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 35th-month update, edited for grammar, clarity, and to add extra insight with the benefit of hindsight.
35th Month Update
Our 35th month of blogging proved that the ten thousand pageviews we received last month weren’t a fluke!
We’ve now gone two months in a row with over 10K pageviews.
Find out how we plan to keep improving from here.
Readership
Over 200 users visited us nearly every day during this period. The only three days with fewer than that were weekends and holidays when people were likely traveling.
We also had a few random spikes in traffic, like last month. I’m still unsure whether these large increases came from bots or real people, but I’ll take the extra pageviews, as they pushed me over the ten thousand mark!
Traffic Drivers
Organic search continues to drive the most traffic, but we’re also seeing a few users from other sources.
Here’s our traffic breakdown.
Organic Search
Although we haven’t yet seen the exponential growth we’ve been hoping for, we’re still getting most of our traffic via organic search.
We saw only a tiny growth from last month, with a handful more users visiting us organically, despite our efforts to improve older articles.
Still, small growth beats no growth, and I’ll take it.
I updated an old travel article, How to Avoid Pickpockets, because it was in position 98 or something ridiculous in Google Search Console. I did my thing, changed the keyword, added relevant information, turned it into an epic post, and guess what?
Google decided to de-index it.
And since Google is experiencing indexing problems this month, I can’t even request re-indexing. I spent all this time rewriting and improving an article, and it’s not even indexed.
Hopefully, whatever is going on with Google will be resolved soon.
Top Pages
I’m sure you can all guess what the top post via organic traffic was again this month.
Fifty percent of our organic traffic discovered us from “How to be a Twitch Affiliate in 30 Days.” It’s great that we are getting a ton of traffic to that post, but I’m still trying hard to diversify so as not to put all our eggs in that basket.
Diversification is essential. That article eventually dropped in the rankings, and we haven’t been able to bring it back up. However, we have many other posts that also rank, which helps us maintain organic traffic.
Ranking Articles
Our old article on Twitter strategies is still in the number two spot with over 400 users, and rounding up the top five were Buffy is the Greatest Show, How Do Twitch Affiliates Make Money, and Pet Regret.
These are the same top five as last time, but the cool thing is they all had more entrances this month than last. During that period, they all had between 130 and 160, but this month, they were all over 200!
The articles on Buffy and pet regret still rank, but they don’t attract as many users. The article on Twitter strategies doesn’t bring any traffic. We only just updated the article about how Twitch affiliates make money, so we don’t know whether the rankings will improve.
I’ll take that growth!
This month, we had more entrances for every post in the top ten. Each brought over 100 users, which is awesome, considering we struggled to get to 80 with some of them last month.
Our page two is also improving, with half the posts getting over 50 users and the final five working hard to reach that 50 mark.
If this trend continues, I’ll have over 50 users a month on 30 of my top posts! That would be an epic milestone.
Direct Hits
Nearly 2000 users found Partners in Fire via direct hit this month.
The direct hits include our fabulous subscribers (if you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, what are you waiting for? Where else will you get blog strategies, travel, finance, and gaming advice straight to your inbox?)
Not all of the users via direct hit are from subscribers. Some referral traffic gets recorded as a direct hit. We are one of the top-rated FIRE blogs on Wealthtender at the moment (be sure to leave us a review to keep us there!), but I don’t see any referrals from them.
We’re getting a few, probably counting as direct hits.
Google defines any clicks it can’t account for as “direct,” so those hits may have come from anywhere.
Social Media
We saw some growth in our social media traffic this month. Nearly 700 users found us via all the social channels combined, which is a pretty nice improvement from the 400 we’ve been getting these past few months.
The most significant growth in social media came from Pinterest. Over 350 users came to us from Pinterest this month, a huge improvement from last month!
The Pinterest Ninja Course helped us improve our traffic from the platform. I still haven’t finished it (life gets in the way, unfortunately), but we doubled our Pinterest reach in one month by implementing the tools taught in just the first third of the class. That’s pretty epic.
If you struggle to grow your reach on Pinterest, I highly recommend this course. It’s been beneficial in boosting my performance on the platform. And maybe I’ll find time to finish it this month!
We only had about 80 users from Twitter this month, which is weird considering our plug-in, Revive Old Posts, was working for the entire period.
I could have done a better job of interacting on Twitter this month. I was tired, and unfortunately, social media is one of the many things that fell by the wayside.
It’s one of those things where you need to interact constantly; if you don’t, your views, interactions, and influence will suffer.
But, sometimes, that’s okay. It’s okay to take a break from social media and not to be able to put 100% into everything all the time.
As we learned from a post I wrote last month, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
We saw another huge improvement on Facebook this month, jumping from 20 users to nearly 70! Most of this traffic is from the Revive Old Posts plugin, which we use to share older articles on the platform regularly.
If you share things, people will come.
Referrals
We received referral traffic from various sources this month. All the link-building seems to be paying off!
The top referral traffic source was from Personal Finance Blogs – my article on Money Conversations got featured there early in the month, and they sent us a decent amount of traffic.
The rest of my referral traffic came from many different sources, but mostly blogs where I did a guest post or published a syndication. Collaborating with other website owners like this pays dividends. It’s fantastic for SEO, but you also get your name out there and receive nice traffic from it.
Content
We are still pumping out some fantastic content.
The month started with a tribute to John Lennon near what would have been his 80th birthday. Although he’s not traditionally associated with the FIRE movement, some of his music and ideas influenced me to pursue it.
We also published a post with ideas for fall fun on a budget to help you and your family have a great time before the weather gets cold and a few motivational pieces about redefining success, improving your life, and resources to help you be more productive.
The final article we wrote this month was for our gamer friends. We answered the all-important question: How much can you make streaming? This post compliments our articles surrounding gaming as a side hustle, like how to become an affiliate and how to make money as an affiliate.
We’ve since deleted the article on John Lennon, as it has no organic search value. The rest of the articles are still live; most have undergone numerous updates since their original publication.
Guest Posts
We rounded out the month with two guest posts. The first was from a surprising source – one of my streamer friends wanted to write an article on broadcasting lessons. I never thought that becoming a streamer and making friends in this community would lead to content for Partners in Fire, but here we are.
The author, who goes by Doughz1lla on Twitch, takes these lessons to heart, and his streams are always engaging and entertaining. If you are looking for a new streamer to follow or just getting your feet wet with Twitch, he should be at the top of your list.
The final article was a guest post from Max at the Free Times, who wrote an article on ways to pay for an MBA.
We’ve since removed the article from Max, and the Free Times is no longer an active website.
How Are We Going to Improve Our Readership
Our readership remained stagnant from last month—but I’ll definitely take stagnant at 10,000 pageviews over stagnant at 2000! Still, we’re looking to grow.
One of my goals this month is to update and improve more of my old travel content. I updated three posts in October, but they haven’t moved as far up in the rankings as I’d hoped. These things take time, so I hope to see the improvements over the next few months.
We’re also focusing on writing for SEO by conducting keyword research and choosing content based on what can rank. It takes a long time to see results, especially with newer articles, but I’m hoping we will see improvements around January—which is about six months from when we began this new SEO-focused style.
Monetization
I thought that once you reached ten thousand pageviews, the money would just start flowing. That is clearly incorrect. Monetization is difficult, but I’m still trying to crack that nut. We made a tiny bit more money this month, but it’s definitely not enough to support us job-free yet.
Ads
$63.65
Our ad revenue remained stagnant this month compared to last month. That makes sense, considering we had about the same number of page views.
I am slowly phasing out one of the ad networks, so I’m not including their ads in any new posts. Every time I update a post, I delete their ad and replace it with the new network. The process will take a few months, so I’ll take the money while the ads are in my old posts.
Affiliates
$68.27
We made a handful of affiliate sales this month, which accounted for a little over half of our revenue. I wrote a lot of posts this month and last specifically about affiliate sales with the hope that they will eventually rank on Google.
The goal is to write one or two monthly posts to get affiliate sales while offering the reader great value. Hopefully, my posts with affiliate links will accomplish that.
Gross earnings: $131.92
Expenses:
Money Mix Insiders – $120
Total expenses: $120
I made money this month!
After subtracting my one expense, the Money Mix Insiders, from my earnings, I made a little over 11 bucks. This also includes hosting because a significant advantage of joining the Insiders is that hosting on their high-speed server is included. My only blog expenses are the Insiders and the domain name registration, which is 12 bucks a year.
The truth is, joining the Money Mix Insiders has been worth every penny. I never would have made any money blogging without them. They taught me SEO tips, gave me access to resources I didn’t even know existed, and helped me with a back-link-building strategy. My domain authority has skyrocketed since joining, and my pageviews are also increasing.
The Insiders no longer offer hosting with the package. However, I’m still with them, as they provide many tools and resources that make online publishing easier.
The last thing that needs to improve is my monetization. With all the work I’ve been putting in, that will (hopefully) come in the next few months.
Continued Growth
We aren’t exactly where we wanted to be at the end of this month, but that’s okay. We are taking the lessons learned these past few months and applying them to both new and old posts.
With the help of the insiders, we will continue to grow and become a profitable blog in a matter of months.
I look forward to sharing our continued growth with all of you!
Congratulations on another month of 10K+ page views, Melanie! And thanks for the Wealthtender shout out! 😀 We’re working every day to increase traffic as well and to drive referrals to your site and other featured blogs.
In fact, our still relatively new Guide to Top Financial Independence and FIRE blogs is already ranking 14th for keyword ‘financial independence blogs’ which isn’t bad for how new it is, but we’re going to keep focused on it until it ranks on page 1 and drives traffic to featured FIRE blogs, of which, as you noted, yours is at the top!
Keep up the great work and thanks for your support!