Type-in traffic

Type-in traffic describes visitors that arrive at a website by typing the domain name directly into a web browser’s address bar. As an example you might want to know about brewing your own beer so you type in:

freebeer.com

Single word domain names in the dot com (.com) namespace will see most type-in traffic but all the common English words (and most foreign words) have now been registered.

There are opportunities for more targeted traffic which can see better conversion rates than generic words. You may decide to establish a number of microsites discussing

freemaltbeer.com, freeweissbeer.com etc.

Each site would have just a few pages covering the subject area. This lets programs such as Google’s AdSense offer better matching for adverts and can also attract niche advertisers.

With widespread Internet penetration in most advanced economies there are also opportunities for local search. The Kelsey Group (a market research firm) predicted that local search advertising will grow to $13 billion in the United States by 2010, a four fold increase over 5 years. Classfied advertising, such as on Craiglist.com, will double to $31 billion. Kelsey say it is part of a trend that marketeers are following away from broadly targeted to vertical and location specific websites. We may also register

freedetroitbeer.com, freeglasgowbeer.com etc.

To target this local market.

Any product or service can be marketed in this way. What actually works and generates traffic requires some research. Obviously larger conurbations and more popular products and services will provide more type-in traffic. You can also take advantage of current trends and developments, if you are quick. As an example the European Court rules that it was permissible to sell cigarettes tax-free by mail within Europe so why not register:

cheap-mail-order-cigarettes

A whole bunch of these were registered at the time of the European ruling.

There is also the perennial question of to hyphen or not to hyphen? It is more likely that type-ins will not use hyphens; however search engines such as Google will not be able to recognize compound words so there will be less keyword optimization benefit.

The obvious way to monetize these sites is by Google AdSense or another content targeted advertising scheme or by Domain Parking.