I’ve just been putting off telling you about it. Seriously.
March Earnings: $50.48
Down $20 from last month. Partly due to my best site going straight to the sandbox. I’ve been getting traffic through MSN. But those people just don’t want to buy. So I’m waffling in Pathetic-ville for a while. No fun images this month…. to display the sum. I’m just a bit bummed by it all.
But anyhoo - how do I go about trying to rectify this situation. My 1 site that was pulling in the money… now in the sandbox. How long will it last? No idea. I’ve been there since March 8th.
So how do I rectify my situation. Do I start building more sites and hope they are as successful as Site #1 was before it hit the sandbox? Do I wait it out? (did I tell you I’m impatient!) Do I take the sites I’ve built already… are not in the sandbox (as far as I can tell) and now move forward with link exchanges, adding to directories and finding any forum that might hold a bit of interest for me and promote the site through those nifty signatures (doesn’t really appeal to me… not a big fan of forums).
Hmmm… Not sure what step #2 will be. Yet….
As far as my 1 page wonders - no clicks… minimal traffic.
HTML sites: Minimal traffic - no promotion of them yet either. No clicks.
I have another idea in the works… maybe try it out as more of a community. Not a new idea… but it is an idea that I like, and would be interested in maintaining (… that’s why I’m leaning towards a community site - run through WordPress - because it’s easier to manage than trying to figure out Drupal, etc…. ).
So anyhoo… we’ll see how it goes. Suggestions more than welcome.
Popularity: 5% [?]
pagepeel by webpicasso.de
April 6th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
How do you know if your site is in the Google Sandbox, no search refferals, lower search referrals, some magic site that tells you?
Just wondering because my referrals from google have gone down for two sites I published at about the same time, but both have a page rank of 4.
E
April 6th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Sorry to hear that Empress, keep your head up!
I understand the sandbox blues though, one of my newbies just topped 35 visitors for a day last week then BAMN…. 0 visitors total the past 3 days… that’s not a single visitor, zero, zip
The only thing I did in that time was a layout change??????????
Good luck in April.
April 6th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Erik, I’ve got a half dozen sites with page rank 4 and almost zero google love. PR doesn’t always mean much.
I attribute my visitor graph dropping to almost zero on a newer sites to the sandbox (usually at the 2-3 month mark).
The pros determine the sandbox this way:
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=701
Good luck.
April 6th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Yup, Erik - 45n5 is right. How I figured it out was checking my stats and seeing that I had a major traffic drop around March 8th - even though my site has a PR4 (still does). Since that time - not a bit of google referrals (from the search engine that is)… but plenty of MSN. Weird eh!
April 6th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Thanks ya’ll, that’s a great site with some good links. I’m not sure if I’m sandboxed or not but I do know that out of all the pages I have indexed via site:, about 9/10ths of them are omitted results which doesn’t sound good.
I guess I’ll have to keep posting and wait it out.
April 6th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
By the way, nice new look around these parts.
April 7th, 2006 at 3:36 am
Don’t worry Empress, we all have difficult periods, especially when starting off in this business.
You earned more in March than I did!
Stick with it and the results will come through in the end.
Tom
April 7th, 2006 at 4:38 am
Stay motivated my friend! I recently wrote about that at my blog.
Also, when you mention Drupal, you should perhaps check out CivicSpace which is a “fork” of drupal which will do just what you want. Its what I use to run DashboardMonkey.com as a community site.
Dave
http://blog.brightonvibes.com
April 7th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Thanks everyone
… and yes I’m taking on a new look with the site… again
But what’s a girl to do… hehe.
If your site hit the sandbox Erik - give it a few months, I know I’m the worst for waiting, but it does take 2-3 months to re-emerge from the sanbox. I think it’s google’s way to try to stop the spammy sites… but gets us all at first.
… thanks for the good words Tom - but I’ll say it again… I am the worst for waiting for things to happen. I’m going to stick to it for sure - it’s just deciding what to do next…
April 11th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Use the time your site is sandboxed to build more incoming links…then when it gets released, it’ll come back with a bang
Nice blog by the way, don’t know how I haven’t found this before!
April 12th, 2006 at 8:31 am
I’m glad you found me
… and I really appreciate the feedback.