authority and backlink 🤔
What do you think happens next? Something to think about 😉
6. Are there any other benefits besides the SEO effects?
The benefit is faster ROI ❤️
Who doesn’t want that?
As I said earlier, aged domains give you a head start in SEO because of their existing authority and backlinks. You experience little to no sandbox period, unlike brand-new domains.
You can check our case study here from one of our clients who made $40,000 ROI from one of his affiliate sites in just 11 months 😍
Here’s his advice to his fellow affiliate marketers…
“Today it takes longer and longer to build sites from scratch from new domains. Time is money in this business, so I don’t build any more sites from new domains, I always use expired domains.
The benefits outweigh the advantages. Time is money in this business. You can buy strong expired domains starting at $500. That’s a small investment you can easily make for an ROI after three months in a profitable niche.”
7. Do you have an example or two of websites that have been built with your domains?
So yeah. My clients prefer confidentiality when it comes to their site’s portfolio, and I respect that, so I’ll just share a few screenshots with you 😊
I guess the best example I can share is this one. I remember this client asking for a money-back guarantee first before buying 🤭
And he wanted to be super clear about it.
Of course, we’re always open for refunds. There’s no point in selling bad domains to our clients, after all. And so I told him to publish the content and wait for at least 30 days, and if it doesn’t get indexed, I would give him a full refund 😌
But it never happened. Why?
Just take a look at his current site performance today 😶
This is for The Rebirth Technique.
Next, I want to share some screenshots for the 301-acquisition strategy 😉
One of my clients who used this strategy emailed me this…
I don’t really want to brag about any of this because, in reality, my clients are the ones who made these sites a huge success 😇
8. What separates SerpNames from other similar providers? Is there any process you follow to avoid bad apples or legal problems?
Rather than blowing our own trumpet here, I guess the best thing I can do is to share what you can expect from SerpNames.
I bet you’d agree, so here it goes.
1. Buying an aged domain has its own fair share of risk. The worst to expect is getting a domain with an existing manual penalty in the Google Search Console. Sadly, such domains will not rank, and unfortunately, you’ll end up losing your time and money 😞
But not with SerpNames, since we are taking that risk away from you. Through our rigorous vetting process and post-purchase manual penalty check, you will only get the cleanest and healthiest aged domains that are ready to rank!
2. Trademark infringement is another thing. Surely, you don’t want a domain that has a significant risk of legal issues. But with SerpNames, we help you secure aged domains that have little to no risk, so you get to build your next affiliate site without worrying about trademark 😊
There are lots of excellent aged domain providers in the market right now, including SerpNames. And to be honest, there’s nothing really special about us. Almost everyone is providing the same thing, but if there’s one thing that can make us stand out, it’s our ‘Go-Giving’ culture. 😇
Rather than aspiring to be the king, we aspire to the opposite. We are seeking to be kingmakers. So that alone shifted our focus from what we can get to what we can give to our clients. And that’s making them exceptionally happy and satisfied!
It’s one of the main reasons why our clients love us. We always find ways to add more value to their lives and to make them extremely happy with their buying experience.
We go the extra mile of helping them not only before and during the buying process but most notably after the purchase, where we give them the intense care, love, and support they need.
Whether you need help fixing the technical issues or guidance in growing your website, we’re always there for you with no added cost, our pinky promise! ❤️
9. What’s the process like when acquiring a domain from Serpnames?
SerpNames has its Exclusive Waitlist, where affiliate marketers can reserve their specific niche requirements. We will notify them first of our newly captured domains before uploading them to our inventory.
And whoever emails us first gets the domain.
Not surprisingly, 50%+ of our aged domains are sold right from the waitlist alone before getting uploaded to our inventory dashboard.
And here’s the process when someone reserves the domain:
- Invoicing and payment process. We will ask for the details of the invoice and the payment options (debit/credit card via Payoneer or wire transfer)
- Domain transfer Processing. Once paid, we will ask for the registrar details for the domain transfer (varies depending on the domain’s current registrar) after that we initiate the transfer. It gets done instantly or within a few hours, depending on the registrar.
- Full-blown after-sales service. After the domain transfer, we will also deliver our bonus package, including logo and brand board files, monetization plan (if there’s any), and archive zip file.
And it doesn’t end there. We make sure we guide our clients all the way through. I make sure to open myself up for all inquiries they have about the domain, and our developer helps them with the technical setup, archive recovery, and any other technical issues they might need. All this for no added costs, of course 🙈
Currently, SerpNames is under major site development, and the entire process will be automated in the coming months, for sure 🤠
10. What are the minimum or average costs per domain people can expect from your service?
There are many deciding factors to consider when it comes to pricing, but the biggest one is niche and market demand.
Let’s say a domain in the cannabis niche would be twice or four times more expensive than a tech domain.
However, you can start your affiliate site on an aged authority domain for as low as $499.
11. After acquiring a domain, what should the new owner focus on? Content? Building more authority? Branding?
Here’s a quick run-through of the overall process when you use aged domains 🤓
Step 1: Recover the authority and the potential traffic back to the aged domain.
How? By rebuilding all its relevant pages that have existing backlinks (rewrite them to avoid copyright issues).
Chances are, you will recover any old traffic and start getting visitors immediately.
For the non-relevant ones, 301 redirect them to your homepage to preserve the link juice and maintain the authority.
Step 2: Focus on your content strategy.
The great thing about an aged domain is that it lets you set aside tedious link building while focusing on your content strategy for the first 3-6 months.
Just remember, your aged authority domain has its existing backlinks, so you should plan your SEO-optimized content based on it and start publishing regularly.
Note: A few posts published frequently on your website is better than publishing bulk content all at once and slowing it down later.
Step 3: Pay attention to your branding.
You must focus on branding your website well before you start with link building.
Compared to a cheap and dull-looking website, a beautiful site jam-packed with valuable content will be more likely to secure fantastic links during the outreaching process.
You know it. An excellent-looking website can leave a remarkable impression on anyone. What more to bloggers and website owners!
Step 4: Time to start with link building.
Just because you already have a handful of high-powered links with your aged domains does not mean you can already ignore the link building entirely.
I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not how it works.
It’s incredibly crucial that you do link building too on your aged domain simply because you need to optimize its existing anchor text profile for faster rankings.
That’s all! No rocket science.
Treat your affiliate website as a valuable resource for your readers, and you’ll get rewarded with rankings and commissions 🙂
12. Anything you’d like to add? Perhaps a discount for our readers or any tips?
Here are some of the important tips I can give to those who might be interested in trying aged domains:
- 👉 Buy aged domains for building sites instead of 301 (if you don’t have both options available)
- 👉 Take care of link juice by either recovering the archive content or doing 301 (recover only that content that is relevant, so you don’t end up diluting link juice in your site because of unnecessary content).
- 👉 Build links to optimize anchor texts. Don’t forget you bought a domain with an existing profile.
- 👉 Focus on relevancy more than the power of the links. You won’t want to get punished later on.
- 👉 Avoid trademarks and copyrighted content.
- 👉 The growth is compounded, not linear. If you don’t see results in starting, then it doesn’t mean the domain is terrible. Just don’t give up!
And here are some of the FAQs we frequently get from interested marketers who want to use aged domains:
How long on average before you see your posts ranking on these aged domains for the new content?
It’s different. If you build links in starting to optimize anchors, then you should see results very soon. One of my friends hit 1K/mo USD within four months as he did link building to optimize anchor text profile 😉
Also, aged domains have compounded growth, not linear. You may not see any results in the starting, but as you keep on adding more value through content and links, you should see a spike coming in later ^.^
How long on average before you see your old (revived) content starting to rank high?
In my experience, you will recover only a certain % of traffic in most cases if you revive the old content.
But the idea of reviving is not limited to traffic only; if you’ve got relevant articles in the Wayback which are getting backlinks, then recovering them is a far better option than redirecting them to the homepage.
You can do internal linking with your money pages to build a solid foundation. But make sure you don’t copy exact content from the archive; try to rewrite as much as possible to avoid potential legal issues.
And for any non-relevant page, just redirect it to the homepage.
Exclusive coupon for Stream SEO readers
Oh, before I forget, I actually decided to give you a 10% coupon that you can use if you buy an aged authority domain from SerpNames ❤️
It’s only exclusive for Stream SEO followers to show my heartfelt gratitude to Servando for trusting SerpNames and for giving me this chance to share the potential of aged domains with his family 🙈
You can use STREAM10 when you check out one of our aged domains here.
And there you have it. Genuinely hoping you learned something from here ❤️
Rooting for your happiness,
Sumit l A Go-Giver
Author’s bio: Hey! I’m Sumit, the founder of SerpNames. I love helping people like you discover the SEO strategies behind aged authority domains, so you get the most out of them. If you need any help or guidance, then shamelessly hit me up at hello@skbansal.com. Happy to connect with you! 💗
