Hello again! It’s time for another Odys Spotlight, where I pick one lucky domain from the wide Odys inventory and tell you why it’s valuable, what you can build with it, and why you should buy it. This is a love letter AND a sales letter to a domain.
Well who are you and why should I listen to what you have to say?
Good question! My name is Sean Markey and I accidentally became an expert in aged domain acquisitions, build-outs, and sales. I have a free SEO newsletter RankTheory.com where I talk about such things. I’ve sold almost a million dollars worth of aged domains that I built from scratch, so I know what I’m talking about!
Today, we’re gonna look at the domain AdvantageLithium.com, and talk about what it used to be, why it’s valuable, and what kind of cool sites you might build on it now. Here we go…
The history of Advantage Lithium
This site was registered in 2016 and it claimed to be “creating the next lithium producer.” That’s nice, you might think, lithium is probably important. After all, there is a Nirvana song called Lithium, so that’s… noteworthy? So what makes the element of lithium so valuable?
Well, aside from its use as an antimanic drug to make your BRAIN feel, well, less manic (note to self: call doctor about Lithium prescription) lithium also has found itself at the center of this little-known industry called THE ELECTRIC CAR INDUSTRY.
That’s right, those Teslas and Leafs and… whatever dope electric car Mercedes is releasing all use lithium-ion batteries which, you’ll never guess what’s in those. Okay, I’ll tell you–it’s lithium.
That takes us to AdvantageLithium.com – their whole reason for existing looks to be putting together presentations to convince investors to invest in them creating the next big lithium producer down in South America. Here’s a grab from one of the slides in their presentation (which is still online on web.archive.org, surprisingly…
So what happened to AdvandedLithium.com? How did they go from an eager investor presentation to a domain for sale on Odys? Acquisition, baby! On April 17th, 2020 (a.k.a March 48th, 2020) Advantage Lithium was acquired by Orocobre, a “mineral resource company that focuses on lithium and borax mining operations” which has since changed its name to Allkem Limited. Got it?
This is one of the most common paths that lead to aged domains being acquired: the forgotten redirect via acquisition. So that’s the journeyAdvantageLithium.com took to arrive in the Odys inventory. Now let’s look at WHY it is a valuable domain in two parts: the backlinks, and the battery industry.
The backlinks
Everybody loves to see amazing backlinks in a site’s backlink profile from heavy-hitting authority sites like Bloomberg, Deloitte, and TheLancet. But when you’re drilling down into a specific niche (get it? It’s a mining pun, and Advantage Lithium was a site about mining for Lithium! You get it…) – when you drill down into a specific niche like lithium mining, you REALLY want to see niche specific backlinks propping up that niched down authority.
Lucky for you, future buyer of AdvantageLithium.com, the backlink profile DOES include such links:
Here is a look at the Majestic.com link graph (which is a thing I have recently discovered and love):
The backlinks are solid but not powered-up, meaning the pages LINKING to AdvantageLithium.com don’t have many links going to them. In my opinion, this is an easy win for anyone that starts building out the site.
It is my strongly-held opinion that the age of a backlink matters greatly, along with the topic of the site doing the linking. Many of the strongest links are over five years old–so in addition to the links being strong, they are also well-aged. So, in the backlinks department, this site has a lot going for it. But what about the electric vehicle/battery niche (which is the most obvious build-out case)?
Information about the niche
Odys has this very succinctly covered from the listing page, so I’ll start this section with what has been written there:
Market insights
The global electric vehicle market size was USD 246.70 billion in 2020. The global impact of COVID-19 has been staggering and unprecedented, with Electric Vehicles witnessing a progressive demand shock in all regions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our study, the global market exhibited a growth of -9.7% in 2020 as compared to the average year-on-year growth during 2017-2019. The market is anticipated to grow from USD 287.36 billion in 2021 to USD 1,318.22 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 24.3% in the 2021-2028 period. The sudden rise in CAGR is attributable to this market’s growth and demand, returning to pre-pandemic levels once the coronavirus crisis is over.
Short story shorter: there’s a lot of money to be made in the electric vehicle market. People aren’t going to suddenly stop buying electric cars as the Earth continues to be poisoned and lashes back out at us like a Boa Constrictor being consumed by an alligator, coiling around the beast and crushing it with its last bit of strength so nobody wins…
Oops, got a bit caught up there… where was I? Ah, yes. The Earth is dying. And green tech is big business and of great interest, so this is a pretty solid niche to slip into. If you need further convincing on the hot topic-ness, here are two graphs that show the interest over time from Google Trends:
Solid. Now that I’ve shared the history of the domain, the backlinks, and talked about the niche, it’s time to focus on website-building strategies.
What I would do with AdvantageLithium.com
To be honest, I would treat this like another aged domain I’m working within a lucrative but-hard-to-monetize niche: Build traffic and that’s it. This makes your job fairly easy. All you need to do is cover the entire topical map of related posts. Easy Peasy!
But seriously, work on that topical map. Find other sites talking about the electric car industry or lithium battery mining and just write an article on everything you find in Ahrefs. Go hunting for competitors and put them in Ahrefs or whatever tool and mine every keyword you can. No keyword has too small a search volume. Your number one job here is showing Google that when it comes to this topic, no one has more to say about it than you.
Next, I’d suggest firing up a tool like KeywordChef.com and having it pull in a thousand ideas you could write about, topics with little or no search volume. Again, you’re not necessarily trying to get huge rankings right away. Instead, you’re leveraging the existing authority of the domain to rank for easy, low-competition keywords AND ALSO painting your site as the absolute authority on the topic of lithium batteries.
I don’t even think you need to just stick to one sub-niche of lithium, like, you don’t need to JUST write about mining, or just write about electric cars, or whatever else is related, IDK, glamping? I think the topic is niche enough that you don’t have to peel off any more layers. So that’s the foundation: seed it with a ton of content.
I can see that there are a bunch of 302 redirects in place (temporarily saying this page is redirected to the homepage). Get rid of those. For any pages that can be rebuilt, such as the “investors” page, rebuild it!
For example, on the investors page, I’d make a post giving info about investing in Lithium, focusing on trends, talking about places or organizations making big bets on Lithium, going over their stock and market cap, etc. Anything relating to investing in Lithium would go there. Boom, now you’ve captured all the old links coming into this page and pointed it at something that can help your site and do something with all that juice (that is, after all, THE ENTIRE POINT of using an aged domain).
Same with the news and media section – I’d just make a lithium news page and redirect that news-and-media page (and any sub-pages) to the new “news” page. Boom. It doesn’t have to be a 1:1 fit, just make it related and then put in a 301 redirect.
You want to make sure every page with a link worth having is DOING SOMETHING or GOING SOMEWHERE. Otherwise, just start from scratch if you’re going to ignore all the old juice. For any page unrelated to anything you’d want to be building, just 301 it to the home page or to a category post. Don’t overthink it.
Monetization options
This is a bit tricky, as it’s not like this is or was a site that sold tents or something that people actively buy, or that there’s a passionate group of people who are interested in it. Most people are like MEH when it comes to talking about batteries or sustainability, so you will need to get creative.
I can point you in the right direction, but the person that will monetize this site the best will either be someone super passionate about going green, or Tesla (or electric cars in general), or …something. But to my earlier point: kick this site into overdrive by getting a bunch of traffic and you’ll figure it out.
Start a newsletter
Anyone interested in the electric car market or in mining lithium or whatever-related topics (you’ll definitely find more as you go deep in the niche) is probably hurting for very focused news and think pieces.
If you’re really going to bring the thunder and have some absolutely valuable insights or synthesizing data, you can attract readers to your blog with some solid SEO and then charge them a bunch of money to deliver some Deloitte-esque insights and consulting on the topic. One report a quarter or something, if your insights are extremely valuable, you can easily charge four-figures once your have the reputation.
Similarly, if you just build a big (it’ll probably still be small, the overall market of readers is smaller than, like, “graphic design” or something) email list of all the right people, you can charge some solid ad rates to sponsor your newsletter, for sponsored posts on your site, or just for ads in general. If that’s the case, probably going with an ad network like Media Vine is not the right answer.
Ads on your site
This is going to be short because there doesn’t need to be a lot said about it: Monetize your site with ads. You COULD use an ad platform, but, like i just said above, it’d probably be more lucrative to find big industry players that want to get in front of a very target audience.
Affiliate Site, I guess…
It’s not the best idea. Maybe it’s something to do while you’re working on building a bigger audience and getting sponsors, but you could review some different lithium batteries if you can find some on Amazon or wherever that have a decent associated search volume.
This is definitely the weakest of the ideas, but it’s a solid starting point if you need something easy and straightforward. And yes, I made that amazing graphic. I’m available for all your graphic design needs!
There are a ton of batteries for sale on Amazon, just find some to write about and, they are not so expensive, just buy a few for the authenticity side of things, and there you go. Best Lithium Batteries For X 2023.
Wrapping it up (And throwing it into a lithium mine)
So that’s what’s up with AdvantageLithium.com. A solid brand (we didn’t even talk about the brand–it’s solid!) with a great backlink profile full of strong domains and niche-relevant links. I really think this has the makings of a potentially great build-out. As always, I will offer an hour of my time on a consulting call if you end up buying this domain to help you get started. Thanks for reading!
