Dealing with a Lull

So, we hit kind of a lull in our website projects.  This would be both a physical lull as well as a Google lull for lack of a better term.  Easter and spring weather brought about a lot of difficulty in keeping people on the computer to do their work that was required.  So that has set us back considerably and only halfway through May are we finishing our projects for April.  I'm not terribly surprised by this as we're all still learning to pace ourselves and figuring out what is the best schedule for the group and individually.

The other problem is with Google.  It doesn't seem as though the group projects have had this problem as much but my individual projects are having trouble with Google.  From everything that I've read, you really go up and down in Google during the first few months of a site's life.  Google has never officially acknowledged this and it may not actually be policy but rather a quirk in the search engine algorithm.

Whatever the case actually is, I had a couple of keywords that I was feeling pretty good about and then they dropped considerably.  I'm hoping that they bounce back soon obviously and I suspect that they will come back within a week or two.  But I can say that even knowing it was a possibility, it is insanely frustrating to be near the first page of Google only to drop back a couple of pages abd watch your meager traffic drop off completely while you wait things out.

My other issue is with Google, particularly Adsense but it is not Google's issue really.  Instead it has to do with the fact that less people shop online in good weather.  This means less affiliate sales and fewer clicks on ads.  And fewer people are advertising which means that the ad clicks that I do get are worth less money.  I've seen the phenomenom year after year so it's not a surprise, it just sucks because making more money is better than making less money.  My revenue is down about 30% from last month right now which is a big hit.  But on the bright side, it's still about 10% more than it was in May of last year.  The other bright spot is that I used to see a significant dropoff in April and now it is pushing later.  I don't know if this is coincidence, strange weather, or a change in consumer patterns but it has been evident for the last couple of years.  I can't guarantee that it's a trend but I'll take what I can get.