Really frustrated with progress (G'gle)

I am only 3 months into my journey, but I just feeling particularly down with results lately, perhaps I just need to chill out / chin up and keep chipping away, but I feel pretty down now and admit I need some encouragement.

I now have 4 sites which I have spent many, many hours working on for both content and SEO. They are a mix of adsense and amazon afff based.

Each site has a link wheel in place of web 2.0's which I blast as regular as I can with scrapebox, xrumer.

I have some direct comments (within the same niche) on high PR pages.

I have submittied to directories.

I have social bookmarked.

I have made youtube videos pointing to the sites.

I try to add content weekly if I can. It is well written with good grammar, pictures, videos.

I have some paid links (outside of the big networks such as BMR which got whacked).

Three of my sites did well for the first few weeks as seems to be the pattern and then dropped out of the first one thousand results and have not been back since (over 2 months). None of them have duplicate bad content, ads above the fold or anything which should raise a flag. I have had no msgs on google webmaster. The sites are still indexed.

One of my sites (the one I put most of my effort into), got up to position 17 for its main keyword and since last 2 weeks has just been dropping by between 2 to 10 places each day and its now at position 92!. I have just ordered a set of high PR wikis to try and fight back. I would say the competition here is medium difficulty, nothing to tough.

Its kind of left me bummed now. My income has been about $3 so far and I have proberbly paid out around $300 - $400 on tools, domains, hosting and SEO.

So I wanted to ask what you guys do when you launch new sites?

Seems to me I should start registering domains, putting up sites and then just forgetting about them for 6 months.

I am now looking into PPC / CPA as some side work to keep me busy as it sounds more tempting as I won't be relying on keeping Google happy the whole time. I am also questioning if I should rely on Google at all for traffic as she is such a bitch and can take everything away at few lines of code change.

Ah sorry for the bitching guys! I really love you lot. I have got so much info from here and when I see you doing well it really gives me a big buzz! I just expected to be doing better then this somehow.

pm me... with your info.
i'll give you some tips & best practices and analize your info for you.
shouldnt take No three months to start raking it in..
wtf three months lmao. sorry.
pm me.

Most likely you built links too fast.

I've done this too twice before...to get out of this I had to wait for a month before I started ranking again. Tough luck.

hmmmm said:

pm me... with your info.
i'll give you some tips & best practices and analize your info for you.
shouldnt take No three months to start raking it in..
wtf three months lmao. sorry.
pm me.

Click to expand...

Nice typo buddy you want to analize me too? sounds kinky

JonnyBorneo said:

Most likely you built links too fast.

I've done this too twice before...to get out of this I had to wait for a month before I started ranking again. Tough luck.

Nice typo buddy you want to analize me too? sounds kinky

Click to expand...

I think that is likely the case. Sounds like I need to be more whitehat?

hmmmm said:

pm me... with your info.
i'll give you some tips & best practices and analize your info for you.
shouldnt take No three months to start raking it in..
wtf three months lmao. sorry.
pm me.

Click to expand...

Thanks, but no thanks.

No worries.

Sometimes seo makes us loose sight of what's really important, the site itself. I'm not talking about on-page seo. I'm referring to on page content.

When times are slow, sometimes I like to experiment with things on my site. Build a bunch of new pages and add some social features with facebook/twitter integration. You'd be surprised how much traffic they can bring and who knows, you might get some loyal users to come back.