You've all seen the rut, when you look at your historical traffic data year over year and you see that your traffic numbers remained the same all year long. This doesn't apply to new sites only, who often complain they have a hard time getting traffic, but to old sites as well who put out top notch content frequently and still don't see much of a rise in traffic totals, if any.

There are some ways to make the traffic jump, such as by paying for more traffic or by putting out content that goes truly viral at some point, but the rut is the day to day stuff... the reason your traffic graph has a straight line across it regardless of traffic levels.

It begs the question: WHY am I putting so much effort into creating new content when, a year from now, odds are my traffic level will be the same as it is now. Shouldn't we be focusing on things that will increase that total? It seems that plugging away on "fresh new content" isn't the way. In fact, sometimes, if that fresh new content had been placed on a new domain you'd have two sites with stagnant traffic totals instead of one, which would have been a net gain!

How do you break the rut when you don't want to buy traffic and the same'ol same 'ol isn't getting it done? I'm not asking for pointers on how to make better content here, I'm asking why I shouldn't simply create multiple properties like I see a lot of publications starting to do. Perhaps it's a site structure thing? Whatever it is I can't even count the number of times I've seen graphs that show a site "topped out" and that "fresh exciting daily content of awesomeness" doesn't help.

Actually, much like the stock market, I see a lot of related sites gain and lose traffic at the same points during the year which confirms it's not purely their content moving the graphs. X subject with Y social stature will get Z traffic and no more, it's like a law of some sort. I'd prefer to buy a website than buy traffic because at least, that way, I'd actually own something more than one time clicks. Do you have any suggestions on how to "break the rut" without adding websites to your portfolio?

Edit: When something seems confusing math often has an answer. In this case would X number of keywords with Y potential = Z traffic maximum potential? It would make sense since new content often competes with older content already established for that keyword or phrase. Perhaps a new section to the site covering an unrelated topic would work? Reaching out to new visitors means reaching out to the terms they are searching for, it might work, if Google doesn't lower the scores because of unrelated stuff. Anyway, thinking in circles and will take it up again in the morning.