Breaking a Traffic Plateau

I just started a diet three weeks ago.  I’ve lost 13 pounds so far.  Not bad at all, right?  I’m pretty happy with how its going so far.  I have to admit though that I can lose 20 or 30 pounds pretty easily.  I’ve done it dozens of times.  It’s keeping it off and going for the next 20 pounds that causes me heartache.

It is common to reach weight loss plateaus.  You hit a point where what you’ve been doing that helped you lose weight starts to not be enough.  You have to do something MORE to keep on losing.

Today I had a chat with a friend who has reached a plateau in her business.  She is making a little money in a regular basis but her numbers haven’t increased much in the last six months.

FYI, she is a content site owner.  She doesn’t sell anything physical or digital and she doesn’t offer any services.  Her business model is based on affiliate marketing, recommending products and services related to her website topic.

We talked about what she has been doing to promote her site and get traffic. Turns out – she really has been doing the same things she has always done since she started the site years ago.  She adds a few new pages of original content each month, adds a dozen or so pages of well rewritten PLR content and she writes one article per month to distribute to article directories.  She posts to forums, comments on blogs and spends a little time networking each day on sites like Ryze and Ning.

My friend has reached a traffic plateau.

What worked to grow her website traffic at first – is not enough to fuel additional growth.  If she wants to see more traffic, she has to up her game.

The first glaring issue I see is that my friend is not blogging. (WHAT!? Seriously!?)  Yep – she’s one of those stubborn holdbacks from Web 1.0 days.  She believes ‘if you build it – they will come’.  Maybe that was true ten years ago but it sure isn’t true today – especially not if you are operating in a niche that has attracted a lot of competition.  As competitors enter the market and employ Web 2.0 tactics – older sites see their numbers drop.

She has to start blogging.  Blogging will make her site fresher and more relevant if it is done right and that will help her to draw more traffic right there.

When I added a blog to WAHM Talk Radio my traffic increased 30% within two months.

She needs to increase her efforts to get her links out there on the web.  One distributed article per month isn’t a lot.  I know content site owners who distribute 30 articles per month on a consistent basis and trust me, they see the fruit in terms of traffic.

She doesn’t have to go from one per month to 30 -  but she could up it to five and see five times the exposure and inbound links. To make her multiplied article marketing really work for her she should be sure to use her author box to give links back to different key internal pages on her website instead of only to her home page.

In addition to upping her article distribution count, she should look for topical article directories that may have popped up in the last year or so to make sure she is sending her content out to the best targeted sources.

She needs to look out for guest blogging opportunities on relevant blogs as well as look for chances to be profiled, featured, interviewed and otherwise plugged on other websites and podcasts.

If she just did these few things, she’d see a very respectable boost in web traffic over the next six months.  All of those articles, blog posts and profiles are being seen by more eye balls and all those back links will help her rank better in the search engines.

There’s more she can do.  Lots more – but this would be a great start.

And goodness knows… another plateau surely awaits her.  She’ll have to up her game again down the road as will we all.

Plateaus are not left behind by doing the same old same old.

So what do you need to do today to make it up to the next level for your business?

Additional Resources:

• The Truth about Traffic
• What is Article Marketing?