Do all of your sites slow down after a year?

I noticed that every site I create is always extremely popular at first. Then after a year things slow down a lot. All of my sites are still active, but not like when they first began. I always go out of my way to improve on the site, like adding new features for free that people seem to enjoy. However the thing that confuses me is why sites do not continue to be as active as when you first created them. I guess when a user sees that the site is already popular, they may feel like everyone is already aware of the site and they are just a face in the crowd. However when a site is new they feel as though they have discovered something that no one else is aware of and want to spread the word.

I can only assume that is normal for a site to have a popular lifespan of a year or so. They will continue to gain traffic and new members, but not an explosive amount like the first month. Ironically I know a few plain sites that everyone seems to love that grows on a daily basis. How about yourself?

 

do they slow down, or does the growth rate just level off. May be that there are only a finite amount of users fro the niche and you are starting to get your available market share of them.

 

This wasnt normal for me. Try introducing a new marketing plan, or at least updating it. If its a service, maybe new, better ones have emerged. Good luck.

 

It may just be your avatar, who knows...

 

Haha ServerUnion. Yeah they seem to level off, no decrease or a large increase.

 

i thought it would increase...

 

Thats what most would expect. 1 year is not very long after staring a site and it still should be growth phase for the site.

 

Were you getting visitors from Google? Perhaps you're in the sandbox; I've heard of very new sites doing very well, then after a couple months their rankings drop sharply into "sandbox" zone.

 

No, I find it's the opposite. Things tend to grow gradually, sometimes even when I'm not actively promoting or improving on a site. You gather backlinks which people leave around, get out of the sandbox, people tell their friends, and word gradually spreads.

Perhaps the reason you get this drop-off is because of the sort of sites you run, and the way you promote them? I can think of a few promotion methods that will be a lot shorter-lived than others. Email, for instance.

 

since 1997 all numbers always went up year after year - NO single year same or only little more than before - each year a substantial increase of 50-100% over the previous year in visitors and overall performance

each year i set a goal to achieve and each year i work many EXTRA hundreds of hours just to achieve that goal

more content, more new stuff, new features, etc,
increase in ALL parts means
- improve SEO and directory submissions for REAL directories
- increase/improve RSS feeds to reach out to more visitors directly
- newsletters and forum improvements
- HW improvements
- new topics of intrerest
- increase in server quality ( less 404, etc )
- increase in server security and performance
- include new technologies ( WAP/mobile content, RSS, mpeg/flash, photos, etc,
- each year many k$ investment into improvements HW/SW

always resulting in ALL numbers going steadily way UP yr after yr - also adsense
btw - i have 1 site only ever since i started!