You are really into something. So much so that perhaps your friends and family joke about your “obsession”, or ask why you aren’t making a career out of it. You know that for the majority of us, the quickest way to suck the fun out of something you love is to make it your job. You also know that there are plenty of people better qualified than you out there that are already making a living in that area, and besides, you wouldn’t know where to begin.

Maybe, just maybe, your passion exceeds it’s object and you feel compelled to take it to the next level. A website? Hmmm. A website! I can indulge in this passion and create something in the process that will be of use to others who share my enthusiasm. Brilliant!

This thought process may or may not be familiar to you, but many of us start down the road of website or blog creation with a similar motivation. The pitfalls for the many who pursue this is that, well, websites require a lot of work. Like everything else, it’s easy to start hard and then taper off. Perhaps your site got off to an incredible start, but now it’s in the tank and not growing, or worse, traffic has decreased. Man, this sucks. Everyone knows that on the internet if you aren’t growing you’re dying, right? Well before you call it quits it’s time to stop, take a deep breath and decide if you’re really finished after all.

It takes a lot of work to get a new website off the ground and build traffic. Link building is time consuming, and generating enough content for Google to send significant traffic your way takes a while. Along the way you probably also got more interested in your design, and spent some time on your site’s look and layout. All this amounts to a lot of blood and sweat on your part to give your new site a successful start.

Pitfall #1- Laziness

It’s easy to get lazy at this point. Ok, now the site is rolling, all I need to do is shovel in a little coal now and again and the engine will keep spinning. Wrong. Don’t expect the kind of growth you saw early on if you are going to slack off once you have gotten some success. This is the recipe for stagnation. This won’t kill your site, but it will keep you exactly where you are now.

Pitfall #2- Life gets in the way

I don’t have any good advice for this one; it’s exactly where I find myself right now. If your website isn’t your primary source of income, there’s a good chance there’s a day job conspiring to keep you from investing the time you need to on your website. Not to mention spouses and children. Don’t forget about them, it leads to divorce, not to mention that you will never get this day back again with your child.

I bought a laptop so that I could work on the website during the work week. I work double shifts and spend nights away from my family so that I can A) make more money, and B) take more time off to compensate for the time I have to spend away. Well, waking up at 5am, working from 7am to 11pm, and trying to eat some dinner AND work on the website in the hour I have on a work night so I can get 4 1/2 hours of sleep is impossible. I’m going to choose dinner and bed over the laptop every time. Further, I am going to choose my wife and my sons over the website every time as well.

This is where you want to find time on your days off, crank out some articles and set them to publish on different days during the coming week. Be more selective in the articles you publish, pick quality over quantity. It’s the only advice I have, unless you don’t need sleep.

Frustration

If you care about your site, this is where frustration sets in. Man, if this is all there is, then maybe I should just let the site die. Then I won’t have to spend so much time and thought on it. Sound familiar? Hold on before you pull the plug, it’s time for a little introspection.

Is the site good? Is the content quality? Does Google love you? If you answer yes to these three questions, don’t kill the site. You’ve already achieved what most sites never do.

So you’re at a low point with the site. Your focus and attitude changes, right? Maybe next month you will be as driven with the site as you were 6 months ago, you just never know. Google is going to keep sending traffic your way, even if new posts are down. The site isn’t going to shrivel up and die just because you are having a bad summer. Yes, you will lose some traffic, and you’ll have to win those people back later, but the site is still good and the content is still good and Google still loves you.

There is no such thing as an infinite growth website. All sites have a ceiling that depends on your niche, how much Google loves you and how much content you have. If you thought that your traffic numbers would look that great forever and started wondering what you were going to do with all the money your site would be generating in a few years, welcome to reality. If you don’t have an unlimited amount of time to devote to your website, join the club.

If you are creating something of value, don’t quit. The foundation is sound, so don’t walk away from something you worked so hard on, because you will probably be back to it before too long. You know your content is good, and so will many of the people that land on your site. This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and taking periods to get your wind back is ok. Just don’t walk away from something good because you are frustrated. We’ve all been there or are heading there or will be there again, it’s part of the human condition.

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