You log into your FeedBurner statistics page, your analytics page, and compile an income report for the month. You find that everything is down more than twenty percent month-over-month. You begin hesitating, feeling that you haven’t accomplished your goals. You decide to slow down in posting, although this is what caused the initial problem. Posts become even less frequent and your blog begins to ‘die.’

Although it may appear that this situation occurs much less often than it actually does, it is often the situation of bloggers who witness massive growth, then a decline (breaking the trend) of quite a large percentage. However, there is nothing wrong with this. In the ideal world, this would never happen, but it isn’t, so growth and declines happen naturally.

When your blog begins declining over a series of months, and you are unable to employ new methods to combat the problem, this is when you should start considering alternatives—more rapid approaches to bringing your blog “back to life.”

Don’t worry about declines in the following situations (unless you had set goals and you will be unable to reach those without seeing increases each month).

1. Traffic follows somewhat natural patterns. As the year goes by, people search for different topics, leading to an influence on the number of visitors you receive through search engines. Vise versa, people are more active during different seasons, although this would only affect certain areas, as the world goes through different seasons year-round.
2. Not all statistics should be used, nor do they all tell what is truly occurring. The algorithms companies have put in place are often inaccurate due to the wide breadth of sites that they must account for. It is natural to see a decline (albeit sometimes quite significant) from month-to-month. You might want to base the real figures off statistics generated directly from code inserted on your site.
3. You have changed your post schedule, number of posts per week, or the main topic, reflecting in a shift of traffic/pages views to posts that aren’t received as well in terms of comments. Generally, each comment draws in as much as five extra page views, from people who read past posts to see what your overall focus is, refreshing the page, etc. A decrease in comments could also lead to slightly lower statistics.
4. Your site wasn’t up as often, especially during peak traffic times. If your host failed to provide service during peak times, such as after your site was shared on a social media site, you might see less traffic. Even if you don’t account for all the “regular” traffic periods, downtimes can leave a lasting impact on your site as people don’t visit your site as often after the downtime.
5. A dramatic change in your theme or layout was made. In some cases, if you don’t choose or implement the best theme, you will see negative effects on your traffic or other elements of your site.

The main idea to remember is that even though you might have negative growth a few months of the year, it doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to change elements of your blog – they are natural and cannot be avoided unless you are able to increase the number of posts published or other rather dramatic methods. Be aware that once you have a few months in a row of declines (the term recession could be applied here), you should begin focusing on different methods of promotion.

Your Thoughts - How do you feel about declines in traffic/subscribers? What methods do you use to combat any negative growth, excluding publishing content regularly?