You can check whether your site has penalty or not through Google's Webmaster tool. If it has a penalty, you'll have to address that by disavowing or removing the links that Google may find spammy.
Also, there is a trick which you can use to avoid manual penalty - put a picture of yourself, or any other pictures that say you are the webmaster, and you actively update that respective site. Put your contact information, etc and that should avoid 'manual' penalty as it clearly shows that the site is not updated through a bot, etc.
Otherwise, if both the above is satisfied, maybe you can try building some quality links to your site instead, as that will also help you get out of the sandbox quicker. Quality links from authority sites would definitely help.