Those are two very important questions you are asking yourself. Here is the bottom line. You are probably like most on-line entrepreneurs. You have been struggling to snatch your share of that whirl wind of traffic that you hear about from every guru wannabe out there.

Chances are you have probably invested strongly in banner ads, classified ads, search engines or even spent a pile on so-called "safe lists" only to find yourself disappointed again and again.

There is a perfectly legal, outrageously effective, traffic generation technique that, until now, has gone relatively unnoticed by the masses.

What if you could recover existing web traffic that is currently being overlooked and basically being flushed down the toilet?

What if you could grab one of those prized listings in Yahoo that cost $200 with no guarantee you'll even be included in the directory?

What if you could get that traffic for a fraction of what other advertising methods charge?

Expired domains might be an option to mull over. Every day over 3 million hits of targeted traffic are lost due to abandoned web sites.

Why does this happen?

Webmasters may lose interest or they don't have the money or time to manage the site. Occasionally they just forget to renew. A large part of these expired domain clicks come from sites that were never developed. BUT, some were once solid sites generating traffic and sales.

Expired domains is all about capturing all the effort, time and money that the previous owner developed and putting it to good use for yourself.

What if a domain name had link popularity, had a coveted dotcom (.com) extension, or was even listed in Yahoo or had Google Page Ranking?

What is Link Popularity? Simply put, Link Popularity is the number of other websites that link to your site. Doesn't it stand to reason that if a domain name previously had Link Popularity or was one of those coveted dotcoms or was even listed in Yahoo, that it might have once been a thriving website?

Not only that, but with a little time and effort, you might even be able to pick up some popular domain names just for conjecture or to resell on eBay ! Many of the domain names that expire every day could be resold even without Link Popularity or any of the other "carrots" because they just happen to be highly regarded as a tangible asset. Short, descriptive domain names that end in a ".com" or ".net" are examples of this.

The best part is that you can get these names for the price of registering them, often for less than $10!

Even if you didn't use the domain name to redirect traffic to your own web site, if you find a couple and sell them at auction for $25, $50 or more, that's a pretty suitable return on a very small investment.

A certain amount of caution needs to be taken when using this tool for any purpose. Make certain you do a bit of homework to make sure the previous web site was not an adult site. Occasionally the domain name may not necessarily reflect the former content. There is a tool that can be used to determine the history of the site. Best of all, it's free! Here is the link:

http://web .archive.org

If you are looking for alternative ways to generate traffic to your site, expired domains might be a good investment.