EPP 125: What To Do When Your Business Growth Has Stalled

In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast we’re talking about the reasons why business growth comes to a screeching halt and how this problem can be solved.

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You’re working hard and you think you’re doing everything possible yet your business is simply not growing. Does that sound familiar? It probably does because most entrepreneurs hit this plateau at some point. I have certainly been there several times and many Extra Paycheck blog readers reached out to me with the same issue.

Let’s examine why this happens to our online business and how we can solve this problem.

First of all we tend to think that we’re working hard when in reality we aren’t. We feel like we’re doing all that we need to be doing yet we’re not seeing any results. I can only attribute that to a comfort routine. When you start a brand new blog you start producing content for it. Let’s say you’re writing one good article per week and your blog starts picking up. After 6 months you’re hitting 100 unique visitors per day and you’re even making some money. Awesome, right?

You keep doing that for 6 more months only to realize that you’re still getting only 100 visitors a day and you’re making the same amount of money you were half a year ago. Stability is great but we were hoping for growth so where is it? The answer is simple in this scenario: 1 article per week is no longer enough. The blog posts you wrote at the very beginning might be irrelevant at this point or maybe they simply dropped in rankings because other bloggers created better content. Maybe you even published a piece of content that went viral but with time people forgot about it and stopped sharing it. Our attention span is very short after all.

When you figure out a routine that works for you, you usually stick to it and stop trying to do more and go further. Please do not take this personally, I am drawing conclusions based on my own work experience. We can (and should) work harder and always try to improve and expand our business.

Another reason why many feel like their business is not growing is because they expect an overnight success. I know that 6 months or even a year feels like a lot of time but it really isn’t in the grand scheme of things. When I interviewed Pat Flynn on my podcast he mentioned that most of his niche websites took at least 18 months to show any significant results. Let me be bald here, if you’re expecting to become a big success in a year or less then maybe building a business is not for you. 12 months simply isn’t enough time to truly measure your results. Even though you’re feeling like it’s not worth it after a year of work, keep at it, keep improving and keeping looking for ways you can improve your business.

In my experience success comes in jumps. In my online business and many other online businesses that I have seen success came in chunks. You’re stuck on the same level for several months then all of the sudden you see a huge increase. That is the next level. After that you’ll be stuck on this “2nd level” for several month or even a year then all of the sudden you’ll see another big jump and so on. Sure, it doesn’t apply to everyone but that’s what I’ve experienced and it’s definitely worth thinking about.

Remember that most success stories you’ve heard of took years to build. It might seem like a new start-up just appeared out of a nowhere and conquered the world but if you research that company you’ll see that it took many years of hard work to get that “overnight success”.

Rovio built over 51 games and they all failed until their very last project, Angry Birds. Later Zynga offered to buy out Rovio for $2.25 Billion (with a B) which Rovio declined.

Starbucks opened its first shop in 1971. It took 16 years to open the second shop and I imagine you can imagine the rest.

Colonel Sanders tried to sell his fried chicken recipe and was rejected 1,009 times before anyone accepted it. I am sure you’ve heard of KFC by now.

There are also hundreds if not thousands of stories when people who run successful websites admit they couldn’t even over 100 visitors per day for the first 2+ years. Give it time. Be patient. Keep working.

Sit down, relax and think what you can do to improve your business. Can you produce more content? If you can’t do it yourself maybe you can pay someone to do it for you? Remember that promoting your content is just as important as creating it. Are you building an email list? If not you should start today. Are you doing YouTube videos? I know that it might seem useless for your brand or your industry but it really isn’t. YouTube is the second biggest search engine (after Google) and you must be on it. Also check out this post about YouTube and its benefits. When was the last time you audited your website monetization strategies? You might be missing out on some serious income.

Scroll up and press the PLAY button to listen to the full episode for more!

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If you do have any comments or question, please do use the comment form below! I will answer every single one

– Alex

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