What the heckity heck is the "Google Sandbox"? Succinctly, it's when Google's algorithm decides it's not going to send your website traffic anymore. There's a number of reasons this may happen, but the short of it is that it happened to me, and I stopped making money. Any money.
July actually started very, very excitingly. By the end of the first week I had made almost six dollars! I know, right? Up until that point my traffic had been steadily increasing, and I put out a huge effort to write as many quality hubs as I could to keep the hits coming. Somewhere at the end of June my hits TRIPLED and I started raking in some money. By the end of the first week of July I was pretty sure I would hit my very first payout the end of that month.
Then I logged on one day to see that my hits had tanked to ten.
And they never got better.
I went from making sometimes up to two dollars a day to barely making four cents a day. All I could figure, as it never improved no matter what I did, was that I had been sandboxed, and it was time to move on. So I did. I stopped hubbing mid-July and focused on my noveling.
Today I logged into HP to see what was going on hits wise. It had been over a month since I last checked it, too disgusted to even bother. Shockingly, I made a whole daughter this month. Woohoo. But what actually WAS nice? My hits were back up in the hundreds! That is, they were about June's average, right before my trafficked tripled.
So what does this mean? I think when I have some downtime I'll go through and start updating some of the older hubs and start advertising them again. Apparently, Google is liking me enough to give me hits again, so why not? But I'm not gonna wear myself out writing new articles if I don't feel like it. I have a couple unpublished ones languishing that I might as well get out. If things improve again? I'll let you know.
I don't know much of anything about the HubPages, but I do know that I've never seen much revenue come from my blog. Making money is what first lured me to blogging, but I found out pretty quickly that I enjoyed the writing and if I made any money it was pretty incidental. I've come to accept that I'm not interested in revenue blogs if you have to compromise content to make anything.
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Tossing It Out
Yes, I don't blog for money. I've never had any luck with Adsense, as all my HP money comes from the site's homegrown ad setup which is based on ad views as opposed to clicks. (I also had good luck with ebay ads, since most of my articles are centered around music found cheap on ebay.)
DeleteMy approach to HP was always "write what I care about", so I did enjoy the articles I wrote. But as busy as I am with the other projects now, if I'm not making enough money to make the time input worth it, I just don't worry about it. I'll see how it goes from here.
Interesting... I've never really gotten knowledgeable about trying to get revenue from blogging, though I've heard of it. Well, sorry it slacked off, but hope it comes back! Or, more time to write on your novel :)
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