[Case Study] How someone bought a politician's website to build an affiliate website
2017: The French elect, as they do every 5 years, the person who will run the country during the next 5 years. One candidate is Marine Le Pen, candidate of the far-right party Front National (now called Rassemblement National).
She uses a website (https://marine2017.fr) to expose her political ideas and display her meetings etc...
After losing the election against Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, the domain is left unused because it serves no purpose anymore. At the end of the day, the year is included in the domain name, hence even if she decided to run again in 2022, she would probably use another domain.
2018: The domain is bought at the beginning of the year and its former content is replaced by an affiliate website, comparing products like meat grinders, vacuum cleaners, etc...
Even if the thematic is very far from the original one, Google ranks the website pretty fast, undoubtedly thanks to the huge amount of backlinks it generated during the political campaign, on its targeted terms.
These targeted terms all have the same characteristics: huge search volume, clear purchase intent, and the products sell from medium to high prices.
The website grows and managed to generate up to 500.000 sessions/months (based on SEMRUSH's data) in France.
2019: The website's owner tries to carry out a domain migration, to use a name that matches better with the real content.
Unfortunately, the migration didn't go very well and the owner decided to reverse the migration and stick to the current domain.
Why would you even try to do that? Because having a mismatch between your domain name and what you offer is not something you want to maintain in the long-run. And you want to build a brand, something impossible to achieve with the current domain.
2020: The domain still generates a lot of traffic (and revenue) but he was impacted by Google's last update. Maybe Google finally realizes that a huge part of the backlinks linked to this domain doesn't have to be taken into account.
This is one of the most fascinating examples I have ever found on a successful business whose growth was based on the history of a bought domain. Anyone working on the affiliate business has tried to use this same technique, but this is by far the most successful I can think of.
Do you know other funny cases like this one that you can share? I'd be curious to look at them as well.
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This is the best one I read so far considering expired domains: https://detailed.com/expired-domain-seo/
They claim the site earned up 28k/month with this particular strategy in just 8 months.
I am not sure how well this works right now, but I am testing this with my new affiliate website. I think if you buy the domain in the same niche as your site AND backlinks from relevant websites (in the same product category).
I have just started the site at the beginning of 2020, so we'll see in a few months time how this works :)
Buying an expired domain is still a very valid strategy if you do it correctly IMO. You can benefit from its backlinks but also recover contents using archive.org for instance.
I have seen affiliates or E-commerce websites taking off quickly thanks to that strategy, so I hope yours will too :)
That is what I am testing and really hope this, at least, kickstart the whole website, but my niche is seasonal, so I may not see the results this year. We'll see 🙂
Amazing story. Thanks for sharing.
I would never have thought of using a politician domain name for such a purpose.
By the way, do you know of any good place to sell a (.io) domain name?
I wouldn't have either and it takes courage to take this decision because you have no way to know that it will work for sure.
There are a lot of websites you can use to sell: you can check https://hostlater.com/sites-to-sell-domain-names/ and pick your favorite.
Thank you Antoine :)