Your funnel probably just needed fresh traffic. Not a complete rebuild.
If something stops working, we assume we broke it.
And yeah, I've done that too. I've done it expensively.
After years of buying courses and trying systems and watching people "optimize" themselves into a hole, here's the boring truth: most things don't break. They plateau.
Your email sequence stops converting? You probably sent it to everyone who was ever going to respond to it.
Your Facebook ads "stop working"? Audience fatigue. Week 3 or 4 and everyone suddenly decides you're annoying. Happens to basically everyone.
Webinar registrations drop? You've pitched it forty-something times to the same exact humans. They didn't forget. They just decided.
None of that means you broke anything.
But we convince ourselves we did, because it feels safer to believe it was our fault. At least then it's "fixable." At least then there's a lever we can pull.
What's actually happening is this
When something works, we don't fully trust it. We tell ourselves we got lucky.
When it stops working, we assume we finally got caught. Like we were pulling off a con and the world finally noticed.
We give ourselves credit for failure. We treat success like an accident.
Same thing in business, just with clickthrough rates.
The real reasons things slow down
Most of the time when something slows down, it's not mysterious. It's one of the obvious boring reasons.
The well ran dry. You tapped out an audience or a channel.
The market shifted. What worked last year doesn't automatically work this year.
You stopped doing the thing. You were posting every day, then you stopped, and somehow leads slowed down. Wild.
It's just cycles. People buy before the holidays. They don't buy in January. This is not complicated. It just feels personal when it happens to you.
Rarely is it because you "fundamentally broke" something.
But then we panic and change everything. And now we might have.
New headline. Rewrite the whole sales page. New funnel. New offer. New "positioning." New personality if we have time.
And then six months later we can't even remember what was working in the first place, because we swapped every variable like we were playing whack-a-mole blindfolded.
I did exactly this with a lead gen campaign.
It was pulling in leads consistently. Then it slowed down a bit, like campaigns do, and I panicked.
Rewrote the ad. Changed the landing page. Made it "better." Cleaner. Smarter. More persuasive.
Killed it dead.
The original version just needed fresh traffic. That's it. But I didn't trust that something so simple could be the answer. I wanted the answer to be complicated, because complicated feels like control.
So here's what I do now when something stops working.
I don't go rebuild mode. I get really boring about it.
I ask: did I actually change anything? And I'm annoyingly honest about it, because half the time you "didn't change anything" except you changed three things.
Then I ask: what are the obvious external reasons this could have slowed down? Audience size, seasonality, platform changes, partner source disappearing, spend level changing, frequency climbing.
Then I ask: is this a plateau or an actual problem? Plateaus are normal. Problems have symptoms.
And then the big one: do I need to optimize… or do I just need more traffic?
Most of the time, I just need more people seeing the thing that was already working.
Not a new funnel. Not a new offer. Not a fresh existential crisis.
Just… more eyeballs.
Stop assuming you broke it
Look at the numbers like an adult. How many people saw it? How many clicked? How many bought?
If the percentages are basically the same as when it "worked," you don't have a conversion problem. You have a traffic problem.
If the percentages actually dropped, cool. Now you optimize. Now you change one thing at a time like a sane person.
But most people skip that. They go straight to demolition. Then they wonder why they never get momentum.
Last thing.
If you've been doing this long enough, you know the feeling. That little gut punch when something slows down and your first thought is, "I knew it was too good to be true."
That's not data. That's fear.
And fear makes you do dumb stuff. Like torching a funnel that just needs fresh traffic.
So next time something "stops working," don't panic. Don't rebuild. Don't assume you're broken.
Ask what changed. Look at the numbers. Send more people to it.
Until Next Time,
Kevin
P.S. If you want the PDF on the 20 traps that kept me stuck, grab it here.