This happened to me in 2005. I've put a lot of effort to build one site. It was growing steadily until one day traffic from Google dropped by 95%. And since most of the traffic was from Google - overall visitors dropped 90%. I smelled a failure. One year of honest work and all of a sudden you find yourself with almost nothing.

It was a biggest failure of that time for me. I tried my best and failed miserable. Days kept going and traffic was going down. Without new traffic to site - nothing is updating and you have no strength to carry on doing regular stuff, like writing new content.

My attitude at that time was so pessimistic that I thought of closing the site and starting all over again.

Well, I found some strength a week later. I just kept going ang going. Adding new content, exchanging links and trying my best to get links and make the site better.

Funny thing happened two weeks later after that momemt. Not only all of my traffic returned to regular numbers, but it actually doubled! I did so much in those two weeeks that Google Algorithm improved all of my positions and gave me some decent listings in very related words. It was a success! Double traffic to the site that was my only at that time.

Now I strongly believe that success comes after the biggest failure. Failure tries to catch us when we are most relaxed, it tests us if we grew enough to achieve success. If we are - it will give us the most astonishing success ride we ever see.