Most website owners will tell you the hardest part of setting up a website is the website promotion. Without that you will find it hard to attract visitors and make a success of your website. There are millions of websites out there competing for visitors, so website promotion is a very important, if not the most important part of building a successful website. But what if I was to tell you there is an easy way to promote your new website and that all it takes is a little forward planning from the outset.

Many websites come and go. Some of these websites have been heavily promoted, and their underlying domains carry on receiving lots of visitors even after the websites have gone and the domains expired. There are estimates showing that millions of visitors every day land on expired domains, and it is these visitors which could be visiting your new website.

Expired domains come about as a domain name has a limited life - a domain is registered for a fixed period, normally one or two years. If the domain isn't renewed after this time then it will expire and become available for other people to register once again. The owners of many of these domains have spent a lot of time and money promoting these domains in order to get lots of visitors every day.

You may find it odd that a website receiving visitors gets abandoned and left to expire. There are many reasons why websites are left to expire - a change of life by the owner, or it was a project they tried and got bored with, or they simply didn't realise how many visitors they were getting, or... The list goes on. The question shouldn't be why has the domain expired, but how many visitors does it receive and is it suitable for my chosen website topic?

Before you start your new website, you want to carefully consider your domain name. You could keep trying different domains with the registrars to see which ones are available, but most of the good domain names are already taken. If you do happen to find a domain name you like, and its available, then you will still need to plan ahead and look into website promotion. Without that you will find it hard to attract visitors.

But what if you could find a domain that has already been promoted in the past, and is about to become available. Surely that is an option considering very seriously. You could be receiving traffic from the moment you put your website up on the internet. Of course you will want to promote your new website, but using a domain that has already been promoted could give you a good head start.

The trick is to find a domain appropriate for your website idea, that receives lots of visitors, and is about to expire. A tall order, but there are services out there that can help. Once such website is DomDat.com that lists expiring domains along with their relevant data such as search engine rankings, the number of inbound links specified by several of the top search engines, and information regarding the previous content of the associated website.