How does your billing work? Are you on a plan for that VPS with dedicated, fixed burstable, or 95th percentile burstable? You may be able to find some less cringe worthy bills if you change how you are billed. Although that might mean you have to change providers, too.
Sorry I know I am late getting back to you, but good luck. Would love to get connected with you on LinkedIn or something. Feel free to reach out to me anytime.
Love that you are engaging with the commenters. Maybe it's worth taking some of this feedback and applying it to your homepage, or maybe create some click tracks from your homepage to some of these other feature pages to take people on a the buyer journey and try to convert them into leads?
What's your appetite for discussing your competitors on your site? An SEO/content strategy targeting terms like "alternatives to [Competitor]" should work well in your space. This is also incredibly common in the SaaS space, so you won't be doing anything that these companies aren't already doing to each other.
Consider reaching cold on LinkedIn with no "sales" agenda and explain your interest in reaching out. Pretty sure most people worth adding to your circle would appreciate actually not getting a sales pitch on LinkedIn through a connection request.
I find connection requests that are of a non-sales variety are so rare on that platform these days, it really sticks out when I get one.
- Time spent reading daily: my min goal is 30 minutes.
- Time spent on social media: trying to lower this to as close to 0 as possible, currently limiting to about 20 minutes per day.
- Amount of sleep
Professional:
- Average ranking position for all keyword targets (I'm an SEO/digital marketer)
- Amount of work hours invested (I'm a remoter, so I want to make sure I hit AT LEAST 8). PS - this is never a problem LOL.
Thinking about this purely from the perspective of SEO, does the domain still have backlinks pointing to it from that 2011 timeframe?
If yes, then the "age" of the domain shouldn't matter as much as the age of the backlinks.
So if the old links are still pointing to it, the newer domain age shouldn't matter - you should be good. I would use a pages report in a backlink analysis tool (I prefer Majestic, but I know there are others :)) and then pull up the Wayback Machine to see what kind of data it has on the domain. Then work on rebuilding the essential pages from there.
The first sentence from PaulHoule is 100% spot on. Additionally, you can't just point the expired domain with backlinks at your domain and think its rankings are magically going to boost your rankings.
First off, the domain needs to be somewhat relevant to the topic of the site you are redirecting it to.
Second, make sure you actually reproduce the site to allow Google to understand the domain is online and active again before you simply redirect it.
Basically, to do the "expired domain" tactic right, you are going to need to find one with backlinks worth leveraging, on a topic closely related to yours, and put the site back online for at least 90 days before you redirect.
If you're going to do this (and want to do it right) make sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
Can you integrate with anything that is already frequently used (ala Salesforce or Zendesk)? Do you have a unique application for a specific industry that you can document? I saw someone said run Google or Facebook ads - hard to argue with that. But to get your first 10 paying customers you probably need to go the organic route. I would leverage an SEO strategy where you barnacle on highly adopted platforms - think Quora, Medium, or even Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups.
I am interested to see what they will be testing in some of the upcoming posts in this series. It would be fun to be scrolling Netflix and have the transparency to know that I'm seeing the 'B' test.