Partners in Fire published monthly growth updates for the first fifty months of its existence as an online publisher. We decided to maintain these old articles for posterity and help others embark on their online journeys.
Here’s our 34th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add extra insight with the benefit of hindsight.
34th Month Update
Ten Thousand Pageviews!
It took us 34 months, but we finally achieved that coveted number.
Find out how we did it and how we plan to keep growing!
Readership
Over 200 people visited Partners in Fire nearly every single day this month. Only four days saw fewer users.
Each of the lower days was a Saturday, which makes sense as fewer people are inside searching online during the fun weekends. I wonder if it will pick up as the weather gets colder.
This month, we saw a few spikes that helped us achieve 10K pageviews.
Unfortunately, the first two seem unnatural. It looks like every page on the website received at least one pageview, which doesn’t make sense. We likely got hit by a bot attack. But if you don’t dive too deep, the 10K stands!
Users vs. Pageviews vs. Sessions
The graph above shows users and sessions, not pageviews. Many of those 7K users looked at multiple pages, which helped us achieve the magic number.
Here’s a quick breakdown of users vs. pageviews vs. sessions for those who are curious:
User: An individual IP(Internet Protocol) address visiting the website. Cookies can track IPs, so if that same person visits three times per month, visiting five pages each time, it still counts as one.
Sessions: The number of times users visit your website. A user can create multiple sessions. If a person comes three times a month and visits five pages each time, it counts as three sessions.
Pageviews: The total number of times pages are viewed. Users can have multiple pageviews in a single session. If a person comes three times a month and visits five pages each time, that will count as 15 pageviews.
Traffic Drivers
Organic Search
Our viewership from organic traffic is growing almost exponentially. Nearly 5,000 users found us through organic search this month! This fantastic growth marks the first time I have achieved one of my stated goals for the month.
All the hard work I’ve been putting into updating posts and writing for specific keywords is actually paying off! Do you think we can double it again in October? Wouldn’t it be amazing to reach 10k pageviews with organic search alone?
Top Pages
Our top page from organic search remains “How to be a Twitch Affiliate in 30 Days”, but we did diversify a little more this period. Only about half our organic traffic went to this post, as compared to 60% last month. I will continue working to diversify this – not so that this post ranks less, but to get other posts to rank more.
Diversification is crucial. The Twitch post lost rankings over time, and today, we hardly receive any traffic from it. However, we’ve made up for the lost traffic with a variety of other articles.
The second-highest post is new to the list (but one of my oldest posts): How to Get 500 Twitter Followers in One Month. That one jumped up in the search rankings recently, and over 400 users found us organically through that post, accounting for about 8% of our organic traffic.
With Twitter’s change to X, that article lost rankings. We revised it to match the platform’s current status, but it hasn’t recovered much.
Two of the three from previous periods and one new article round out the top five: Buffy is the Greatest Show, and I Regret Getting Pets are still up there, but How Do Twitch Affiliates Make Money beat out Animal Crossing is Addictive for the first time. All three posts received more traffic this month than last, with between 130-160 users per article.
The article about Animal Crossing saw a steep drop off, with 50 fewer users. Animal Crossing is no longer the hottest new game, so it makes sense that fewer people are searching for it.
Beyond the top five, many other articles are creeping up the second page. Approximately 20 articles each received over 30 users apiece via organic search. If this trend continues, I can break through that 10K in organic search in no time!
Direct Hits
Our traffic via direct hits this month was much higher than last month. About 1400 users visited Partners in Fire directly during this period, twice as many as last month.
Many of these hits are from our wonderful subscribers (thank you!). If you haven’t subscribed yet, you should do so now so that you never miss another post!
I seriously doubt a majority of 1400 users came from subscribers, but a girl can dream. Our Newsletter has vastly improved since then, so you should subscribe so you don’t miss out!
But not all the direct hits are subscribers. I don’t know where the rest of them come from. I’m guessing some are referrals because a good portion of these went to my post on Generational Wealth, which got a ton of attention in the community.
Some might be social media posts that Google doesn’t record correctly. From what I understand, Google calls any traffic it’s not sure of a direct hit. But I’m happy to take the traffic wherever it comes from!
Social Media
Our social media traffic remained stagnant this month. We still had about 400 users, which isn’t terrible. Remember back in the early days when we’d be excited to report 400 users from social media?
This month, we tried a few new things to improve our reach across networks. First, we installed a plugin, Revise Old Posts, that is supposed to share an old post to a social site every 12 hours or so. It worked great for the first two weeks, but then I decided my PHP (a programming script) needed to be updated for it to keep working. The month was already over when I finally figured out how to do that.
Despite that, we still received 400 users across the various networks. Here’s the breakdown of each.
We did a lot better on Pinterest this month than in previous months. More than half of our social media users for this period came from the platform. A big reason for that is that we decided to take an actual Pinterest course and start implementing some of the lessons.
We bought Pinterest Ninja in the middle of the month and only completed and implemented the first third or so of the class. But just by doing that, we saw a drastic increase in users.
We went from a little under 50 in the first two weeks of September to over 150 in the second two weeks! I can’t wait to see what the rest of the course will bring.
If you’ve been struggling with Pinterest, I highly recommend this course. As a bonus, you’ll also receive an invite to the Facebook page, where you can ask your Pinterest questions! It’s a great value.
Approximately 100 users found us on Twitter this month, slightly fewer than last.
The plugin helped early in the month, so hopefully, now that I have it working again, I’ll see an increase in the coming months.
I failed at sharing old posts on my own, so having something that automates the sharing process is a huge boon.
We still only use Revive Old Posts for Twitter (X) and receive minimal traffic from the platform each month.
We had fewer Reddit users this period than last, but we also didn’t use self-promotion as often on the financial independence subreddit. I posted a lot of gaming content this month, and that just doesn’t fit the audience of that subreddit.
Knowing your audience and posting to the correct platform is crucial.
However, 20 users still found us on the platform, which is a win.
We focused very little on Reddit and receive very little traffic from the platform.
We saw a huge improvement on Facebook this period – from 4 to 20! Most of those users were from the beginning of the month when my plugin was working. The only other thing I did on the platform was share my posts when I wrote them.
I know many people use Facebook to drive a lot of traffic, but I just haven’t been able to crack the code. It seems like Pinterest will be more valuable, so I decided to put the limited amount of eggs I have in that basket instead of the Facebook basket. Hopefully, it will pay off.
We recently started sharing photos, memes, and infographics on Facebook, along with older articles via Revive Old Posts. We now see about 250 monthly users from the platform.
Referrals
I got a few juicy backlinks this month, which increased referral traffic.
The article on generational wealth got picked up by the wonderful Physician on Fire and included in his Sunday Best round-up, which is really the reason for my awesome stats this month. That post was also included in a Count About round-up, and we got some traffic to it from a variety of other feeds that we are included in.
We also did a podcast with Alain Guillot (well, we recorded it a while back, but it came out in September!) about the quest for financial independence and the blogging journey, which drove a bit of traffic to the site. It was fun being on the podcast, too!
Shameless plug – but as a blogger, I’m always on the lookout for more juicy backlinks, so if you blog and want to swap guest posts – hit me up!
Content
We created an awesome mix of content this month. My piece on generational wealth is probably the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m very proud of that post, and I hope it helped people.
But we also diversified a lot this month, with two posts specific to gaming (what does a capture card do and Twitch streamers to follow) and one about joining a blogging mastermind group. We also posted a career/self-development piece with the best platforms for online education.
We went back to our roots in lifting people up with our post on doing things poorly, and finally (two years later) rounded out our Adult Conversations series with adult conversations you need to have about money.
In addition, we published a ton of syndications from our blogging network, which helps diversify the types of content we get to publish.
We no longer regularly publish syndicated content. While it helped us grow the website at the time, with the increase in AI content, we no longer trust it.
Overall, we published excellent content across various niches this month, and I’m very proud of all the articles we published.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership
Our readership grew by leaps and bounds this month! Obviously, getting that feature by Physician on Fire helped a lot, but we grew organically on our own, and we plan to continue doing that.
It seems to be working, so there’s no reason to make any huge changes. We’re still doing a lot of keyword research, targeting high-volume, easy-to-rank keywords and optimizing older posts for SEO.
As we discussed above, another big thing we’re working on is Pinterest. I’m using the tools I’m learning in the Pinterest Ninja course to optimize my profile, my boards, and my pins for SEO. I’m also learning how to make higher-quality pins that draw people’s attention and multiple pins for posts that I think can do well on Pinterest.
Another strategy is using Pinterest group boards to expand my reach. Getting invited to a variety of boards helps the content in front of fresh audiences.
Hopefully, these changes will increase my reach on that network and improve the overall readership.
Monetization
The monetization piece of blogging is still my biggest struggle. I just can’t seem to figure it out.
However, we made a little more money this month and are still trying new things to increase our revenue. Here’s our breakdown for the month.
Ads
$66.57
Although we had more pageviews this month than last, that did not generate more ad revenue. The RPMS were incredibly low this month, and I’m not exactly sure why. One of the reasons is that I didn’t have one of my ad networks configured correctly – so I had extremely low RPMS for the first half of the month. But it wasn’t configured correctly in August either, and my RPMs were higher that month. I’ll have to do some research into RPMs and ads to see why these things happen.
The low RPMs were likely due to the potential bot attack mentioned earlier.
One of my networks vastly outperformed the other this month, so I’m going to work on slowly phasing the low performer out. I stopped adding it to new blog posts, but I have to go back and replace all the old ads in older posts, which will definitely take some work. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy whatever little money I get from it.
Affiliates
$29.76
We made two affiliate sales this month, which accounted for a third of our monthly revenue. This just goes to show how profitable affiliate income can be once we get the hang of it.
This month, I worked hard to increase our affiliate income, writing articles designed explicitly for affiliate income.
Although I made some beautiful pins for these posts, I’m playing the Google waiting game and hoping my keyword research was on point. The goal is for them to start ranking in the next few months, and hopefully, that will increase my affiliate revenue.
Gross earnings: $96.33
Expenses:
Money Mix Insiders – $120
Pinterest Ninja Course: $105
Total expenses: $225
They say it takes money to make money, right? That’s why I decided to splurge on a Pinterest course. I believe it will have long-term value for my business. And it’s a one-time expense.
The Insiders is a recurring expense, but it’s definitely been worth the cost. Without them, I would still be bumbling along with three thousand page views and zero gross earnings.
I was close to covering the program’s cos this month – and I’m sure I will make it next month. As it stands, I’m in the hole about $130 for the month.
But you know what? Partners in Fire is a business. And sometimes, you have to invest in your business in order to get it to grow.
Continued Growth
Partners in Fire is continuing to learn and grow. We have some awesome ideas for October that are designed for growth and monetization, so hopefully, the increases will continue. As always, we will continue to share the journey with you.
It was a pleasure to have an interview with you.
Also, from reading your blog, I too started doing a monthly traffic update.
Finally, I have never used Pinterest, but I continue hearing good things about it. I will carve out some time to take a look at it. On the opposite side, I get zero traffic from Instagram. I wonder if any blogger does?
Thank you for keeping us updated. It’s very refreshing to see how other bloggers are doing. It makes us feel part of a bigger community.
You’re welcome! I’m glad I inspired you to start your own series! I love it when folks are transparent with their growth and their struggles. Pinterest is great, but it takes a lot of work. Instagram…I’m with you. I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll get to 10K followers, but it won’t be any time soon.
Congrats on 10k! I am just starting back after taking a long time away due to another business. I would love to see 10k, but only back at this 2 months.
Thank you! You will get to 10K soon if you keep at it!
Hey!
Just a quick clarification:
“Ten Thousand Pageviews! That’s what our 34th month blogging brought! Finally, after 34 months of hard work, we got over 10K pageviews for a 30-month period.”
Based on the wording of the post and the picture below that quote should it read “30-*day* period”?
Love the post, congrats on your success!
Wow that’s embarrassing. Thank you, I will fix that!