With one of my sites I have hit a bit of a wall... (don't even ask for the url) The site is nearly 2 years old and basically over the life of it traffic has been growing and it has stagnated at around 100K uniques for the last 3 months. I earn a few hunderd $ a month from it - it is a low paying niche (sub $0.10 clicks most of the time) I am hesitant to change to an affiliate program as the loss of the income I have would be a problem for me. The site was heavily promoted in a large forum I used to participate in initially and it has slowly grown over time. It gets typically 10-50 new natural backlinks/mth without any effort on my part. I rank in the top 10 for over 50 words/phrases on the big 3 S/E's so natural SE traffic has probably peaked - I get S/E hits for over 3K different search terms each month. There would be very little value going after any "long tail" search terms with these results. When the site started, I did a few link exchanges, and have done quite a few directory submissions as well - somewhere between 500 and 1000. The wall I have hit is that traffic has levelled out and so has revenue growth. The site itself is pretty simple and requires next to no work to keep it running as the site provides an online tool. I am just wondering how I can take it to the next level, get back on a growth cycle. Has anyone else had a similar situation with a site hitting a peak? how did you get past it? Sure, if I do nothing, I will probably still get the ~100K uniques/mth and remain fairly revenue neutral. I just never thought I would have the problem of only getting 100K uniques a month on any site.
Since I can't see what you are actually talking about I can'tt say much but you say its an internet tool?? Have you considered addin on other tools or resources to get past the wall? Different marketing tactics, article submissions, or something besides just forums? Just a couple of ideas that came to mind right away. Good luck!
Online tools could be on various topics. If you give the name of the topic, we may be able to give suggestions to reach markets hitherto untapped..
I don't think any one will say this so here is my advice assuming you only have one site. Start another web site in a different niche. You will learn what you need to know and come back with ideas to take the current one to the next level. You are probably just stuck with the problem of one site.
By tool, I mean that the website does something that you could do on your own computer if you had the right software - so basically it is online software that has a simple interface. I certainly don't have just 1 site - I have several and most of them cover different niches. I have never really done any sort of article submissions - I would not know where to start! I guess it is something that I could look at and see how it goes - anyone have a "dummies guide" to getting started with article submission?
I think the way to go is to expand what the tool does. Let's say it watermarks....well then you might want to make a banner creator site. I know when i first got online i couldn't make banners and used websites like flamingtext.com (if it still exists....man i can't believe i remembered the URL, i haven't used the site for 5 years). If you're getting 100,000 uniques, then you could easily transfer some of that traffic to another similar site. I'd love 100,000 uniques haha.