Here is how you can get traffic from an expired domain name.
Everyday hundreds of domain names expire. This could be for any of these reasons: their owners forgot to renew them in time. They lost interest in them. Or they got other domain names for their new sites. And of course, this can happen also when the owner passed away and there was nobody to carry on his or her online business.
But all expired domains are not equal. For a domain name to be useful for getting traffic and ultimately making you money, it must already have been used for a site which was getting a lots of traffic. It could have a good number of backlinks, be listed in popular search engines and directories.
The more popular the website, the more valuable would be its domain name. Because even when there is no site going with such a domain name, it is found in search engines and gets hits. So if you get such a domain name and use it to re-direct it to your site or use it for your new site, you would be getting lots of valuable hits without doing anything. And with so much traffic you can make money by affiliate sales, adsense clicks or sales of your own products. The possibilities of making money with highly optimized domain names are endless.
But there is another side to expired domain names also. For one, such a domain may be worthless if it was getting no traffic to begin with. Then it would require you to develop it as you would do a new domain. But a domain name may be dangerous for your business also. If the domain name was used for a site that was tagged as a spam site by search engines it would do more harm than good to you. If you use it the search engines wouldn't list it in their search results. Your AdSense account may also be affected by using it with such a spammy domain.
So you have to find a popular as well as clean domain name if you would like to make money from it.
Here it would be in order to know something about how you can register for a domain name that has expired.
When a domain name expires it doesn't become available for re-registration on its expiry date. There is a wait period of 40 days during which the owner can renew it. And even after this time, there is a period of about 30 days in which the domain can be renewed by the original owner at some enhanced fee. It is only after this time has passed that a domain name would become available for new registration.
Savvy webmasters who are on the lookout for valuable expired domain names backorder them before the expiry time. So it is not certain that you would get a domain name just because it has expired even if you have backordered it but your order is not the first in the queue.
To put this strategy to work you need to find sites which let you make searches for expired or about to expire domain names. You may find some such sites which are free to use but for an in-depth analysis of domain names you may have to join a site which would charge a membership fee. But a single good domain name could pay back what you invest for finding it.